Is the Media to Blame for Hiding Biden’s Condition from Americans?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns the need for an independent press – reporters who will investigate and report the truth without partisanship. Clearly, the mainstream press in the United States is not independent as was shown from the reactions of Americans who finally saw President Joe Biden as his real self.

On June 27, 2024, Democratic President Joe Biden and his Republican rival former President Donald Trump faced off in the first presidential debate of the 2024 presidential race. Biden was a disaster, and suddenly the entire nation knew it. A top Biden donor who wished to remain unnamed said, “There is no way to spin this. His performance was disqualifying. There is going to be a call for a brokered convention. Whitmer, Pritzker, Newsom, Beshear. Those could all be the options. It’s inevitable.” 

The news for the last two weeks is about Biden and how he should resign. Such calls are coming from Democrats at all levels, but Biden insists that he is the Democrat’s nominee and is staying in the race. Only time will tell who is correct.

Meanwhile, numerous people are being blamed for keeping Biden’s medical condition – senility – a secret from the American public. Obviously, the blame starts with Vice President Kamala Harris and extends through the top ranks of the Democrats who have met with Biden over the past three plus years. It also extends to the lamestream media who have been covering up Biden’s condition.

According to an article written by Jennifer Graham and published in the Deseret News, Jill Abramson, a former editor of The New York Times, accused the White House of conducting “a massive cover-up of the degree of the president’s feebleness and his serious physical decline.” She also “chastised the press for not covering the story until after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump.” 

“It’s clear the best news reporters in Washington have failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power accountable. It is our duty to poke through White House smoke screens and find out the truth,” Jill Abramson said, adding, “It is simply astounding for the entire country, including its most seasoned reporters, to be as shocked as everyone was by the ugly and painful reality of (President Joe) Biden’s debate performance.”

Many consumers of conservative media, however, were quick to point out that they were not shocked. Biden’s missteps – both literal and figurative – have long been recurring features on “Hannity” and other talk shows, to the point where any serious questions raised about the 81-year-old president’s limitations were dismissed as partisan attacks, or deflected by concerns that they would harm the national media’s candidate of choice. “I worry that too many journalists didn’t try to get the story because they did not want to be accused of helping elect Donald Trump,” Abramson said.

“Silence,” as Biden has repeatedly said, “is complicity.” And the legacy news media’s silence about Biden’s deteriorating condition in recent years is prompting soul-searching among journalists and a new combativeness between the press and the White House….

Actually, there were plenty of reasons, articulated by The Guardian in an article entitled “Warning signs: A history of Joe Biden’s verbal slips” in which the newspaper recounts incidents over the past three years that, in retrospect, should have been cause for greater scrutiny by the press. These range from Biden stumbling three times as he boards a plane, confusing Iraq with Ukraine, and inexplicably ending a speech about gun safety by saying “God save the queen, man.”

And these are just a sampling of worrisome incidents that are undisputed. There have been many others that might be open to interpretation, most recently a moment in last week’s interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, when Biden appeared to say that he would be satisfied if he had done his “goodest job” in trying to defeat Trump, and a kerfuffle later erupted between the press and the White House over what he actually said.

And of course, Biden provided new sound bites for his critics today when he, among other stumbles, introduced Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin” at the NATO meeting in New York City and called Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump” at a rambling news conference that lasted nearly an hour.

I am willing to give Biden some leeway in messing up the names of world leaders. I think he made a simple mistake in calling Zelenskyy President Putin. He recognized his mistake immediately and corrected it. I watched/listened to the news conference, and I thought that Biden did fairly well. In fact, he did much better than I expected him to do. I do not think that Biden will pull out of the presidential race.

However, too many people saw behind the curtain like in Wizard of Oz when they watched Biden’s debate performance. Now Americans know that the press helped Democrats to hide the real condition of Biden.

There may not have been a nefarious “conspiracy of collusion,” as British commentator Piers Morgan has charged, but there was certainly fear by some in the media of helping Donald Trump. There was also a lack of willingness to ask probing questions when the president faltered, and to do the kind of bootstrap reporting that might reveal, as independent journalist Alex Berenson did on July 6 (two days before The New York Times published its story) a curious series of visits to the White House by a doctor who specializes in Parkinson’s disease….

It's hard to overstate how much the media has flipped on the subject of Biden in just 14 days. Jake Tapper, a moderator at the Juen 27 debate, has spoken out strongly about Biden’s condition, calling his refusal to leave the race “Operation Defiance” and devastatingly reading snippets of Biden’s disjointed answers in recent interviews, which we all know were not “cheapfakes” manipulated for political advantage.

There’s no question that the internet is awash in deceptive images, which makes the media all the more suspicious of them. But there’s also no question that public distrust in the media, which has deepened over the past eight years, is related to the open hostility toward Trump and his supporters among some members of the media. Until the media remembers that its job is not to keep Trump out of office, but “to hold power accountable,” as Abramson said, and to do so without partisan bias, our favorable ratings will remain even lower than Biden’s.

I do not know if the media is truly complicit in hiding truth from the American people. I do know that I knew that Hunter’s lap top was real before the 2020 presidential election. The mainstream media was hiding this truth, but the right-wing media was publishing it.