White House reporters respond after being called out for weak coverage of Biden's decline at WHCD
The speech made by Axios correspondent Alex Thompson at the White House Correspondents' Dinner last weekend calling out the media's weak coverage of Joe Biden continues to make waves in Washington, D.C.
"Alex's speech was the best part of an otherwise tedious night and the only real olive branch extended toward the Trump administration," one White House reporter told Fox News Digital. "But it's telling that this award is granted after Biden's already out of power. Less than a year ago, most major outlets in that room ran with White House talking points on 'cheap fakes.'"
Last Saturday, Thompson accepted the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage for his reporting that shed light on Biden's cognitive decline long before his now-infamous presidential debate performance that led to his ousting from the 2024 race.
"Being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. And some people trust us less because of it," Thompson told his peers at the dinner. "We, myself included, missed a lot of this story. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows."
"I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust, and being defensive about them further erodes it. We should've done better," Thompson added.
Daily Wire White House correspondent Mary Margaret Olahan told Fox News Digital, "It needed to be said."
"Most of the White House press still pretends that they fairly covered the Biden White House," Olahan said, adding that the media "acted as members of the Biden comms shop for the past four years."
However, another White House correspondent, who called Thompson a "terrific journalist" and said he was rightly honored for his work, seemed to push back at the Axios reporter's assertion that the media failed in its job while covering the Biden presidency.
"There was a lot of good reporting in a variety of outlets on this in the months and years leading up to the debate," the correspondent told Fox News Digital. "But it's fair to say that no story had the impact of tens of millions of people watching the debate on national television with their own eyes."
Few journalists in the Beltway dug into the severity of Biden's cognitive decline. Thompson's reporting in 2023 for example, revealed Biden's short temper behind the scenes and the extreme lengths the White House took to prevent him from tripping in front of the cameras.
The Wall Street Journal and its reporters Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes were viciously attacked by Democrats and Biden's allies in the media for their bombshell reporting alleging Biden was showing "signs of slipping" behind the scenes, in a piece published weeks before his ill-fated debate.
Meanwhile, numerous outlets ran with the White House's talking points that accused conservatives of peddling "cheap fakes" when moments that showed Biden wandering or freezing up went viral.
Biden has been at the center of the turmoil within the Democratic Party ever since President Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 election. Many Democrats have blamed Biden for not withdrawing from the presidential race sooner and allowing time for an open primary to select a new Democratic nominee rather than rallying behind then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the final months of the campaign.
Since Biden left office, he has also been the subject of multiple books about how his cognitive decline was strongly apparent behind the scenes among his staffers, long before his disastrous debate performance.
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