The press coverage of the Biden presidency, or lack of same, has been fully exposed this summer. And the reputation of what is purported to be high-quality, national journalism has taken a brutal hit. Its performance has been a black mark on the profession in general.
The bulk of our Big Media’s handling of Joe Biden’s eroding mental and physical capacities has been telling, shockingly misleading and grossly unprofessional.
It’s been a disservice and a cover-up of historic proportions. With few notable exceptions (The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is certainly one good example), one-time, top tier information outlets, both printed and electronic, have failed to live up to their advertised reason for being.
The usual suspects — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and the rest of the apologists — covered up what they all knew and worried about: The elderly president’s cognitive condition was worsening; it was becoming dangerous as an election neared.
So they chose not to report on it. They chose to conceal it. They pooh-poohed the growing body of evidence regarding Biden’s decline. They cooperated with the Biden White House to try to bamboozle the public.
They were complicit in this deceit. Then it all blew up in their faces during a June 27 debate with the despised (by the left) and deeply flawed Donald Trump. Biden’s performance was a debacle.
Now, his supporters are stuck with a failing candidate who is obviously deteriorating before our eyes. Big Media, for the most part, is a co-conspirator in all of this, a blatant enabler.
It’s been utterly eye-rolling to watch many of these same reporters, editors, commentators, columnists, et al, now questioning Biden’s abilities when they knew all along what the reality actually was.
Some of them are turning on the president with a vengeance. The hypocrisy reeks.
It may be too late to save the Democratic Party at the November polls, not to mention the fate of the nation at large, if you assume that Trump is a dire threat to democracy itself. It’s not clear. Events are occurring at dizzying speed.
When the history of all of this is written, it will go down as one of the media’s darkest hours, one more glaring example of failure, when it comes to credibility, fairness, accuracy, honesty and transparency. For the national journalism collective, it’s a decided low point, with its ugly warts out there in full public view. Again. It’s not new.
The irony in all of this is that the media’s egregious behavior, its failure to perform its touted function, its betrayal if you will, just might wind up helping the hated Trump assume residence in the White House one more time.
Then what? Who would get the blame for such a result? Would media outfits take responsibility for not sounding the warning bells about Biden’s limitations much earlier? Don’t bet on it. Such a mea culpa is not in their DNA. They’re above all that.
SCRUTINY IS WELL-DESERVED: This weekly exercise has never delved into national political matters in any concerted way — until today. Local, local, local, that’s been the name of the game in this space for years. And rightly so.
But the past few weeks have proven to be just too much to ignore. It’s one thing to watch sly politicians subscribe to the five D’s of dodgeball (“dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge”), it’s quite another to endure media malpractice on a grand scale. It’s no wonder so many Americans do not trust their purveyors of information these days.
Journalism has been in trouble for awhile. Far too often, the reasons for the doubts are self-inflicted. The public has every right to be increasingly suspicious and skeptical. Our business needs all the scrutiny it can get.
By the way, if Biden is in such poor shape today as a candidate, is he in the same or worse condition as the president? If so, should he resign the office now for the good of the country? Will the media address that obvious question?
Email: johnhorganmedia@gmail.com.
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(4) comments
The left ended up being Trump biggest enabler.
John - those of us who have been reporting on Biden's condition for the past three years were lambasted mercilessly by the rest of the lefties. Have you noticed how they have disappeared from the scene? Should we expect apologies? This has been disgraceful and I am delighted to see finally one journalist bringing this up and be honest about it. Thank you, John.
Hello all, I usually find John's columns to be a bit of "You kids get off my lawn" grumpy old guy material (I'm eighty myself so no insults there). But I think he nails it, sort of, in this latest work. While citing the Wall Street Journal editorial section of a paper that I generally avoid, he feels they have been honest with their coverage of the Joe Biden decline. I tend to chalk it up to the possibility of "the blind squirrel finding the occasional acorn" phenomenon. the WSJ is characteristically caustic when it comes to most anything from the Democrats. That being said I think the media has indeed been most circumspect when it came to the real possibility of questions of Joe Biden's fitness for another four years. I concur, but object to his 35 years out of date foreign policy behavior even more than his personal gaffes. Either way, he should NEVER have been suggested as an eight year presidential candidate possibility in the first place. Shame on the Democrats indeed. We do live in interesting times.
Thanks for your column today, Mr. Horgan. Fortunately, I know many people who in the past and now are transitioning into ignoring the political news and views from the usual suspects you’ve listed. The bigger question is whether lost readers ever trust these usual suspects ever again. Based on the mainstream media’s performance for close to a decade, I doubt it since these companies have been infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome. We can only hope that these mainstream media companies get hit where it hurts, in their pocketbooks.
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