DAVID HARSANYI: If You Were Duped On Biden’s Cognitive Decline, You’re Too Dumb To Be A Journalist. And if you knew, you were in on it.
The New York Times has now written two editorials asking Biden to drop out of the race. And if the members of the board had only been reading their own coverage, they might not have known that Biden was struggling. Days before the debate the paper ran a piece titled “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts,” which laid out the case that conservatives had been unfairly attacking the president. An earlier piece, “Release of Hur Report Underlines Perils of the Special Counsel’s Job,” did not investigate Hur’s contention, it merely amplified attacks on him, noting that report was “seized upon by Trump supporters.”
The Times editorial page helpfully ran essays like “I’m a Neuroscientist. We’re Thinking About Biden’s Memory and Age in the Wrong Way,” wherein credulous readers learn that the president’s failure to recall the year his son died is probably not a very big deal. The same thing went on at NBC News, where one story’s subhead helpfully notes: “Forgetting the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past doesn’t affect decision-making or judgment, brain experts say.”
Are there bigger dupes in this country than media-approved “experts?”
Even now, virtually every discussion on the left regarding the president’s fragile mental acuity revolves around his ability or inability to beat Donald Trump — rather than the dangerous position the administration and a pliant press have put the nation in. One suspects that if Biden withstands the pressure and stays in the race, they’ll all go back to covering for him again.
Because, if there’s anything this incident reaffirms, it’s that far too often the first loyalty of the political media is to the Democratic Party.
No wonder “The Media Want the Flaming Wreckage of the Biden Campaign to Explode — to Cover Their Tracks,” as Jeff Blehar wrote on Sunday:
It’s easy to get lost in bleak humor (or score-settling) and lose sight of the sheer magnitude of what it is we are living through: The president of the United States is an empty shell of himself mentally. His praetorian guard has been keeping his near-complete mental collapse a secret for possibly years now, and the media engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” (Nuzzi’s words, not mine) to conceal it from voters, out of reflexive (in the truest sense of the word) partisan and professional self-interest. Very Smart People tell me that my sense of complete betrayal and abiding disgust is a feeling peculiar only to Republicans and political anoraks — chumps who care too much, in other words. Perhaps so.
But the question Charlie Cooke posed last week should be the same one you hang on to as well: If the media claims it has been lied to about the state of Biden’s health for all these long years, then maybe they should investigate that? How that happened? How much did Kamala Harris — Biden’s almost certain replacement, should he step down — know? When did she know it? A real media would start from the premise that she is just as disqualified by helping to conceal Biden’s collapse as Biden and his people themselves are, and force her to prove otherwise. A real media wouldn’t play a balancing game in its head, saying, “Let’s not push her too hard, we don’t want to help the Other Guy.” This is not a real media, however, so I will invoke Betteridge’s Law by answering the question Charlie merely posed in his headline: Will the media seriously investigate how they were “misled” about Biden’s health? No. That would mean investigating themselves.
And the guild always protects its own. Always.