For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.
Alex Thompson, a journalist at Axios, received an award at last month’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a fancy bash where members of the press rub shoulders with the people they cover, traditionally including the President. Donald Trump skipped the event, and the persistent threats that he’s made against the media hung over it. But Thompson’s award, for “aggressive reporting on President Biden” and his “cognitive decline,” briefly refocussed attention on the media’s relationship with Trump’s predecessor. “Biden’s decline, and its coverup by the people around him, is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Thompson said. “But being truth-tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We—myself included—missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it. . . . We should have done better.”
In the room, Thompson’s admonishment was met with applause. But some journalists disagreed. A couple of days later, Chuck Todd weighed in on Substack, in language that would have been unfamiliar to followers of his unfailingly polite tenure hosting “Meet the Press,” on NBC. “The virtue-signalling that some people have done, to try to say that the media missed this story—they didn’t miss this story,” he said, dismissing the claim as a “manufactured, right-wing premise.” This wasn’t, he went on, like weapons of mass destruction, in the wake of 9/11, “where the White House worked with the mainstream media to manufacture a story” that helped justify the invasion of Iraq. Referring to footage of Biden looking old and infirm, Todd said, “You know why that’s all out there? Because the media fucking showed it!”
Thompson’s speech, and Todd’s response, reignited a dispute that flared last summer, when Biden’s disastrous appearance at the first Presidential debate supercharged discussion of his mental acuity, and led to him dropping out of the race. Also reignited was the “right-wing premise” that Todd mentioned; as Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s White House press secretary, put it when asked about Thompson’s remarks, the “legacy media” abetted “one of the greatest coverups and scandals that ever took place in American history.” This claim has come back around again, in Thompson and Jake Tapper’s buzzy new book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” which was excerpted in these pages. Among those accused of perpetuating the coverup: Tapper himself, by supposedly shutting down scrutiny of Biden’s health during his work as an anchor for CNN. (“It is just patently insulting that Jake Tapper is trying to rewrite history while lining his own pockets in the process,” one pundit said on Fox.) Tapper has said that some of the criticism is “fair, to be honest,” adding, “I did cover some of these issues, but not enough.” This week, he told Megyn Kelly, “Knowing what I know now, obviously, I feel tremendous humility.”
Claims of an organized media conspiracy here are silly. For starters, “the media” is not one entity. Even narrowing the term to the élite outlets that have traditionally set the political agenda would ignore the distance, or even antipathy, that marked such outlets’ relationship with Biden and his team. And if there was a media coverup, it wasn’t very effective, not least because the majority of the public thought Biden was too old long before the debate, which was always going to further expose him to voters in a setting where he had nowhere to hide. It’s true that liberal commentators, including the editor of this magazine, wanted to stop Trump from winning—so much so that, almost as soon as the debate was over, they concluded that Biden was an impediment to that end, and urged him to drop out, to the chagrin of many Biden fans (and, per the opening anecdote of “Original Sin,” of Biden himself). And mainstream journalists, of course, are now the ones writing books containing actual reporting on what happened.
The proposition that reporters unintentionally missed the full story of Biden’s decline is much more credible, and has been advanced not only by Thompson and Tapper but by numerous journalistic bigwigs, both now and in the immediate aftermath of the debate. Ben Smith, the editor of Semafor, wrote at the time that the press “failed to penetrate this White House as it did the last one, and failed to provide an accurate portrait of the president.” As a media critic, I admire this instinct to own up to mistakes. Last summer, however, I often found claims that “the media” missed Biden’s condition to be unconvincing, or at least lacking in specifics on how journalists might have done better. Recently, I found myself wondering whether the passage of time—and the release of “Original Sin”—might lead me to a different conclusion.
Let’s get one thing straight: the media did “fucking show” the story of Biden’s advanced age prior to the debate. As far back as 2019, when Biden was running in the Democratic primary, the media critic Jack Shafer described his age as a key lens through which the press was viewing him, and it remained so after he took office, even if it’s fair to say that such coverage more often took the form of punditry about his unpopularity and electoral chances, as opposed to specific reporting about what he was like behind closed doors. There were some such stories, though—and from the earliest days of his Presidency, journalists consistently demanded more direct access to Biden, who, compared to his recent predecessors, did few formal interviews or press conferences. (In the months before last year’s debate, Politico quoted a Times journalist claiming that A. G. Sulzberger, the Times’ publisher, was “pissed” that Biden hadn’t done a sit-down interview with the paper, and was quietly encouraging “all the tough reporting on his age”; the Times strongly denied any such trade-off—in a statement that doubled as a call for more access.) Following the debate, I pointed to these facts in the newsletter that I write for the Columbia Journalism Review, concluding that Biden’s performance—while certainly jarring—wasn’t some “Wizard of Oz”-esque unmasking of the frail man behind the curtain.
