The story of Joe Biden’s mental decline—hidden in plain sight by the legacy media—has become The Story That Will Not Die. While the media are blaming Biden’s White House staff, as well as former First Lady Jill Biden, the real reason this scandal—and it is a scandal—has existed is the legacy media itself. Without the major news outlets from The New York Times to CBS News actively coordinating suppression of the obvious with the Biden White House, the Biden scandal would not have existed.
This is not how news organizations like to portray themselves. They will swear up and down to the public that they are professionals just “reporting the news,” and that if anyone thinks their coverage is biased or favors one candidate or political party, that someone has a vivid imagination.
The current spin on the Biden demise is that the White House and their own Lady MacBeth—Jill—did it, an accusation made by Washington’s “ultimate insider,” Sally Quinn, who declared that Jill is guilty of “elder abuse.” Ezra Klein blamed the problem on “groupthink” in the White House, while CNN reporter Jake Tapper has claimed that the White House “coverup” was “worse than Watergate.”
We can see where this is going. Almost to a reporter, the Washington news establishment is claiming that the fault lies entirely with the White House staff and Biden’s wife, Jill. When an influential insider like Sally Quinn claims that Jill committed a felony, no one in Washington would be willing to push back on such comments. Interestingly, while First Lady, Jill Biden received almost 100 percent hagiographic coverage from the legacy media, with reporters almost always referring to her as “Dr. Jill Biden,” even though her terminal degree came in educational leadership, which is at the very bottom of doctoral studies.
Once again, we see a self-declared “crisis” in the legacy media in which insiders engage in a strange combination of self-flagellation and self-congratulations. The response to the book on Biden’s cognitive deterioration by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson is especially ironic, given that Tapper himself, as well as much of the media, such as the New York Times, declared that Biden was not suffering from any loss of cognition.
(The NYT a week before Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump insisted that any videos that showed otherwise were “cheapfakes,” and were inaccurate. Shortly after the debate, in a move that would have made Big Brother proud, the NYT editorialized against Biden running for re-election.)
There is much to take in here, as this scandal shines yet another light on our modern media culture, one that has been in decline for many years. Fifteen years ago, I commented on the decline of the media (and especially newspapers) in a review of Losing the News by former NYT writer, Alex S. Jones, who blamed (of course) capitalism (profit-seeking, you know) for the demise not only of newspapers, but also what he called “fact-based reporting.” Jones claimed that the rise of the internet and the fall of the print-based news organizations also meant that the “iron core” of objective news was disappearing. He wrote:
Inside the core is news from abroad, from coverage of the war in Iraq to articles describing the effort to save national parks in Mozambique. There is news of politics, from the White House to the mayor’s office…. There is policy news about Medicare reform and science news about global warming.
He went on:
What goes into this cannonball is the daily aggregation of what is sometimes called “accountability news,” because it is the form of news whose purpose is to hold government and those with power accountable. This is fact-based news, sometimes called the “news of verification” as opposed to the “news of assertion” that is mostly on display these days in prime time on cable news channels and in blogs.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Jones—who hosted the PBS show “Media Matters”—believes that government subsidies like what PBS received would solve the problem, as these subsidies would ensure that newspapers would be able to continue their so-called fact-based reporting. Now, most of our readers would have to pause here—amid gales of laughter—to wrap their minds around the scenario in which the government subsidizes the media to make sure that the media will stick to its “purpose” “to hold government and those with power accountable.” Commenting on Jones’s claim that only government can save the “objective” press, I wrote:
What to do? Jones turns to the government as savior. His recommendations include expanding PBS, subsidizing newspapers, and empowering the FCC to once again determine what counts as news “in the public interest.” The irony that the supposed “watchdog of government” would thus be heavily dependent on that same government is lost on Jones, but such ideas are perfectly in line with his “progressive” beliefs. He believes that the “watchdog of government” must in turn be watched over and cared for by government.
