Biden and the Beltway news media deserve each other

OPINION:

President Biden and the Beltway media deserve each other.

One tells outrageous and consequential lies, and the other keeps up the pretense that they’re true until it just isn’t possible anymore.

Mr. Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter for any and all federal crimes, both charged and uncharged, over the last 11 years is yet another case in point.

The younger Biden had been convicted of illegally purchasing a gun in Delaware after lying on a federal form in 2018 that he was not using or addicted to drugs. And he was set to plead guilty to tax evasion charges in another case in California.

The president repeatedly pledged not to let his own son off the hook even though he had the power to do so, and some media figures practically swooned at the mention of a man of such unassailable principles. And so, when he broke that promise, some reacted with shock and outrage, perhaps at having been had.

“This pardon will tarnish Joe Biden’s legacy,” CNN’s Elie Honig said. “Joe Biden — let’s be clear here — he lied to us for a long time.”

“Biden made a huge mistake,” former “Meet the Press” anchor Chuck Todd wrote for NBC News. “And it really is going to make a lot of people question everything they thought they understood about him in public service.”

While Mr. Biden’s longtime allies in the media expressed their dismay, it’s important to remember that they all helped him try to conceal the very thing that began the sequence of events that ended in Hunter’s convictions: the infamous laptop.

As the world knows, the portable computer Hunter abandoned in a Delaware repair shop contained evidence linking the now-president to the lucrative family business of selling access to him. And the reason the pardon stretches back to 2014 likely is because that’s when business dealings began with a certain natural gas company in Ukraine.

But when it first came to light just before Election Day 2020, the media parroted the Biden campaign line that the laptop was a piece of Russian disinformation until it was proved conclusively that it was real.

The broken promise of the pardon was more of the same. It seems that Mr. Biden’s word is always golden for the media until it suddenly isn’t.

And these certainly aren’t the only times reporters have carried water for Mr. Biden until the contents of the buckets started spilling out all over the road.

For the better part of his presidency, the White House press corps worked to conceal Mr. Biden’s cognitive and physical decline from the public. They acted in concert with administration officials, outrageously exaggerating Mr. Biden’s vigor and acuity while deriding any Republican who raised doubts about his abilities.

That lie fell apart when Mr. Biden performed horribly, looking feeble, lost and confused, in a June debate dominated by former President Donald Trump. At that point again, the national news media felt unable to defend their man any longer. They turned on him, ultimately helping former President Barack Obama, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and other heavy hitters in the Democratic Party drive him from the race completely. 

Journalists were angry with Mr. Biden because he had failed to hold up his end of the bargain. The media had tacitly agreed to give him a pass on his decrepitude as long as he didn’t embarrass them for doing it. And old Joe couldn’t deliver.

This frustration among reporters is what led to the immense eruption of media glee when Vice President Kamala Harris was jammed into place as the Democrats’ emergency replacement candidate. Breezy stories about “Brat Summer” and selling “joy” as a “vibe” dominated the media for days on end. Ms. Harris enjoyed an uninterrupted run of positive media attention — spanning weeks — in which almost no negative words were written or uttered, and no actual policy issues were discussed.

It was the vapid, empty race the Harris campaign needed to run, and the media were happy to play along. The other end of the deal was that Ms. Harris had to go out and not be terrible.

But Ms. Harris couldn’t deliver even that, and Mr. Trump cleaned her clock.

She was indeed a terrible candidate, just as she was when she ran for president for the first time in 2019. And now that she has lost again, reporters are letting her have it by savaging her campaign’s decisions and marveling at the completeness of her failure.

Democrats are stumbling through the political wilderness now, and their allies in the media are still plenty angry about the election result. One group created the mess, and the other tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. And they both deserve their predicament.

• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and the founder and principal of Line Drive Public Affairs LLC. He served as a senior adviser on the 2024 Trump campaign and as communications director on the 2020 Trump campaign.