Last week, CNN’s Jake Tapper suggested that the media’s previous refusal to entertain questions about former President Biden’s cognitive or physical health was a result of routine journalistic “politeness.” That’s been the story among the corporate media for some time: that journalists just “missed” the signs that Biden was fading, because supposedly it’s just not something journalists are supposed to pry into.
But if that’s the case, then Tapper and his ilk owe all of us an explanation for why, from 2017 through 2020, these same journalists were so intensely concerned about President Trump’s health that they managed to incorrectly diagnose him with dementia, early-onset Alzheimer’s, profound mental illness, and heart disease.
When disgraced journalist Michael Wolff’s White House gossip book, Fire and Fury came out in early 2018, the media were particularly thrilled by the dubious claims about President Trump’s mental health. For the next three years, every few months the media would leap at some unusual or off-color behavior by Trump — anything, really — and use it to start a new round of innuendo and bad-faith speculation that he had dementia, Alzheimer’s, or both.
In 2019, when the President paid an unscheduled visit to Walter Reed military hospital, the journalists quickly dismissed the White House’s official explanation that it was for a routine check-up. The proposed explanations on liberal airwaves ranged from an emergency CAT scan to a heart attack.
As we all recall, as recently as a few months ago, any explanation whatsoever that Biden’s White House offered, for any of his erratic behavior, was the media’s gold standard for proof. If the White House said Biden was fine, he must be find, and that settled that.
The corporate media don’t get to explain this disparity away with a shrug and a half-hearted, “Guess we missed, sorry about that.” Everyone knows full well what’s going on here, and what’s likely to start going on again very soon: the journalists, having “rediscovered” the importance of caring about a President’s health, will no doubt resume speculating wildly about Trump’s mental fitness, and diagnosing him with every geriatric malady they can name.
