America's liberal media will pay a high price for colluding in covering up Biden's incapacity

Telegraph

16-05-2025

There are many causes of the breakdown of trust in Western societies. The breakdown of trust in politicians is easy to map. The breakdown of trust in scientific expertise can be pinpointed to a very specific moment – the Covid years. But the breakdown of trust in the media has been a long time coming and is already having long-term consequences.
In the UK just 31 per cent of the public say that they trust the media. In the US it is 39 per cent. Into that gap of trust a lot of charlatans and know-nothings can now roam. But the old media – or at least much of the old media – only has itself to blame.
Consider the story of the cover-up of Joe Biden's cognitive decline. The story was one that was obviously sensitive. Many people experience some similar signs of decline when – as Joe Biden did while president – you reach the age of 81.
Some Republicans could sound exceptionally mean when they raised the issue. And yet the cognitive decline of a president is a serious matter. Especially when he is seeking re-election for another four-year term. But precisely because so many people have relatives who have experienced the same conditions, a lot of people could recognise the signs. Should a man who seemed to find it difficult to put a sentence together, remember key facts or even where to walk be running the free world?
Several new books now lay bare part of the scheme by which people around Joe Biden sought to hide his decline from American voters. What is additionally appalling is much of the media was willing to go along with the façade that the Biden team tried to pull off.
Only after having tried to hide him from interviews for months did the unavoidable presidential debate against Donald Trump in June last year do for Biden's candidacy. There in the brightest spotlight possible the reality became unavoidable. With trailing-off sentences, lost trains of thought and much more, Biden was cruelly humiliated.
The effect was compounded by the First Lady, Jill Biden, addressing supporters immediately after the debate. With her husband standing beside her, looking lost and vacant, she addressed him in the terms you might a child who had earned an ice-cream. 'Joe you did such a great job' she said. 'You answered every question. You knew all the facts.'
Within days he was gone and Kamala Harris got the Democratic party's crown.
One of the new books that exposes part of what went on behind the scenes is Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, written by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. With scores of sources – largely anonymous – the authors try to uncover how a small group around the president tried to keep the seriousness of his decline from the nation and even from his own cabinet.
But it is the collusion of the media which is most stunning. Questions asked by allegedly serious fact-finding journalists were pre-submitted so that Biden could read out an 'impromptu' response off a teleprompter to the question offered up. In February 2024 Judge Robert Hur carried out his investigation in the misappropriated documents case. He concluded that Biden was an 'elderly man with a poor memory'. The Democrat media promptly ignored or attacked Judge Hur. How could a press corps who as much as any other in the world buffs its self-regard with a claim that it 'speaks truth to power' engage in such a cover-up?
The answer in part lies in the fact that one of the authors of the well-received new book was himself seemingly part of the cover-up. Tapper was one of the many media figures in the US who tried to shut down discussion of Biden's failings. In one especially memorable exchange from 2020 on his CNN show, Tapper was interviewing Lara Trump (daughter-in-law of Donald). He bounced off comments she had recently made saying that whenever Biden speaks you almost feel for him and will him to get the right words out. 'How do you think that it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that', asked Tapper with the utmost seriousness.
Lara Trump pointed out that when she had made her remarks she had no idea that Biden had ever had a stutter. But suddenly the feelings of stutterers had to be protected at all costs. Lara Trump tried to explain that what she had been pointing to was nothing to do with a stutter but rather that President Biden was suffering 'very clearly a cognitive decline'.
This enraged Tapper who decided to end the interview early. 'OK – I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody's cognitive decline,' he said, deciding that the only thing worse than stutterer-hurting was diagnosing of illnesses from a distance. Something Democrats have done with Trump for more than a decade.
To be fair to Tapper, he has now faced up to the fact that he could have done more in the Biden years to acknowledge what everybody else could see with their own eyes. His co-author has done this even more fulsomely. But the fact remains that a cover-up occurred. And it was one that could get exceptionally vicious.
Not all of the American media engaged in the cover-up. The New York Post (for which I write a column) was one of the few outlets which identified what had been going on for years. But again and again the White House and the Democrat media tried to shoot the messenger.
When videos emerged of Biden stumbling around, not knowing where he was going, most of the media tried to make excuses for the president – to say he was simply wondering whether to go and speak to that chap over there, and the like. They even covered up when Biden claimed to have just spoken to world leaders who were in fact dead.
And that is when what Donald Trump calls 'the fake news media' really went into overdrive. Videos like those that the New York Post wrote about were not able to be seriously contested. So the Biden White House decided to claim that even this footage – able to be seen by anyone – were 'cheap fakes'. That is, videos which had been carefully edited in order to make Biden look bad.
But the only cheap fake was the mission that the Biden White House and its amen chorus in the US media were engaging in. It fell apart on the presidential debate stage, when nobody could deny the problem any longer.
But the bigger lessons seem not to have been learnt. If Tapper and his colleagues get away with a mere, 'Aw shucks, yes, I should have mentioned that the president was unfit for the job – and we all knew it' then the public has even more reason to distrust everything that comes out of the mainstream media.
That is obviously a disaster for the declining media. But it is also a disaster for society as a whole. Because the ability to have some trustworthy sources in the world does matter – and will matter an awful lot more in the years to come. The American media that helped Biden should take a serious and critical look at themselves – even though it's not clear that self-criticism is something of which they are remotely capable.