That being said, really There was none It’s a conspiracy. First, the mainstream media reported on the president’s age, if only too gently. Why so gently? Well, criticizing physical features is a common norm in journalism (which is why even the official columnists who hate Donald Trump barely make any sarcastic remarks about his over-the-top hair).
Clearly, it was a mistake to treat age, which affects job performance, the same as hairstyle, which doesn’t. But the mistake was shared by both parties. Over the years, I’d heard many people talk about Trump’s senior citizen moment, but I’d never put the idea to paper.
If President Trump had faltered as visibly and publicly as President Biden had, we might have covered it more aggressively. But there was a paradox: While the reporters who watched him most closely weren’t necessarily surprised by the cumulative magnitude of the decline, those who watched more infrequently saw smaller, incremental changes than those who noticed it. And the Biden White House was simply better at deflecting the reporters who did notice; they were masters at killing stories with kindness and punishing reporters who wrote things they didn’t like.
Journalists who began asking questions about Biden’s age were suddenly met with senior staff they would not normally have access to, only to be bombarded with denials from peers who insisted Biden was doing great privately. Balancing these accounts with reports of supposedly isolated gaffes was a real challenge.
“But the video!” conservative readers quibble, and rightly so. But video clips can be misleading if you don’t know the context. (Remember the Covington Catholic Church debacle?) The White House made it hard to get that context: Staff members rarely leaked information, and in any case, few outside Biden’s inner circle had seen enough of him to fully understand his condition, most of whom had been with the president for years.
But a few incredibly tenacious reporters persevered, and their efforts were unrewarded because Biden reporting seemed to have no readership: Their articles went unread, and their books about Biden didn’t sell.
That’s not enough, I can hear conservative readers say. Yes, the White House has made it difficult to cover the story, but if Trump were president, reporters would be more skeptical of its reporting and more willing to break the wall of silence to meet their audience’s demands. To that, I can only say, “Yes, you’re right.”
The media’s treatment of Biden was not a conspiracy to protect a Democratic president, but it looks like one because it was. None of our decisions were driven entirely by partisanship, but if we’re honest, many of them were unduly influenced by partisanship.
Because there are 10 times as many Democrats as Republicans in mainstream news organizations, journalists, with a few honorable exceptions, tended to give the Democratic administration an undeserved trust. The president’s absence was a huge red flag. They saw it as a respite from having to watch Trump’s rants 24/7. As Biden’s decline became increasingly visible, people continued to politely report on the administration’s insulting and implausible claims, such as the claim that there was a secretly brilliant president flying around the back hallways of the White House like Batman, or that a video of that same president embarrassing himself on the world stage was a “cheap fake.”
And when journalists did cover the issue, many outlets that had previously been relentless in pointing out Trump’s flaws seemed reluctant to be as forthright about their favorite president, in part because doing so would anger his friends and the White House. Many stories about Biden’s age ended up being worded in very vague terms about “questions” and “concerns,” and wrapped defensively in vague context, so the necessary SOS messages went unheard.
The result is that Fox News viewers had a better understanding of the state of the president than our viewers did. This should be a huge wake-up call for us. We don’t have the problems conservatives imagine, but we do have problems. And the only way to fix them is to add more diverse perspectives to our newsrooms.
We should do this not for the sake of conservative journalists or politicians, but for the sake of our readers. When our newsrooms single-mindedly favor one party, readers miss out on a lot of news — in this case, almost all of it. Instead of complaining outside the building, conservatives need to be inside the building and help us overcome our natural biases. We owe it to our readers and our country much more.
