Democrats should blame the media for Harris' loss

As much as it makes me feel old to say it, I have been watching Joe Biden's career in politics for over 30 years.

Once, in an incident that is, unbelievably, almost 20 years old, I had a front-row seat to the Joe Biden show. The year was 2007, and I was working for former Kansas Senator (and later Governor) Sam Brownback during his abortive run for the 2008 Republican nomination. I was in the Des Moines airport waiting to catch a delayed flight back home to Tennessee in what I assume was the only bar in the place.

The media channeled their inner Chico Marx and asked, 'Who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?'

The boss had performed poorly in the Ames straw poll the previous day, and I was in a mood. As I was trying to drown my sorrows, I looked up and suddenly found myself staring into a face I recognized: Joe Biden, who was also running for president, was making the rounds with the four other people who were stuck in the bar that day, and he made it over to my table.

I felt a little sorry for Biden, in spite of the fact that his politics have always been loathsome to me, watching him make the rounds with clearly disinterested voters, most of whom did not even know who he was. So I apologized and told him that I was not even an Iowa resident and was actually only there to work on a Republican presidential campaign. Surely, I figured, Biden must have better things to do than talk to a very unpersuadable person who was not even an Iowa voter.

As it turned out, he did not. "Oh, really?" Biden exclaimed. "Which one?" When I told him I worked for Sen. Brownback, to my horror, he pulled up a chair and wanted to chat. At length.

“You know, I'm working with Sam Brownback on our partition plan for Iraq,” he began. Thus began a conversation that lasted for easily over an hour, which I did not want at the time. I will say this for the Biden I unwillingly met in 2007: He was a world-champion talker. His political and foreign policy instincts have always been bad, and he's never been honest in even the slightest sense, but he was unquestionably possessed of the species of intelligence that allows most politicians to immediately come up with a plausible-sounding justification for almost literally anything they are saying.

When Biden re-emerged from de facto retirement in 2020 to run for president again, I was shocked at the desiccated version of Biden I saw on my television screen. This was not at all the same person who bent my ear 13 years earlier. The COVID-19 pandemic gave the Democrats the perfect excuse they needed to do exactly what had to be done with Biden in order to preserve any chance that he would win: They locked him (figuratively, I assume) in a basement and hid him from the public. At the time, Biden still had enough "good" days that this was a feasible approach with careful planning. I don't begrudge Democrats the tactic, which, after all, was ultimately successful.

I do begrudge the media, many of whom had much more extensive personal interactions with Biden than I ever did and many of whom also should have been very clear about what was going on with Biden's mental condition. And any person who has seen a family member who is going through age-related cognitive decline, which should be all of them, should have known that while those suffering from it will have periodic good days, the condition will inexorably get worse with time. And they said nothing.

As literally anyone could have predicted, Biden became visibly worse with each passing month of his first term. The White House staff took to hiding Biden away even more thoroughly, and the press said nothing. In what would become a meme in right-leaning circles, the White House reporters would dutifully report, day after day, that Biden had "called a lid" before noon. Never did they report that there should be any level of concern that the president of the United States had apparently adopted a two-hour work day, and certainly they did not do any of the hard-nosed, investigative reporting that the moment demanded.

In fact, as his condition worsened, their coverage of it was, without exaggeration, the worst example of media malpractice in history. On the few occasions that Biden appeared in public in 2024, he displayed alarming and unavoidable signs of very advanced cognitive decline, including freezing up, losing his place and staring silently for awkward lengths of time, and having to be physically led with shuffling steps to where he was supposed to be.

It's not that the media forgot what these signs meant. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was starting to display them, too, and the media dutifully reported them as fact. But when it came to Biden, the reaction was quite different: They lied. There is no other way to put it. They did not shade the truth; they did not spin it; they just flat-out put their heads in the sand and published things they had to know were not true.

