Top White House Reporters, in Obituaries of the Biden Administration, Shy Away From Mentioning President’s Mental Decline

As President Biden prepares to leave the White House and end his five-decade-long public career, members of the White House press corps who’ve covered his administration from day one have been publishing their first drafts of the history of the 46th president. And even as a reckoning is beginning about how the press covered Mr. Biden’s mental acuity over the course of his presidency, some of the most elite members of the White House press corps appear to be doubling down on their unwillingness to acknowledge what’s long been obvious to even a casual observer of the president — that he was challenged by cognition issues. For much of the first half of this year, the White House press corps went along with White House explanations that the president was fine, that he was in control, and that, behind the scenes, he was as sharp as ever, despite public verbal slip-ups and “senior moments.” Some ran with the explanation that Mr. Biden only appeared so old because Republican operatives were deploying “cheapfakes” of the president, referring to videos that — while not technically altered — were cut or edited in some way that made Mr. Biden appear older or more confused than he actually was. The few mainstream outlets that did report on the president’s cognitive decline — such as the Wall Street Journal and Axios — were widely denounced. When the Wall Street Journal went out on a limb in early June with a deeply reported piece on the president’s mental acuity, CNN’s then-senior media reporter, Oliver Darcy, led an outraged chorus of press elites condemning the report as “bizarre” and “suffering from glaring problems.”On Sunday, a CBS News national correspondent, Jan Crawford, said on “Face the Nation” that Mr. Biden’s obvious diminishing abilities was the most under-covered story of the year. “That would be, to me, Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in the televised debate,” Ms. Crawford said when asked what the most under-reported story of the year was. “It’s starting to emerge now that his advisors kind of managed his limitations … 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.”Many of Ms. Crawford’s contemporaries in the national press have been less open to self-reflection. Some of the most prominent political obituaries for Mr. Biden either failed to mention his cognition issues or repeated the White House’s longtime insistence that he was intellectually fit. Writing in the New York Times, the newspaper’s chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, in a carefully worded passage, wrote that “aides say he remains plenty sharp in the Situation Room,” before attributing the president’s very public decline as being due to travel to Angola and the Amazon that “would have tired even a president younger than 82.” He excused away an embarrassing video of Mr. Biden seemingly dozing off in the middle of the day at a round table discussion as the president “briefly [closing] his eyes as the speeches droned on.” In the Washington Post, one of its top White House reporters, Tyler Pager, writes that the White House feels strongly that Mr. Biden’s greatest problem was his inability to pivot to a new press landscape which includes smaller, independent outlets, podcasters, and YouTube shows. There was no mention in the long piece about mental decline.One of the few outlets to challenge the narrative about Mr. Biden’s mental acuity was the Wall Street Journal, which reported on June 4 — less than one month before that disastrous debate performance — that members of Congress were growing concerned that the president may not be up to the job. Speaker McCarthy told the outlet that Mr. Biden had lost a step, compared to his days when he was the vice president, and while many Democrats did defend the president on the record with the Journal, the truth would come out a mere three weeks later. In addition to the aforementioned, scathing criticism of the Journal by CNN, Senator Murray, the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee who served in the Senate with Mr. Biden for more than 15 years, came out with a scathing statement after the June 4 piece was posted. “Surprise, surprise — everyone attacking @POTUS is a Republican with an agenda. I made clear to the @WSJ regarding the January meeting on Ukraine that the President was absolutely engaged & ran that meeting in a way that brought everyone together,” Ms. Murray wrote on X on June 4. “I’m not quoted — I wonder why.”Just on December 19, the Journal was out with another story about how White House aides shielded the president from more junior staffers, members of Congress, and even the president’s own cabinet secretaries. The Journal quotes one aide as telling someone that Mr. Biden had “good” and “bad” days as far back as 2021 — the latter requiring the president to cancel meetings or take a break in the middle of his work. This time, the Journal’s previous critics were silent.

Top White House Reporters, in Obituaries of the Biden Administration, Shy Away From Mentioning President’s Mental Decline

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