I now think, especially after reading “Original Sin,” that I got some things wrong. Though I always believed Biden’s age was an important story, I sometimes argued that the political press overhyped it to the detriment of more substantive questions about his Presidency—and his opponent—and in so doing probably downplayed its ultimate significance; I also regret sounding so dismissive about a pre-debate Wall Street Journal article that reported private concerns about Biden’s state of mind. But it was fair to question that story’s sourcing: most of the critics it cited were Republicans, including, prominently, the former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who infamously voted, along with a hundred and thirty-eight of his colleagues, not to certify Biden’s win in the first place. More credible sources apparently wouldn’t talk to reporters, certainly not on the record; “Original Sin” suggests that people started to come forward only after the debate, then again after the election, when “officials and aides felt considerably freer to talk.” And some of the public-facing evidence of Biden’s decline—mixing up names; hiding from the press—could credibly be explained, not only then but now, by factors other than mental decay. (“Original Sin” documents various Biden gaffes, but they often don’t read so differently from the time he called Barack Obama “Barack America” or asked a paraplegic state senator to stand up—both of which occurred during the 2008 campaign.)
None of this is to say that Tapper and Thompson fail to make their core case that Biden was, at least by the end, not up to the rigors of the Presidency, even if the time line remains somewhat fuzzy, and the titular “cover-up” reads not as a vast, well-oiled conspiracy but as different people, for different reasons, scaring or deluding themselves into silence. The sheer number of insiders they reveal as having had concerns before the debate—or who, at least, now claim that they did—makes it surprising that more concrete details didn’t leak, and leaves me more sympathetic to the claim that reporters, on the whole, could have pushed harder to get more of the story sooner, even if the details of how they may have done so remain hard to specify. (Tapper and Thompson also reveal just how poorly Biden officials treated those reporters who did push, creating “a disincentive structure for those curious about the president’s condition.”) The book persuaded me that the press, in the aggregate, did not concentrate enough, early enough, on the risks of Biden’s asking for a second term, by the end of which he would have been eighty-six—though this might have reflected short-term thinking, a perennial media failing, more than anything Biden-specific. Ditto the idea that too many in the media were out of touch with public opinion—itself a failing that extends far beyond coverage of Biden.
Yet there are reasonable caveats to all this, too. (Public opinion, for example, does not exist independently of the information ecosystem, which was for years pumped full of right-wing bile about Biden being senile, much of which was unsupported by evidence or malicious.) Aging is, ultimately, a devilishly hard story to get right, responsibly. In 2019, Shafer argued that journalists may have seemed happy to ask questions about Biden’s age during his campaign, but there was a taboo around answering them. I’d argue that that’s because pinpointing solid answers was tricky back then, just as it was tricky last year, and is still tricky now—even if the taboo may since have lifted, as the mere existence of “Original Sin” suggests.
In 2020, Ben Smith, who was then the media columnist at the Times, wrote a piece headlined “How to Cover a Sick Old Man.” That old man was Trump—who had just been hospitalized with COVID-19, but was pretending that everything was fine—and yet the column was about America’s gerontocracy as a whole, and what Smith suggested was an unsustainable media omertà around it. “For the next few years, at least, our leaders’ age and health will remain big news,” Smith predicted. “We need a reporting culture that’s ready to handle the public decline of this generation of leaders, as long as they insist on declining in public.” He proposed that the press demand greater medical transparency from officials, and that those who fail to offer it should be subjected to stories based on “experts’ long-range diagnoses.”
The value of transparency is another key moral of “Original Sin.” I think I may have erred when I argued during the Biden years that, though access to the President matters, it isn’t the be-all and end-all; I broadly stand by the latter idea—among other things, as Trump is proving now, ready access to the President is no guarantee of good information—but maybe I understated how urgent direct access can be. Then again, even if Biden had done more interviews or press conferences, our insight into his condition would not have been perfect: decline is not a linear process; good days can obscure bad ones, and vice versa. (As “Original Sin” notes, the State of the Union address in March, 2024, was seen as a “de facto acuity test” for Biden, and he was widely thought to have passed it. And journalists who did sit down with Biden toward the end of his Presidency, including Evan Osnos for this magazine, found him to be lucid.) Everyone ages differently; a given individual’s mental faculties are not always easy to judge from the outside, and using one case to construct universal standards by which to judge incapacity is dangerous. Indeed, we’re still learning details about Biden’s health—on Sunday, his office announced that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer—that cast his Presidency in a complicated and unresolved new light.
If leaders refuse to be transparent, it’s not clear to me that diagnosis-by-pundit is desirable, or ethical—as the former CNN journalist Chris Cillizza recently put it in conversation with Todd, “Any Tom, Dick, or Harry can say ‘Joe Biden has dementia!’ ” but actual journalists face “a very high bar, and it should be a very high bar.” The press, ultimately, can only do so much better on its own. Despite Thompson’s remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, “Original Sin” doesn’t have a whole lot to say about the failures of the media; those who come out the worst are the Democratic politicians and allies who were privately alarmed but said nothing. In the book’s final chapter, Tapper and Thompson suggest that forcing greater disclosure might be up to Congress, which could, for example, pass a law that requires a President’s physician to provide certain health information under penalty of perjury. “If I learned about any of these stories in 2022, 2023 or 2024, I would have reported them in a second,” Tapper said recently. “But I don’t have subpoena power.” Reporters, he added, are “only as good as our sources.” ♦
