NEW YORK — President Joe Biden’s fitness to serve a second term has been major news since his inauguration. interrupting performance in last week’s debate against Donald Trump, where the president at times seemed unable to complete or articulate some thoughts under the pressure of the moment.
For some press critics who are now reading these stories, there is another question: what took you so long?
“It is simply surprising for the entire country, including its most experienced reporters, to be as shocked as everyone else was by the ugly and painful reality of Biden’s debate performance,” said Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New York Times, to the website. Traffic lights this week.
Although it was a “super difficult story to report,” she said it could have been done. Instead, Abramson said, the American press has failed in its duty to hold those in power accountable.
There is certainly no shortage of “I told you so” sentiment coming from Biden’s opponents. “Conservatives realized this a long time ago,” said “Fox & Friends” host Ainsley Earhardt.
It’s a complicated story that’s been bubbling for months — and, it could be argued, the American people figured it out first.
Throughout the campaign, Biden aides have aggressively rejected the notion that he has diminished, and some supporters are irritated by any attention the issue receives compared to stories about whether Trump is telling the truth.
Nearly a year ago, in August 2023, the Associated Press-NORC poll found that three quarters of American adults said that Biden, 81, was too old to serve effectively another four-year term as president. AP-NORC found in February of this year that six in 10 adults were “not very” or “not at all” confident that Biden had the mental capacity to serve as president, although the sentiment was much the same for his 78-year-old Republican opponent. . , Donald Trump.
Media standards for coverage of a president’s health have changed markedly over the years. He was little known at the time, but after President Woodrow Wilson suffered a serious stroke in 1919, his wife effectively ran the government for the remainder of his term. And in the pre-television era, the press remained largely silent about the disability that kept Franklin D. Roosevelt in a wheelchair most of the time.
Four Times reporters collaborated on a storypublished on Tuesday, which said that several people who met Biden behind closed doors noticed that “he seemed increasingly confused or apathetic, or lost the thread of the conversation.”
Biden’s lack of public visibility in situations that are not tightly controlled has been evident throughout his presidency.
The 36 news conferences he held through June 30 were fewer than any president in the same period since Ronald Reagan, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project. Biden has given a total of 128 interviews, compared to Donald Trump’s 369 at the same stage of his presidency and Biden’s former boss’s 497, she said.
This was noted in February when Biden missed an interview on the Super Bowl pregame show, a relatively new presidential tradition that offers an audience of tens of millions of people.
Under pressure after the debate, Biden agreed to an interview on Friday with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, and his team said he would hold a news conference next week.
Biden’s team may have done a disservice in protecting him from such situations, said Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist at Cornell University. “In general, it is good for a politician and an elderly person to exercise and manage stressful situations,” he said. In other words: practice helps.
If there were signs beyond public speaking that his ability to do his job was impaired, Biden should have been investigated, said Pillemer, a professor of gerontology in medicine at Weill Cornell. But he said he was not aware of such evidence, unlike what there was for California Sen. Dianne Feinstein before she died.
“I don’t think the media could have done much more,” Pillemer said.
The situation shows how the media’s push for greater access is more than just lamentation, said Ben Smith, co-founder of news website Semafor and a former media columnist. Even unofficial time with a president is valuable for getting a sense of what he’s like, and Biden hasn’t done that like his predecessors, Smith said.
If there had been some crisis situation before the debate in which Biden’s problems were evident, the press might have picked up on the story sooner. “But a lot of Americans believed the president was in really bad shape and the media kind of dismissed that,” Smith said.
“We should all have gone after this harder,” he said.
Abramson told Semafor she was concerned that many journalists didn’t try to get the story because they didn’t want to be accused of helping elect Trump.
Wall Street Journal, in a June 4th play by Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes, said some people who worked with Biden “described a president who seems to be slower now, someone who has good times and bad times.”
Journal reporters interviewed more than 45 people, both Republicans and Democrats, for the article. However, because the story, published in a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, prominently cited Republican House speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, it was dismissed by many at the time as being inspired by partisanship.
Similarly illustrating the challenges of telling the story, the Biden campaign sharply criticized the Times during instances in which it wrote about concerns about Biden’s age. Even before the campaign, the Times quotes stories which indicate that the newspaper did not ignore the matter.
Political suggested in Aprilciting an unnamed Times staff member, that the paper’s attention to the issue was “quietly encouraged” by publisher AG Sulzberger because he was upset that Biden had not agreed to an interview with Times reporters.
The newspaper vehemently denied this, and issued a statement saying it was concerning that Biden “has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his time in office.” On Wednesday, Times executive editor Joe Kahn sent a message to the paper’s newsroom about the issue, acknowledging “wide speculation” about what the media did and didn’t do.
“What I’ve seen and what our readers have experienced from our team is steady, fact-based reporting on the topic that began a few years ago when we documented Biden’s age-related challenges in several industry-leading articles,” Kahn said. he wrote. “We have kept that story every step of the way, always with nuance and context, through today’s excellent report.”
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Linley Sanders of the Associated Press research team contributed. David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him on http://twitter.com/dbauder.
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