Sometimes, a plea of “not guilty” is worse than a simple admission of guilt. The latest round of defenses and explanations for the press’s abject failure to cover Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline represents such an instance.
Former CNN analyst Chris Cillizza volunteered some very thin gruel last week, suggesting the political press’s subconscious partisan biases primed it to be too trusting of the Biden White House.
This is hardly a satisfying or comforting defense for why the media didn’t report sooner on Biden’s struggles, and in some cases actively harangued and shouted down those who raised the issue.
For one thing, any reporter who takes the world’s most powerful office at its word is hardly doing his job. Second, anyone who genuinely trusts that Biden is telling the truth is too incompetent to be left alone around sharp objects, let alone cover the White House.
“Any study that you ever see about who reporters vote for, they vote for Democrats much more than Republicans,” said Cillizza, who has been hard on his colleagues for the industry-wide failure to account for the former president’s deterioration. “And I think what was going on here is, I think it was an inherent and sort of unconscious bias more than a conscious bias. But I think the reporters covering this White House were too willing to take the Biden team’s word for it. Anytime you asked about Joe Biden they would say ‘I mean, he’s 80, moves a little bit more stiffly than he did before, but man he is totally with it, he outworks our 20-something staffers.’ And I think reporters were too willing to just say ‘Okay that makes sense.’ They were too credulous.”
Cillizza then stated the obvious: Had the president been a Republican, no one in the political press would have uncritically accepted the White House’s assurances about the chief executive’s mental and physical capabilities (or lack thereof).
“They didn’t ask enough questions,” he said. “Their skepticism meter was not honed — turned up high enough. And I think that had it been a Republican in that office, particularly if that Republican had been Donald Trump, there would have been less credulity. There would have been less willingness to just go along with what the Trump White House was saying like, ‘Oh he’s fine, you don’t see him in his great times. He’s amazing.’”
He added, “I think there would have been more hard questions asked, and I think there should have been more hard questions asked by the media of Joe Biden and Joe Biden’s staff about his health. I absolutely think that’s true.”
It’s bad enough, the idea of reporters taking the president at his word. (Hold the powerful to account? Not to the point that it’s uncomfortable!) However, the thought of reporters trusting Joe Biden specifically to play it straight with the facts is much worse, given everything we know about Biden’s decades-long struggle with telling the truth.
Indeed, if there were ever a president to rival Donald Trump in terms of sheer dishonesty, it is Biden, a man with a long history of brazen falsehoods and dishonest behavior.
Biden famously claimed that he had been arrested in South Africa after demanding a meeting with the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Biden was never arrested in South Africa.
The former president said he had met with the leaders of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after an antisemitic terrorist attack in October 2018 left 11 worshipers dead. Biden did not meet with the synagogue leaders.
Biden once asserted, “Immediately, the moment [the Iraq War] started, I came out against the war at that moment.” Biden did not do that.
Biden has said on several occasions that he marched with civil rights protesters. He did not.
He has said on several occasions that he was arrested with civil rights protesters. He was not.
Biden said the NAACP supported each of his campaigns for office. It did not.
Biden said he was appointed to the Naval Academy in 1965 by the late U.S. Sen. J. Caleb Boggs (R-Del.), but the late senator’s archives show nothing of the sort.
Biden claimed he was once in a helicopter that was “forced down” into “the superhighway of terror” between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was not.
He said he was “shot at” during trips to the Green Zone in Iraq. This did not happen. (He later clarified: “I was near where a shot landed”).
Biden bragged that he had led the charge against the war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. He had not. Biden said he had been the first in his family to go to university. He was not.
When Biden first ran for president in the late 1980s, he told voters he attended law school at Syracuse University on a full academic scholarship. This was not true. He told the same audience that he had finished in the top half of his class, that he was named the outstanding student in the political science department as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware, and that he graduated from Delaware with three undergraduate degrees. All three of those claims were false.
Biden’s first run for president imploded spectacularly after he was caught in a plagiarism scandal.
And then, of course, there’s Biden’s most psychotic trait, which is his seeming compulsion to embellish the details of family deaths.
He has said that his eldest son, Beau, died while serving in Iraq, which is not true. Beau died of brain cancer in the U.S., nearly six years after returning from deployment.
Biden has said that as vice president, he had awarded his late uncle a Purple Heart at his father’s urging. Biden’s father passed away in 2002, seven years before Biden became vice President.
Speaking of Biden’s late uncles, Biden once claimed that cannibals had eaten one of them after he was shot down during World War II. No one knows what Biden was talking about, least of all the U.S. Department of Defense.
Perhaps worst of all, Biden said a drunk driver killed his daughter and first wife. There is no evidence the other driver was intoxicated in the crash that devastated the former president’s family. The other driver’s family has vigorously disputed this claim ever since Biden first casually asserted it.
If you can believe it, there is a lot more where this comes from, but you get the picture.
What defense excuse besides inexcusable incompetence or malice could there be for a reporter to accept Biden and his White House’s say-so regarding his health, when he was nearly incapable of telling the truth about anything else?
Anyone who believes the president — any president — without question is not a reporter but a stenographer. Anyone who believes a word Biden says without first verifying is probably his press secretary.
Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.
