By Becket Adams
Sunday, February 18, 2024
The White House press corps is in full CYA mode.
Its members are “second-guessing some of their reporting decisions” regarding the president’s age and “looking at their subject with fresh eyes,” Puck’s Dylan Byers reports.
The “soul-searching,” as Byers puts it, comes after the release of special counsel Robert Hur’s report, which characterized Biden as a dotard, and the White House asserting in response that the president is not, in fact, a dotard.
In other words, Biden’s mental decline is out in the open for all to see. It’s not an issue that can simply be ignored or dismissed, especially considering the White House itself is addressing the matter directly. Thus the people who’ve been tasked with covering the White House have been forced to address an issue they’ve been all too happy to downplay up until this moment. The problem for them, however, is how to explain why they’ve ignored for so long the one issue on which voters agree almost unanimously.
They can’t say they simply hadn’t noticed Biden’s yearslong decline. No, that’d make it look as if they are bad at their jobs. Imagine that: a White House reporter who hadn’t noticed until recently that the president of the United States has struggled for his entire presidency, and even before then, to express a coherent thought.
They can’t say they ignored the issue for political convenience. That would give the game away.
Aha! They can tell someone such as Byers, anonymously of course, that they’ve struggled to cover the issue that everyone else has noticed and asked about since even before 2020 because — wait for it — they are just too damn conscientious.
“This week,” Byers writes, “I surveyed members of the White House press corps—reporters, on-air correspondents, photographers, etcetera—and they all emphasized that the symptoms of Biden’s age had become more noticeable in recent months and a frequent discussion topic at the desks behind the Brady briefing room.” He continues:
Since the beginning of Biden’s term, many White House journalists have reported on, or alluded to, concerns surrounding Biden’s age in often gentle or euphemistic ways. Nevertheless, several of the journalists I spoke with said the true significance and importance of that issue, as they observed it, was not reflected in the coverage—often due to the sense that it was sensitive or unseemly, or because there was no obvious evidence that it had affected his performance as president beyond optics. Or, left unsaid, perhaps because they didn’t want to ruin their relationship with the White House by being the lone wolf to speak up.
Oh, please. They didn’t think that Biden’s decline warranted tougher coverage until just now? Not during any of the moments in which he confused basic world events, including when he suggested Russia was at war with Iran and then later Iraq? Or when he praised rail projects that don’t exist? Or when, on repeated occasions, he wandered around stages and TV sets as if he was lost? Or when, going back several years now, he has been unable to make it through speaking engagements without getting flustered or exhausted? Or how about when he ended an address in Connecticut with the exclamation, “God save the Queen, man” — the queen having already passed? Or how about when he inquired at a White House event about the whereabouts of Representative Jackie Walorski, the Indiana Republican who had died in a car crash several weeks earlier? The White House had even flown the flag at half-staff for two days following the congresswoman’s death.
These incidents, and the frequency with which they keep occurring, didn’t merit a closer look?
Let’s be honest. These reporters aren’t reconsidering their earlier coverage simply because the Hur report has forced them to look at the president in a new light. They haven’t suddenly noticed an uptick in weird Bidenisms. They are simply doing damage control now, scrambling to protect their reputations as “truth-tellers.” The issue is no longer relegated to niche political circles. It has gone mainstream, as they say. They ignored the story because they could, because to do otherwise might have threatened their all-important access, and because no one else in their circle was covering it — a sort of herd reluctance. Remember, this is the same cowardly, cliquish bunch of people who agree to participate in “press conferences” where the journalists and questions are pre-approved by the White House, where the president has flashcards with reporters’ faces and responses to questions all typed up before he even approaches the lectern.
But ignoring the age issue has become simply impossible, even for them. Thus we’re getting the “we’re just too darn noble” defense.
“It was something that felt indelicate to talk about,” one member of the White House press corps told Byers.
Another said, “The amount of time we spent talking about it versus the time we spent reporting on it was not the same. There should have been tougher, more scrutinizing coverage of his age earlier.”
Yeah, no kidding.
Amazingly, the Byers article includes the following in its closing: “The Hur report has obviously given the press corps greater license to cover the issue—in the same way, one journalist noted, that the Monica Lewinsky scandal gave the White House press corps greater license to talk about the flirtatious behavior they’d witnessed Bill Clinton exhibiting toward some women, but never felt like they had the freedom to write about in their pages.”
For reference, the Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones scandals were already out in the open before Lewinsky. The White House press pool apparently needed not one, not two, but three whole allegations, along with the behavior they witnessed personally, before they found their courage.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but what, exactly, do these people do for a living anyway?
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