If Donald Trump regains the US presidency, there will be no shortage of people to hold responsible. But spare some blame for the liberal media and its failure to report on Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline.
Footage from the 2012 vice-presidential debate between a razor-sharp Biden and Paul Ryan demonstrates that his drowning-on-dry-land performance last week in the first 2024 presidential debate can’t be blamed on a speech impediment, or a cold, or a dog eating his homework.
As far back as 2008, The New York Times reported that Barack Obama’s choice of Biden as his running mate had been motivated by a conviction he wouldn’t have the mixed loyalties of other vice presidents because age made it “unlikely that Mr Biden would be in a position to run for president should Mr Obama win and serve two terms”.
In the wake of Friday’s car crash, we learned that White House insiders all know how easily the president tires, considering him “dependably engaged” only between 10am and 4pm. That seems a not insignificant issue, not only for Biden’s political chances but also in the eventuality that a global crisis breaks at, say, 4.15pm.
So why are we only learning about it now?
In fact, pundits have pondered Biden’s frailty for years. But as Jack Shafer explained in 2019 in Politico, they generally avoided coming to any definite conclusion. “After tallying Biden’s repeated stumbles, miscues and mental lapses,” he wrote, “journalists tend to retreat from calling Biden too infirm to run the White House. The greater press taboo, it seems, isn’t asking the question about Biden but answering it.”
In part, the equivocation stemmed from the American style of journalistic “objectivity”, which often results in an “on-the-one-hand” and “on-the-other” presentation. For instance, after Biden flopped in a 2019 debate (ironically, against Kamala Harris), The New York Times reported that some thought him “slow off the mark” and “uncertain about how to counterpunch”. But the piece carefully balanced such criticisms with quotes from Biden loyalists about his gym program and healthy diet (he ate “staples like yogurt and juice, salads with protein and for dinner, pasta or fish”, they enthused).
You might think that when someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s the media’s job to look out the window and say that Joe Biden should retire. But the view-from-nowhere paradigm has provided a handy alibi for liberal journalists determined not to be seen as providing any assistance to the Trump campaign.
In June, The Wall Street Journal published an account based on multiple interviews describing President Biden struggling to make himself heard and pausing for extended periods with his eyes closed. The uber-conservative WSJ might have a dog in the presidential fight, but its report accurately described the guy (“fragile, stick-like, with a nodding Jack O’Lantern head“) who turned up for CNN’s debate.
By contrast, as recently as a few weeks ago, liberal pundits were still blaming scepticism about Biden’s fitness on right-wing video manipulation. Donald Trump relies, of course, on an ecosystem of media grifters and liars. Yet there’s a depressing parallel between the Trumposphere and the rusted-on Democrats prepared to believe anything that boosts their guy.
Ken Klippenstein aptly described as “liberal Qanon” the multiple posts explaining away the debate as a result of CNN deliberately framing and lighting the set to make Biden look frail.
The liberal mainstream hasn’t gone quite that far. But the journalists who worked inside the Beltway for decades must have recognised how much Biden had deteriorated. If by not sharing their knowledge they thought they were warding off Trump, they’ve now achieved the opposite. Worst still, they’ve legitimated a key narrative of the far right.
“This is Joe Biden ‘19 and ’24,” posted the conspiracist crank Russell Brand. “Until the debate, the media tried to deny this. Who you gonna trust: them or your own lying eyes?!”
There’s no shortage of Americans more enthusiastic about their lying eyes than material reality. If we don’t defend the latter, we’ll get Trump — but we might also get something far worse.
