Finally. For Americans wondering when the media will finally admit President Joe Biden is, in the words of Fox’s Sean Hannity, “a cognitive mess,”, light dawns.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal carried the headline:
How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge
Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.
The quadruple-bylined story, published on Friday's front page, underlined that Biden aides were trying to hide his decline in his first year in office. Our Curtis Houck noted the networks didn't touch it. The Journal story, among many things, referred back to another Journal story on Biden from July, headlined:
How Biden’s Inner Circle Worked to Keep Signs of Aging Under Wraps.
Aides kept a tight rein on the president’s travel plans, news conferences, public appearances and meetings with donors while Biden’s stumbles became increasingly obvious
The dates of those two stories are a picture of exactly what has been wrong with the media coverage of the Biden presidency. One was in July, the second in December. Six months apart.
The Journal deserves plaudits for running the stories at all, because they stand out in a mainstream media that should have been -- but wasn’t and isn’t -- on top of the clearly big story about the 46th president’s mental condition.
Think back to media coverage of other troubled presidencies.
Their Watergate coverage made stars out of the Washington Post’s relentless young investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The stories of the Nixon scandal went from a trickle to a torrent. The two would turn out entire books on their story, one of which became a hit movie.
Here’s but a promotional blurb from their first book, the bestselling All the President's Men, made into a movie:
“In what must be the most devastating political detective story of the century, the two young Washington Post reporters whose brilliant investigative journalism smashed the Watergate scandal wide open tell the whole behind-the-scenes drama the way it happened.”
Move from the Nixon era to the Reagan era and the explosive Iran-Contra scandal. As a White House staffer back in the day, I well recall the seemingly endless flood of “inside the White House” stories that swirled around Reagan’s policies revolving around a young national security aide named Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.
Move on to the Clinton era, and one finds this headline:
Drudge says Newsweek sitting on Lewinsky story, Jan. 17, 1998
In a look back at the time period, Politico would later write:
“On this day in 1998, the Drudge Report carried an item on its website alleging that Newsweek magazine was sitting on a story exposing an affair between President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old White House intern.”
You get the picture. When a Republican was in the White House the media was relentless in following any and every last lead they could find, generating one story after another about the inside, scandalous operations of that presidency.
But when it came to exposing the doings of Democrat Clinton, as Matt Drudge exposed, the mainstream media’s Newsweek had the goods on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and sat on it. Finally the story making the spotlight with the arrival on the scene of Matt Drudge’s Internet sensation, the Drudge Report.
And now?
Where are the current media’s Watergate or Iran-Contra style relentless investigative reporting that rips the facade off the Biden White House and tells Americans what is really going on inside a White House where the President of the United States -- with the authority and access over the nuclear codes -- is seen by many as being a “cognitive mess.”
The mere facts in the Wall Street Journal’s article reporting on a “Diminished Biden in Charge” and the fact that it hits the streets when Biden has barely a month left in his four year term speaks volumes about the state of the mainstream media. None of it good.
Not unlike the days when Newsweek sat on its scoop about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, it is clear from the silence of most of the media on what’s really going on inside the Biden White House that they are more interested in protecting the left-leaning Biden then reporting the realities of his White House.
One obvious question? Can you imagine if the president were Donald Trump and he was seen as a “cognitive mess”? The Trump White House would be besieged Watergate or Iran-Contra style with “journalists” demanding to see inside every last nook and cranny of the Trump White House, with an avalanche of stories about the president’s mental fitness to do his job.
With January 20th looming, the Biden presidency is about to close shop. Perhaps with Biden gone, and with him the media’s felt -scandalous? - need to protect him from factual stories about his White House? Only then will the memoirs of this or that Biden aide make an appearance designed for the New York Times bestseller list that reveals what has really been going on inside a White House run by a president who is politely described by the Wall Street Journal as “a diminished leader.”
Why wait for the tell-all books until now?
