It’s impossible not to enjoy seeing legacy news figures scramble to downplay their role in the cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s mental decline. The drama they’d spun and fancied themselves stars in, the one about intrepid journalists beating back the fascists with “facts” and moxie, has been exposed as a fairy tale for all the world to see.
To be sure, the legacy media didn’t just miss the story; they wrote the script for Biden’s masquerade. And it was always pure fiction, a journalistic cosplay. It wasn’t just a flop — it was a betrayal that left America with a president unfit to lead. They deserve every ounce of scorn and shame cast their way.
The way each individual “journalist” responded revealed something essential about each of them.
The cunning ones jumped ship the moment President Donald Trump won in November. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson started writing a book about the cover-up, casting themselves as truth-tellers despite sitting on the truth until doing so no longer paid. (They are being paid handsomely now.)
The dumb ones have maintained their positions. Former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, who never once pursued a story about Biden’s evidently diminished state, has characterized the cover-up as a “manufactured right-wing premise.” Does he really expect us to believe that Tapper and Thompson are “right-wing”? It’s the kind of astute political analysis that defined his run at NBC.
The sleazy ones have side-stepped the scandal altogether, keeping their sights trained on Trump in an effort to appear nobly “above” rehashing the past. MSNBC’s Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough, who famously declared Biden to be “far beyond cogent” and “intellectually, analytically, the best Biden ever,” has made nary a peep. One wonders what he thinks about reports that Biden was so diminished that he needed to be hidden from his own staff and Cabinet.
ABC News anchor David Muir, who interviewed Biden weeks before his train-wreck debate performance and avoided reporting on Biden’s stumbles and verbal miscues throughout the campaign, has yet to cover the cover-up. Apparently, he doesn’t believe his millions of nightly viewers deserve to know the president wasn’t actually running the country for a long stretch of time.
Meanwhile, reporters at the New York Times, the self-anointed guardians of truth, churned out glowing tributes to Biden’s “empathy” while ignoring his obvious frailty — until the debate left them no choice but to pivot.
Others, such as CNN’s Brian Stelter, are attempting to rewrite their own participation in the cover-up and are posturing now as bold truth-tellers by hawking the scandal’s exposés. Stelter was among the most passionate defenders of the White House’s “cheap fakes” line in 2024.
“The White House press secretary used the term ‘cheap fakes,’ so let me explain what that means,” he said last year in a brazen moment of pro-Biden PR. “We’ve been worried for years about AI deepfakes, computer-generated images that are going to trick people into believing something that’s totally false. ‘Cheap fakes’ are a little bit simpler. They’re cheap, distorted, out-of-context videos chopped up in certain ways. That’s what we’re seeing. That’s what the Biden campaign is so worried about now.”
Stelter was similarly impassioned in defense of Biden following a Wall Street Journal report about Biden’s declining mental fitness that had been broadcast on dozens of Sinclair-owned television stations.
“They didn’t do any original reporting,” he said in an MSNBC appearance. “They didn’t follow up or do any work. They didn’t do any work at all. They just ate it up and regurgitated what the Wall Street Journal said. That’s the worst form of so-called journalism out there.”
Let’s see if we can get this straight. Regurgitating what the Wall Street Journal says is “the worst form of so-called journalism,” but regurgitating what the White House press secretary says is good journalism? What a hack.
But not all legacy media journalists fall into the categories of cunning, dumb, and sleazy. Many are just downright pitiable.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this entire episode is witnessing the loss of innocence on so many journalists’ faces, particularly among the younger set, those who came of age in the Trump era and truly believed themselves to be on the right side of history in a battle of good vs. evil.
Thompson’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner two weeks ago landed on this fantasy like an anvil.
LEGACY MEDIA COVERED UP BIDEN’S DECLINE: DON’T LET THEM GET AWAY WITH IT
“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,” he said.
Can you imagine only now learning that Democrats are capable of lying? What a bitter pill for these self-styled heroes. All along, their noble crusade was just another lie they sold themselves — and us.