Imagine getting an award for doing the bare minimum at your job, doing it poorly, and then handing in the work so late that it has become irrelevant?
Welcome to the 2025 White House Correspondents’ Dinner!
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Axios’s Alex Thompson, winner of the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence for his coverage of that story, told the audience. “But being truth-tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story.”
Sounds nice. But this is gaslighting.
If the political media were too credulous to see that then-President Joe Biden’s mental acuity had deteriorated to a degree that made it impossible for him to do the job, they don’t deserve to be anywhere near the White House or a newsroom because they lack the appropriate skill set. If they knew and still covered up or soft-pedaled Biden’s decline, they don’t deserve to be anywhere near the White House or a newsroom because they can’t be trusted.
Those are the choices. For the most part, my money is on the latter. The notion that legacy media had been duped by Biden’s crafty handlers doesn’t stand up to the most basic scrutiny.
For one thing, let’s not forget the same outlets that covered up the former president’s cognitive regression also covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story and the family’s corruption scandals. These are the same outlets that spent years spreading harebrained conspiracy theories about a Russian asset in the White House, among a slew of sensationalist stories too numerous to mention. The failure to report on Biden’s mental regression isn’t an outlier. It had become the norm.
After he won the nomination in 2020, the media had been making excuses for Biden, a lifelong fabulist. Or, as the New York Times might put it, a man who would “veer into a personal folklore” with “the factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful for audiences.” Thompson, in my estimation one of the better mainstream political reporters, also claimed that the president’s “arsenal of wacky phrases” and “quirky aphorisms” were “weaponized by Republicans to insinuate the 80-year-old president is in mental decline.”
Weaponization implies that highlighting Biden’s slips was misleading the public. For the most part, that wasn’t the case.
Indeed, the media laid the groundwork for excusing Biden’s inevitable mental decline — which, let’s face it, was never something to write home about in the first place — during the 2020 campaign, blaming his verbal blunders on a conveniently discovered stuttering problem. Like most of Biden’s biographical contentions, there’s scant evidence the stutter was real. Yet, there was barely a hint of skepticism from establishment media.
Of course, even if the impediment were genuine, it wouldn’t explain why Biden ended a gun-safety summit in Connecticut with “God bless the Queen, man” or struggled to remember the name of a member of his Cabinet or told a crowd that we have “plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean” and so on.
By the time then-special counsel Robert Hur let the president off the hook for pilfering classified documents because he was an “elderly man with a poor memory,” most people could see it as well. In 2023, polls showed a majority of voters doubted Biden’s mental capacity. Yet we’re supposed to believe that his deterioration eluded professionals with journalism degrees and White House press passes.
Let’s recall that on June 13, 2024, a video emerged of Biden wandering off at the G7 summit in Italy during a skydiving demonstration and had to be corralled by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. A few days later, Biden was filmed at a Hollywood presidential fundraiser, waving and clapping to the crowd before freezing up. Former President Barack Obama took him by the wrist and guided him offstage.
All this happened about a week before Biden’s catastrophic presidential debate with Donald Trump. Was there a national conversation on the importance of a president’s fragile mental state? No. The media went on the offensive to discredit anyone who brought it up.
CNN’s media newsletter called the videos fabrications.
An MSNBC anchor said the tape was part of a “growing and insidious trend in right-wing media” to spread “highly misleading and selectively edited videos.”
An NBC News story written by its senior political reporter was headlined, “Misleading GOP videos of Biden are going viral. The fact-checks have trouble keeping up.”
CBS News ran an entire segment on television, “Examining the impact of ‘cheap fakes’” — what the media called videos of an incapacitated Biden.
The New York Times predebate article was headlined, “Biden Battles Age Doubts and a Trail of Misleading Videos.”
The Associated Press allegedly fact-checked the Hollywood event with denials from three Biden spokespeople and Lewis Kay, a spokesman for Jimmy Kimmel, the emcee who hosted a Democratic fundraiser.
The Washington Post’s fact-checkers argued that a video of a perplexed Biden at the G7 summit was achieved by “deceptive framing.” “‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead.”
Anyway, virtually every major outlet treated “cheapfakes” as a conspiracy theory, though they surely knew otherwise — and I only add the word “virtually” out of prudence.
After the debate, it became inarguable that our doddering octogenarian president wasn’t OK. Not one of the journalists featured in the above list has admitted to the lesser charge of being duped. Without any explanation, most of them simply changed their focus and began pushing Biden out of the race to help Democrats. As soon as that goal was achieved, they began covering up for then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
There was no reckoning in the aftermath of Biden’s disconcerting debate performance. Or now.
“Our responsibility is not to align with any one party or any one of the genders, but to serve the people of this country with integrity and dedication,” Eugene Daniels, MSNBC’s senior Washington correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said to long applause. “We care deeply about accuracy and take seriously the heavy responsibility of being stewards of the public’s trust. What we are not is the opposition.”
What evidence exists that this statement is true? Not one journalist has gotten as much as demoted for allegedly missing one of the biggest political stories of the decade. Other than Thompson, not one reporter had specifically acknowledged exactly how they failed. Indeed, the president of what was once a prestigious journalistic association in Washington can’t even concede that his profession has an ideological predisposition.
AN OVERDUE INVESTIGATION OF ACTBLUE
And failing to admit this obvious point is part of the problem. It’s always more difficult to cast a critical eye on your friends. Recall how Thompson stressed that “every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” implying that journalists believe the Left is less inclined to lie than the Right. Thompson only needs to say this because he’s speaking to Democrats, which establishment journalists swear is not the case.
This episode simply punctuates the mass failure of modern journalism. The lack of trust in big-money establishment media outlets is destructive in numerous ways. Perhaps it has created a vacuum that’s too often filled by disreputable people on the Left and Right. So, sure, Thompson conceded more than most at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, but it was far too little. There’s little indication industry leaders feel the need to fix anything.