With the imminent release of the first of what will surely be a legion of books authored by Legacy Media types on the obvious cognitive decline of President Joe Biden, there is a modicum of media self-interest in reporting on the book’s disclosures. But there remains a hesitancy to cover this issue at the Legacy newscasts.
NBC Nightly News was the only newscast tonight with an interest in reporting on the published excerpts of Original Sin by Axios’ Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper of CNN. Below is that report in its entirety:
LESTER HOLT: Meanwhile, there are damaging new details tonight about former President Biden. A new book alleges serious concerns about his mental acuity. Gabe Gutierrez joins us now and Gabe, President Biden’s team is now responding to this reporting.
GABE GUTIERREZ: That’s right, Lester. According to an excerpt from the new book obtained by NBC News it was, quote, “obvious to many at a fundraiser last summer that then-President Biden did not know who George Clooney was, even though they were longtime acquaintances and Clooney is one of the most famous men in the world.” The book, by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, goes on to say former President Obama, who was also at the event, had to hop in and finish sentences for Biden during photo-ops. In separate excerpts, the authors write that Biden would forget the names of longtime aides and there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair in a second term. At the time, The White House publicly defended the president's fitness for office. A Biden spokesperson now says the authors did not fact check the book with them adding, “we continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. He was a very effective president. Lester.
HOLT: Gabe- Gabe, thank you.
Neither ABC, CBS, Univision, nor Telemundo reported on these disclosures, which come from the respective excerpts published in Axios and The New Yorker. I hesitate to call them “revelations” because Biden’s decline was obvious to anyone with two eyes to see, two ears to hear, and two brain cells to run together.
We all saw what we saw in real time, and were called spreaders of “disinformation” or, more egregiously, “cheapfakes.” Not just the catastrophic June 2024 debate but everything that happened prior. Every stumble and fall, every ghost handshake and mental drift, and every unintelligible mumble. And we were repeatedly told, especially by Tapper, that these were the doings of a man with a mumble.
After years of lecturing conservatives on respect for law and order, the media pounced on the Hur Report, specifically its finding that Biden was an elderly man with a declining memory, and therefore all but unprosecutable under classified documents charges.
I will note that tonight’s lack of coverage of a legitimate political scandal stands as an indictment of a media that breathlessly devoted gobs of A-block time to every unsourced negative Trump story under the sun. Were it not for NBC, there’d be no coverage at all.
And that, in a way, is almost poetic. The media’s omissions of the book disclosures (confirmations, not revelations) perfectly mirror their prior omissions of Biden’s decline, clearly evident to everyone else.