By June, just a few short weeks before Biden would embarrass them all, it was happening virtually every time Biden ventured into public. At a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles with former President Barack Obama, Biden froze up on stage for 10 full seconds before being physically led off by Obama. A couple of days later, he repeated this at the G7 summit in Italy, this time being rescued by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The media, led by so-called "fact-checkers," who are the only people in America with less credibility than reporters these days, channeled their inner Chico Marx and asked, "Who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?"

Literally dozens of "fact-checks" followed, seeking to reassure people that the responsible guardians of truth in the media had investigated these videos and found that the problem here was deceptive editing. Not one of these organizations has recovered enough shame to remove them from where they still sit on the internet, including the Associated Press, Reuters, the hilariously named PolitiFact, Snopes, NBC, and dozens of others.

Rather than asking questions of the White House about Biden's mental fitness, as any responsible journalist would have done, the White House press corps was, if anything, more embarrassing in its active lack of interest in the truth. Ten days before Biden's fateful debate, a "reporter" actually asked Karine Jean-Pierre the following: "There seems to be a sort of a rash of videos that have been edited to make the president appear officially frail or mentally confused. I'm wondering if the White House is especially worried about the fact that this appears to be a pattern." Here’s how she responded:

The formerly prestigious Poynter Institute, which fancies itself the arbiter of good reporting, deserves special mention here. In an article dated June 24, just three days before Biden mentally disrobed himself on national television, Poynter published an article subtitled, "'Cheap fake' videos of Biden that have been selectively edited or taken out of context have flooded social media and are the subject of political spin." This article, which has not been corrected or removed, claimed with a straight face that "cheap fakes" have "become a common tactic to undermine Biden’s fitness for office as the 81-year-old seeks reelection."

Three days later, Biden went on television and did this:

After the debate disaster, the media turned on Biden with a fury. They effectively drove him out of the race. But make no mistake: If Biden had simply refused to debate Trump and gone back to his basement for the remainder of 2024, the "fact-checkers" of the world would still this day be telling you that suggestions of Biden's cognitive decline are right-wing disinformation. And that's a problem for the media, but it's also a problem for Democrats.

If you're a Democrat and you're reading this today, and you are searching for people to blame, put these so-called "fact checkers" high on your list. Not one of them can have been under the actual impression that Biden was really fine. Anyone with a working set of eyes who had ever seen Biden on television prior to 2020 — which should be all of them — could see what was happening to him. If they had told the truth back in 2021 or 2022, when it was already very evident, the Democrats could have had a chance at a 2024 campaign that might have gone very differently. Either Biden could have resigned (as he should have done) and Harris could have had a chance to actually act as president and develop her own record, or the Democrats could have had an actual nominating contest for a shot at a different candidate.

This second course of action might well have saved the day for the Democrats. Harris, it must be said, was a bad candidate. And I'm not telling Democrats something they don't already know. That's why, in 2019, despite having the backing of the entire Clinton machine and an enormous war chest, she dropped out ignominiously before a single vote was cast. In my view, Harris had little chance of winning no matter what, but even those who disagree with that would be forced to admit that her chances would have improved enormously if she had a chance to actually be the incumbent and implement her own policies to run on, rather than being tied to a wildly unpopular doddering president.

But in order for that to happen, the media had to tell the truth about what was happening. They had to have the bravery to put aside their own personal partisan convictions, which overwhelmingly skew left, and summon the bravery to tell their audiences things their audiences did not want to hear. And they were simply not capable of doing it.

I have no doubt that as Trump begins his second term, the media will miraculously rediscover their ability to perform aggressive, probing investigations into the mental health and fitness of an aging president. I also have no doubt that Democrats will cheer the media on in this endeavor. Fine. I don't begrudge people rooting for their own team.

But they would do well to remember that when a Democrat returns to office, as one inevitably will, they need to demand better from their media in terms of telling the truth about Democrats, too. Otherwise, they may well find themselves blindsided again.