Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz
President Joe Biden
President Joe Biden talks on the phone with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and FEMA Director Deanna Criswell to discuss the FEMA Declaration following the impacts of Hurricane Beryl, Tuesday, July 9, 2024, in the Oval Office of the White House.
“I represent the heart of a congressional district once represented by Lyndon Johnson. Under very different circumstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw. President Biden should do the same,” exclaimed Democratic Representative Lloyd Doggett on July 2, 2024. Doggett was critical of 81-year-old President Joe Biden’s performance at the first presidential debate in June. Biden’s performance was widely panned as commentators noted that Biden looked like an old and confused man with “eyes staring into the distance, mouth agape.” Doggett was the first sitting Democratic congressperson to ask Biden to leave the race, but over the next few weeks, he was joined by numerous Democrats in Congress, party leadership, national security personnel and members of the intelligentsia.
At the same time, members of the corporate media inundated audiences with video clips that seemed to illustrate Biden’s cognitive decline, such as when he said, “We finally beat Medicare,” after losing his train of thought mid-sentence, or referred to himself as the “first Black woman” to serve in White House, or explained, “I wouldn’t have picked vice president Trump to be vice president.” On July 21, 2024, the pressure became too much, and Biden announced he was dropping out of the race. However, the concerns and media reports on Biden’s cognitive decline illuminated a larger story: The establishment news media failed to report accurately on the status of the President of the United States.
The press is supposed to equip the citizenry with the information necessary to participate meaningfully in the democratic process. The press is expected to hold the powerful accountable. This was summed up in an oft-used late 19th-century phrase, “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” However, since Biden announced he was running for President in 2020, the press has comforted the powerful by concealing the reality of Biden’s condition, while afflicting the electorate by telling them that they are not seeing the cognitive decline that they are seeing.
During the 2020 campaign, critics on the left and the right shared videos demonstrating Biden’s cognitive decline, such as the famous Corn Pop video. At the time, many, including news outlets such as Politico and the Washington Post, and Democratic politicians such as Rep. Eric Swalwell and Julian Castro, questioned if Biden’s mental acuity made him fit for the presidency.
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Discussion Off-Limits
Once Biden became the presumptive nominee, the discussion of his age, let alone mental acuity, became off-limits to many in the media. Indeed, in 2020, Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the media and the Democratic Party had decided that, in an effort to defeat Trump, they would not tolerate discussions of Biden’s age. In the meantime, Biden was able to skirt through the campaign without having to engage in more traditional campaigning due to COVID-19 protocols. This allowed him to avoid the scrutiny that emerges when a candidate travels around the nation directly engaging the public. Meanwhile, his allies in the press and Democratic Party ran cover for him, conflating questions about his cognitive abilities with ageism, while arguing that the evidence of his cognitive decline was actually a stutter, and warning that anyone who questioned cognitive decline was an ableist.
During Biden’s presidency, the media avoided seriously investigating his cognitive state even though videos that seemed to indicate a decline—such as his glitch at a concert and his lack of focus at a G7 event—continued to surface. In fact, in February of 2024, MSNBC claimed that “hysteria over Biden’s age is a distraction from Trump’s authoritarianism.” The lack of interest by legacy media was somewhat surprising given that they consistently questioned then-President Trump’s cognitive decline—going as far as to raise the specter of implementing the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. Similarly, many in the establishment news media rightly hammered President Trump for his litany of lies but often excused or downplayed Biden’s false statements—such as his claim that cannibals ate his uncle during World War II—which resulted in the nation missing an opportunity to investigate if Biden’s statements were lies or actually signs of confusion and cognitive decline.
