A columnist for The Washington Post blamed left-wing media bias for the long-lasting silence and doubt about President Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity.
Columnist Megan McArdle said the White House skillfully deflected journalists who noticed changes in Biden’s behavior by “punishing reporters who wrote things they didn’t like.” She alleged that journalists who publicly asked about the president’s age would suddenly receive rare access to meet with senior staffers who would deny any concerns or issues regarding the president’s age.
“The White House made it hard to get that context; staff rarely leaked, and anyway, few people outside Biden’s inner circle saw him enough to form a complete picture of his condition. The inner circle, meanwhile, is dominated by people who have been with the president for years,” she wrote. “A few phenomenally dogged reporters persisted anyway. But they weren’t rewarded for it because there seemed to be no audience for coverage of Biden. Articles languished unread, and Biden books weren’t selling.”
“We should do this not for the benefit of conservative journalists, or politicians, but for the benefit of our readers. When our newsrooms lopsidedly support one party, our readers miss much of the story — in this case, nearly all of it.”— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) July 11, 2024
McArdle argued the imbalance of Democratic versus Republican journalists led the media to protect the president by ignoring any warning signs. She accused journalists of playing along with the White House’s assertion that any videos depicting the president in a concerning light were “cheap fakes” created by Republicans, which she said would not have happened under Trump.
“And when journalists did cover the issue, many outlets that had been pitilessly clear about Trump’s defects apparently couldn’t bring themselves to be quite so blunt about a president they liked — in part because that would make their friends mad, as well as the White House,” she wrote. “A lot of articles about Biden’s age ended up so couched in ethereally vague language about ‘questions’ and ‘concerns,’ so defensively swaddled in equivocal context that the necessary SOS didn’t get through.”
“As a result, viewers of Fox News understood the president’s condition better than our audiences, which ought to be a huge wake-up call for us. We don’t have the exact problem conservatives imagine, but we do have a problem. And the only way to fix it is to add more viewpoint diversity to our newsrooms,” she continued. (RELATED: ‘It’s Disgusting’: ‘The View’ Co-Host Sara Haines Says She’s ‘Ashamed’ Of Democrats)
McArdle said while the left-wing media is not participating in a conspiracy, it appears that way due to the stark contrast in its treatment toward Biden versus Trump.
“If Trump had slipped as visibly and publicly as President Biden, it’s possible we would have covered that more aggressively. But there was a paradox — the reporters watching him most closely were seeing tiny, incremental changes, without necessarily being struck, as were people who infrequently tuned in, with the cumulative magnitude of the decline,” the columnist wrote regarding the matter.
The June 27 debate drove Democrats and liberal media pundits into a panic as many believe he failed to demonstrate he is capable of serving a second term. Thirteen congressional Democrats are currently calling for Biden to withdraw from the race, and Democratic Vermont Sen. Peter Welch became the first senator of the president’s party to oppose his candidacy in a Washington Post op-ed.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi avoided staunchly defending the president’s reelection bid, saying he should soon make a decision on the matter during a Wednesday interview on “Morning Joe.”
ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos expressed doubt that the president can serve another term to an unnamed individual in footage first posted by TMZ. Stephanopoulos later confirmed he was the person in the footage and expressed regret for what he said. Former “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd revealed Wednesday that a senior cabinet secretary told him two years ago that he did not think Biden could run again.
