OUT ON A LIMB: Do Not Expect the Mainstream Media to Honestly Audit Itself. Jeffrey Blehar writes:

So the real questions, the questions that reporters like Tapper and Thompson, or Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, are actually best situated to answer, are left largely unaddressed: Why did the American media, in the aggregate, forsake its investigative duties? We are informed in these books about the Biden administration’s many efforts to deceive, spin, or bully national political journalists, yes; we are told little about why those journalists acquiesced so easily and at times enthusiastically. Were they really that easily fooled, when all the rest of us in America — theoretically less well-informed than they — were not?

I have already ventured to answer those questions myself, and at length. On the same day I wrote the column excerpted above, I also wrote this:

What the hell happened to the mainstream media during this entire period? . . .

I have an appealingly simple theory to explain the mystery: They didn’t miss it at all. Everyone knew, and the sorts of people who would have normally pursued these whispers about Biden’s remoteness — obvious enough from his calendar and the behavior of his public minders — simply decided not to because it was not in the best interests of the Democratic Party to do so, at least as perceived by the “herd mind” of the media, the left-tinged blob of assignment editors, investigative reporters, and liberal commentators across Washington.

Do you know how I know this? I know this because back in 2019, when Joe Biden seemed for all the world like a hopelessly boring retread with no chance of winning the 2020 nomination — when Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders were thought to be the main competitors for the Democratic prize — the New York Times was more than happy to report about Biden’s age. Once he captured the nomination and went into a quasi-hibernative “basement campaign” (timed perfectly to conceal his weakening state), however, that was it for any investigations into that topic.

I know this because in the fall of 2022, during that brief window when it looked like Biden might decide to pass the torch instead of running again, the window to discuss Biden’s age was once again open for the Washington Post: “Biden, turning 80, faces renewed age questions as he weighs reelection.” Once Biden chose to run for a second term — a moment of world-historical hubris — the subject went back into storage, verboten in polite commentary of real reporting.

I know this because the pressure to not venture the topic was immense, and I saw it come from within the media, not just from the Biden administration. . . .

The media want to tell us that they didn’t know? If they didn’t know, then why were they so eager to raise the subject when it seemed possible to prevent Joe Biden from winning the nomination, or discourage him from running again, but curiously not afterward? Why then such servile eagerness to act as Karine Jean-Pierre’s water boys near the end of the entire debacle. . . . In fact, what better proof do we need of the media’s purely instrumental interest in Biden’s mental disintegration than the fact that once it became impossible to conceal after the debate, they flooded the zone with coverage to push Biden out of the race, but once he was gone promptly never discussed him again?

As Kyle Smith wrote in March of 2019:

When he became veep, any attack on Biden risked looking like casting aspersions on the man who made him his number two, and the media could not countenance any naysaying about the judgment of the Precious. For the next few months, though, we’re in an amusing interstitial period when the media actually has a reason to attack their fellow Democrats: any hacks out there who think their party can do better than Biden (or Sanders, or Warren, or Harris, or etc.) can rip into their disfavored candidates in order to give an assist to their preferred picks. All of this goes away as soon as the Democratic pick for 2020 becomes evident, but until then we’ll be seeing some actual vigorous reporting.

That was the conventional view of the how the DNC-MSM reported on their candidates, but all that changed by the end of 2020: