America’s media elites have been guilty of plenty of shocking ethical lapses in recent years. There was the Hunter Biden-laptop scandal in 2020, when liberal media wilfully ignored and flat-out censored a story that harmed Joe Biden, the presidential candidate they supported. There was their wilful refusal to cover the Covid lab-leak theory during the first couple of years of the pandemic. And of course, there was their non-stop coverage of the Russiagate conspiracy theory, during which they insisted for far too long that Trump’s 2016 victory was engineered by Moscow.
These were all significant failures. They undermined public trust in the media and they prevented people from knowing important truths.
But surely the most egregious of all the modern media’s many ethical failures is the years-long cover-up of President Biden’s obvious mental decline. After all, they enabled an enfeebled and unfit man to sit at the head of the most powerful government in the world, finger on the nuclear button.
All the world could see that Biden was a stumbling, non compos mentis geriatric. Yet the corporate media and the Democratic Party insisted he was cogent and robust. No matter how many videos we saw of him falling up the stairs, staring vacantly into space or asking where dead people are, the media just kept on insisting everything was tickety-boo. If anything, liberal journalists would counter, it was Donald Trump who was mentally unfit. It all amounted to a shameful betrayal of journalistic ethics and, indeed, the public.
So now that Biden and his family are damaged goods (and, according to some reports, broke), those who once covered for him are now attempting to rewrite history.
Indeed, two journalists who consistently swore to the public that Biden was sharp as a tack and raring to go now have books out. Both of which ‘reveal’, as if we didn’t already know, that Biden was actually quite forgetful.
Chris Whipple in Uncharted, and Jake Tapper in Original Sin (co-authored with Alex Thompson), paint a picture of Biden’s precipitous physical and mental decline. Some of the details in Original Sin are truly shocking. Tapper writes that Biden was suffering from such a significant deterioration of the spine in 2023 and 2024 that aides thought he would need a wheelchair if he got re-elected. But they would not consider him using a wheelchair during his re-election campaign, because of the terrible optics.
Whipple’s portrayal of Biden’s aides and family is just as disturbing. They are shown consistently putting their ambition ahead of the wellbeing of this very frail man. Biden’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor, having long expressed concern about Biden’s health, apparently ‘quipped that Biden’s staff members were trying to kill him, while he was trying to keep him alive’.
There are more hair-raising anecdotes where that came from. Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, spoke extensively to Whipple, and effectively threw his former boss under an entire fleet of buses. Klain recounts Biden being ‘out of it’ during preparation for the 2024 televised debate against Trump. Elsewhere Klain even ‘wondered half-seriously if Biden thought he was president of NATO instead of the US’, noting that ‘[Biden] just became very enraptured with being the head of NATO’.
Yet as revealing as Original Sin and Uncharted are, they also whiff of ass-covering. Even the Guardian noticed that Whipple had hitherto defended Biden, maintaining in his 2023 book, The Fight of His Life, that ‘Biden was mentally sharp, even if he appeared physically frail’. In an interview from 2023, Whipple also praised ‘Biden’s extraordinary endurance’.
Tapper was arguably even more complicit in covering up Biden’s decline. In 2020, he aggressively and unpleasantly shut down Lara Trump after she questioned Biden’s mental fitness. Tapper responded by falsely accusing her of referring to Biden’s speech impediment and claiming she was in no position to ‘diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline’.
Even among America’s political and media class, few are buying these journalists’ attempts to rehabilitate their reputations. Meghan McCain, a scion of the Washington swamp herself, compared Tapper’s exposé of the cover-up of Biden’s deterioration with OJ Simpson’s If I Did It – Simpson’s ‘speculative’ account of the murder of his wife which it is widely believed he himself committed.
The reputation of Biden and his enabling aides may have been irretrievably tarnished by the cover-up of his mental and physical decline. But so, too, is the reputation of the regime stenographers who propped them all up.
Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here
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