We also should not be surprised to read that Jones and other media analysts like the late Todd Gitlin believe that the real problem the media faces is private, for-profit ownership. (In his doctoral dissertation from Stanford University, Gitlin called for government subsidies to the media to help keep it under control). In short, according to the media, the real role of the press is to keep enough heat on the government so that it regulates capitalism well enough to keep predatory firms like Wal-Mart from destroying our communities and our very lives.
People like Alex Jones are the media elite and they are the ones that set the agenda for the legacy media. If one reads Losing the News, it is not hard to figure out why the legacy media actively worked with the Biden White House to suppress anything that would smack of Biden’s cognitive difficulties. First, as progressives who tend to march in lockstep in the voting booth and just about everywhere else, they saw Biden as the last bulwark against the election of Donald Trump in 2024 and were not going to verify Republican claims that Biden was cognitively impaired.
Second, media elites were not about to confirm anything that one might have heard first on Fox News or other conservative media outlets. Anyone who has dealt with the legacy media knows that its journalists tend to engage in large-scale groupthink. It is more than just getting scooped; it would be the admission that those people even have the right to be in the media, which is morally intolerable.
That is why we see someone like Sally Quinn making a serious accusation against Jill Biden in accusing her of “elder abuse.” With Joe Biden exiled to Delaware and in serious decline, Jill no longer is useful to the media and is an easy target for the same progressive reporters that once fawned all over her, with Vogue giving her a worshipful cover story.
Now that Jill Biden no longer is a White House insider, she has gone from being a First Lady who could do no wrong to the ambitious Lady MacBeth who abused her dementia-stricken husband for her own benefit, according to current media portrayals. “We have always been at war with Eastasia!” Indeed, George Orwell himself could not have written a better script than the legacy media wrote for itself in the Biden caper.
If it were only the Biden affair, one might excuse the legacy media for being overzealous in its belief that they must protect America from Donald Trump. However, the American elite legacy media for nearly a century has been propagandizing its readers to preserve progressive and socialist narratives. In 1932, the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for what turned out to be reposting Soviet Union propaganda on the infamous Ukraine famine. (The NYT’s correspondent, Walter Duranty, insisted there was no famine, and his employer didn’t dissent).
In 2017, the NYT won a Pulitzer Prize for articles that promoted the false narrative that Trump used Russian operatives to help him win the 2016 election. A decade earlier, the NYT was trying to convince its readers that Durham County District Attorney Michael Nifong had a solid case against three lacrosse players from Duke University for rape and kidnapping. The case ultimately blew up on Nifong and on the legacy media. As I wrote in my review of Losing the News:
The NY Times was not alone in this rush to judgment. Most major news organizations, including the Washington Post, the LA Times, Newsweek, Time, and the main broadcasters, all treated every statement issued by the prosecutor as being ex cathedra. Newsweek even ran a cover story using mug shots of two of the three indicted students, with the hackneyed title, “Sex, Lies, and Duke.”
The journalists later complained that they could not get the facts. This complaint is nonsense — it is reporters’ job to get the facts, not to mindlessly recite what government officials give them and ignore or reflexively deride statements made by anyone who disputes those officials. As opposed to the traditional media journalists, bloggers and independent writers began questioning Nifong and gathering troubling information almost as soon as the story broke. K.C. Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, created a popular blog called “Durham-in-Wonderland” that systematically took apart the prosecution’s case. Only one mainstream media member, CBS News’ 60 Minutes, took those dissenting voices seriously, broadcasting a segment in October 2006 that called the charges into question.
As one who wrote a number of articles on this case, I believe that the media’s self-proclaimed “ignorance” was willful. The facts did not fit the template of the journalists’ worldviews, so the press ignored the facts.
It would be one thing if this were a rare occurrence, but this sort of thing happens all the time. The Biden media coverup was just the latest chapter in a book that grows larger with each legacy media scandal. This is not a problem of journalists being lazy or not “finding the facts.” It is because of their relationship with government itself. The late journalist Warren Brookes wrote in 1991 that American journalists seek what he called the “statist quo.” He wrote:
Like it or not, that makes journalistic incentives very clear: The more government, the more power (and jobs) the news media will have…. Instead of watchdogging and containing this massive explosion of government, the press became one of its principal beneficiaries.
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