One of the ongoing subcycles of the past quadrennium was the Regime Media’s lack of interest in covering or even mentioning the obvious cognitive decline of President Joe Biden. With barely three weeks remaining in his term, whatever discussions about Biden’s decline come across as forced by the recent devastating Wall Street Journal article.
Watch as CBS’s Jan Crawford discusses Biden’s decline during the year-end panel at Face the Nation devoted to “undercovered or underreported” items:
CBS FACE THE NATION
12/29/24
10:45 AM
MAJOR GARRETT: One of the other things we also do in the year end correspondents’ table is dig into what was undercovered or underreported. Jan?
JAN CRAWFORD: Um- undercovered or underreported. That would be, to me, Joe Biden's obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in the televised debate.
GARRETT: At the presidential debate with Donald Trump.
CRAWFORD: Unquestioned. And, you know, it's starting to emerge now that his advisers kind of managed his limitations, it's been reported in The Wall Street Journal, for four years. And yet he insisted that he could still run for president. We should have much more forcefully questioned whether he was fit for office for another four years, which could have led to a primary for the Democrats. It could have changed the- the- the scope of the entire election. Yet still, incredibly, we read in The Washington Post that his advisers are saying that he regrets that he dropped out of the race. You know, that he thinks he could have beaten Trump. And I think that is either delusional, or they’re gaslighting…
ROBERT COSTA: President Biden has said repeatedly he was sick during the debate, June 27th in Atlanta, and he's always been fine and he leaves fine. That is his position, the position of many of his top aides as well, even though there is that reporting.
It wasn’t that long ago that our own Tim Graham posited the question: Who can trust White House reporters who hid Biden’s infirmity? Given this segment, the answer is clearly no one. As Tim noted on occasion of The Wall Street Journal’s bombshell report, everyone knew.
Everyone knew the president was babbling and bumbling. They knew because they observed it first hand, and they knew because he was kept away from the press, and he was even kept away from his own cabinet members. They knew because reporters like Courtney Subramanian of the Los Angeles Times were in on it. Photographs showed that in a press conference, she asked the question that Biden had on a notecard with her name and her face on it.
“We should have much more forcefully questioned” Biden’s fitness, says Crawford in an attempted mea culpa, but that’s only half the problem. In that moment of apparent introspection, there was no accounting for what people could plainly see with their own eyes: the times that Biden either fell down a flight of stairs or on stage, his unavailability with the press, and his struggles with coherence. And even then, as Crawford offers up this crumb of self-reflection, take note of what Robert Costa dies immediately thereafter: veering dabgerously close to "sharp as a tack" territory by parroting The White House's talking points.
The record reflects that the press, when faced with the call to scrutinize, chose to fall in line and amplify whatever spin emerged from The White House. The “cheap fakes” narrative, deployed after Biden’s disastrous trip to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, comes to mind. Everyone knew, but no one cared to report on it until it became reputationally embarrassing not to do so.
Be not deceived by the media’s sudden displays of interest in self-accountability and reflection in the waning days of the Biden presidency. They come from a collective impulse to cover their own backsides, as opposed to any real interest in accountability.
