For the last 17 months of his two-term presidency, following a severe stroke, President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) was barely functional.
Behind the scenes, Wilson’s wife Edith stepped in to effectively serve as de facto commander-in-chief. She even earned herself the title “Secret President” and “first woman to run the government,” according to her official White House biography.
The parallels between Woodrow Wilson and President Joe Biden might not be exact, but they are hard to ignore.
Biden has faced disastrous polls since going head-to-head with GOP frontrunner Donald Trump. All eyes are now on Biden’s age and apparent cognitive decline since the pair’s last electoral matchup in 2020.
To be fair, the current POTUS is certainly more functional than Wilson was: It would be near impossible to conceal a Woodrow-like condition in the White House given today’s 24-hour news cycle and incisive social media scrutiny.
It is no surprise that the White House and prominent Democrats have denied reports of Biden’s declining mental acuity. That is, it could be argued, their job.
What’s far less forgivable is the role the media has played in such denials.
Voicing the concerns of many, Newsmax host Todd Starnes asked over the weekend, “How many White House correspondents will be fired for their part in the coverup of Biden’s health. They all knew. They had a front row seat.”
Indeed they did.
Just last month, The Washington Post gave “Four Pinocchios” to viral videos showing Biden wandering away from a group of G-7 leaders, apparently in a world of his own. WaPo dismissed the footage as “pernicious” attempts to mislead and “reinforce an existing stereotype.”
Around the same time, former Biden press secretary and now MSNBC personality Jen Psaki criticized the New York Post of “inaccurate, false reporting” about Biden freezing and wandering.
Mere months ago, another MSNBC host, Joe Scarborough, described Biden as “beyond cogent” and “better than he’s ever been.”
The New York Times has provided a seemingly endless stream of bubble-wrapped reporting for Biden—from “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts” to “Biden’s Stutter Is His Superpower” to “For Joe Biden, What Seems Like Age Might Instead Be Style.”
In fact, Townhall has compiled a long list of tweets of legacy press denials concerning Biden’s cognitive decline that is well worth a browse.
Now that the president’s diminished faculties have been noticed by a majority of the voting public, these same media outlets appear to be rewriting history.
In recent days, legacy news staple Brian Stelter has been tweeting about journalists feeling misled by the White House about the president’s diminished mental acuity, yet Stelter himself has been one of Biden’s most stalwart defenders in the face of those very same accusations.
Senior Washington Editor at NBC News Ginger Gibson also recently tweeted: “Being a journalist during tumultuous times really makes clear that lots of people think we have all kinds of secret knowledge we’re not telling people and know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Yet the public hasn’t been critical of the media’s lack of future foresight but, instead, about the media’s lack of honesty about the facts they did possess.
Axios is among many outlets now claiming that the media was largely in the dark about President Biden’s cognitive decline.
Now outlets are scurrying to cover this story as if it mattered to them all along.
In the most tawdry example, The New York Times reported Monday that a Parkinson’s expert visited the White House eight times in eight months. Yet the evidence for this was there in the logbooks all along—and was first brought to the public’s attention by independent journalist (and NYT alum) Alex Berenson, and yet the Times has so far declined to credit him with the scoop.
No wonder the mainstream press is now one of the least trusted institutions in America.
It needn’t be so.
The Fourth Estate does not exist as a mouthpiece for the powerful. Its entire purpose is to interrogate the powerful and pierce through their well-spun narratives.
To the degree that the mainstream media didn’t see President Biden’s decline is the degree to which they were avoiding seeing it. They looked away until they could look away no more.
As the apocryphal George Orwell quote goes: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
If journalists got back to the job at hand, we might just turn this country around.
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Image credit: “Joseph R. Biden Jr. MSC 2019” by Kuhlmann/ MSC on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 DE.