Corporate Media
Instead of investigating his mental acuity, the news media largely defended Biden’s cognitive abilities. For example, prior to the CNN debate, videos surfaced showing Biden seemingly lost or confused. The corporate media largely echoed the White House and referred to them as “cheap fakes”—which implied that the videos were not fabricated like a deepfake, but were clips that were taken out of context. News media attacked people such as Robert Hur, the principal associate deputy attorney general for the Department of Justice’s investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents because he concluded in his report that Biden was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who could not remember when his son died. Others, such as The View’s Whoopi Goldberg, dismissed the importance of Biden’s cognitive abilities, and exclaimed that she does not care “if Biden poops pants,” she is voting for Biden. Similarly, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough responded to those questioning Biden’s cognitive ability with an “F you” on the air. Scarborough argued a mere three months before the debate that Biden “is far beyond cogent … in fact, I think he is better than he has ever been,” and this is “the best Biden ever.” By July 2024, Scarborough sang a different tune, as he asked Biden’s aides to “do the right thing” and get him to drop out of the race.
The news media also covered for Biden by supporting the Democratic Party’s decision to cancel primary debates, change the primary schedule, and adjust the party’s rules to undermine other primary rivals, including RFK Jr., who left the party to run for president as an independent. Instead, the media treated the primary like a normal election, arguing that voters—who never saw the candidates’ debate—were deciding the party’s nominee. Indeed, after the June debate, reporting revealed that the White House was actively working to conceal signs of Biden’s cognitive decline. One has to wonder if altering the primary and avoiding debates was part of that strategy, and if so, that means the news media was complicit in election meddling that sought to elevate someone with questionable mental acuity to the nomination.
Still, many recognized that news outlets inclined to support the Democratic Party were hiding Biden’s cognitive decline. Prior to the debate, polls showed Biden’s age was the number one concern for many voters. After the debate, nearly 70 percent of the electorate “were not confident that Mr. Biden had the mental capacity to be president.” Similarly, long before the debate performance, many commentators, such as Bill Maher and Bob Costas, suggested Biden should not run, but they were the minority in the punditocracy. At the same time, internet users and conservative news sites posted video clip after video clip showing Biden in cognitive decline, with titles such as, “Joe Biden completely forgets what he’s talking about in excruciating press conference” in 2021; and “Joe Biden falls off bike while cycling in Delaware” in 2022; and “‘He needs a lie down’: Joe Biden has yet another ‘incoherent’ press conference” in 2023. In essence, much of the public was aware of the cognitive decline that the media ignored, downplayed, or concealed. In fact, it appears to have been an open secret that the news media missed or ignored because many who interacted with Biden—from actor and Democratic mega-donor George Clooney and US Rep. Seth Moulton to former President Barack Obama and past White House aides—admitted witnessing jarring signs of Biden’s decline before the debate.
Undoubtedly, media defenders will argue that many in the press ignored the story because they thought it was unfathomable for a major political party to conceal the cognitive decline of a president. However, this ahistorical position overlooks that presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan reportedly were unable to perform all of the functions associated with the presidency toward the end of their final terms. Indeed, some media defenders will undoubtedly respond, that was then and things are different now. However, they would be wrong, as just a year ago, the corporate media admitted that the Democratic Party concealed the declining health of Senator Diane Feinstein so she could continue to represent the roughly 40 million people in the state of California. In fact, Feinstein was reportedly in such bad mental health that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer held two emotional conversations with Feinstein where he asked the senator to step down due to concerns about her mental health. He had to have multiple conversations because Feinstein seemingly forgot that the first conversation ever took place. Feinstein would ultimately die in office in 2023, nearly three years after the concerns over her cognitive ability surfaced.
Was the incomplete coverage of the president due to the ineptitude of journalists or was it a concerted effort to support Biden by concealing his declining mental acuity? Either answer reflects poorly on the Fourth Estate. As does their conflating questions about cognitive decline with ageism. The Biden episode reveals a news media system that is incapable of holding the powerful accountable, and in the process, afflicts the citizenry by providing incomplete and often inaccurate reporting on the president.
Nolan Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas, Project Censored National Judge, author, and lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. All of Higdon’s work is available at Substack (https://nolanhigdon.substack.com/). He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (2020); Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (2022); The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022); and the forthcoming Surveillance Education: Navigating the conspicuous absence of privacy in schools (Routledge).
