Washington Week with The Atlantic’s year-in-review episode Friday contained a fleeting reference to a bombshell Wall Street Journal story about how the White House and Democrats actively hid President Joe Biden’s descent into decrepitude, including several public stumbles, shaking hands with the air, and taking the “short stairs” up Air Force One.
The supposedly vigilant media acceded to Democratic wishes and showed astonishingly little curiosity about Biden’s decline, even issuing defenses of Biden’s acuity in the face of Republican observations, defenses that look simply pathetic in retrospect, like the New York Times story lamenting so-called Republican “cheap fakes."
Such defenses also appeared on tax-funded PBS including a notorious exchange from the September 1, 2023 edition of the network’s political roundtable, Washington Week with The Atlantic, after a disastrous Biden press conference spurred by a damning special counsel report from Robert Hur.
After Politico’s Kyle Cheney issued his own embarrassing take on how Republicans were just using the non-issue to attack President Biden, panelist Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic and moderator Jeffrey Goldberg (Leibovich’s editor boss at The Atlantic) went out on a limb in the Democratic president’s defense.
Leibovich called out Republicans as “lying” about making an issue of Biden’s age – an issue that would prove all too relevant for the Democratic ticket in 2024.
The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich: Can I just actually just point out, though, that, I mean, it’s not just making an issue of Biden’s age, it’s lying, it’s saying he’s senile, saying he’s demented, saying he’s out of it. I mean, I think it’s important to sort of state for a fact that a lot of these are just --
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Mentally, he’s quite acute.
Leibovich: It seems like it.
But that embarrassing exchange has been flushed down the memory hole on tax-funded PBS. There was no mea culpa in Goldberg and Leibovich’s latest post-election exchange about Biden’s age and infirmity, just the false insinuation they were right all along:
Goldberg: Mark, I want to ask you about Joe Biden, remember Joe Biden? President of the United States for another few weeks. A lot of coverage in the last week or two about, including The Wall Street Journal, his limitations that were showing themselves, his intellectual limitations or cognitive limitations, the age issues, coming out long before this past summer, or the debate on June 27th. You were warning early about Biden’s age. Is there anything surprising coming out to you now or is this kind of a story about a group of people around Joe Biden covering up for him?
Leibovich: I’m not really surprised. I’m surprised to the degree to which he has completely disappeared since the election. I guess it’s sort of obvious that a lame duck president by definition will not be a factor, especially when someone who has such a big footprint as Donald Trump is waiting in the wings. I do think that there’s a lot of sort of unfinished reporting done on this, which I think is going to come out around what this White House really did look like. And is that a failing of the media over the last few years? Maybe. But I also think, you know, there was a very serious effort to protect him, and to shelter him, and to keep him away from cameras, and to keep him away from situations where this would be exposed. And, look, is it a scandal? I don’t know if I’d use that word, but I also think it is a massive source of, you know, information that we`re still trying to understand.
Leibovich authored an Atlantic piece in June 2022, “Why Biden Shouldn’t Run in 2024.” Yet fifteen months later, in September 2023, with a Trump-Biden rematch looming, he agreed with his boss Goldberg’s statement about Biden’s “quite acute” mental state. It's not just politicians who are slippery in their rhetoric.
