OPINION:
The former executive editor of The New York Times gave away the game: The media were in on it.
They helped cover up President Biden’s dramatic cognitive decline and gaslit Americans regarding his mental and physical condition.
In case you just returned from Earth 2, where Mr. Biden is crushing everyone at pickleball, the real Mr. Biden manifested as a confused and tired old man in the first debate of the presidential campaign against Donald Trump on June 27. The media reacted with shock, as if they hadn’t seen any hint of this previously.
In remarks to the news outlet Semafor, former New York Times boss Jill Abramson gently chided the media for not reporting that Mr. Biden was cognitively impaired before he demonstrated it for all the world to see.
“The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the president’s feebleness and his serious physical decline, which may be simply the result of old age,” Ms. Abramson said. “Shame on the White House press corps for not [having] pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the president.”
But then she let out the truth while apparently failing to realize how big her admission was.
“I worry that too many journalists didn’t try to get the story because they did not want to be accused of helping elect Donald Trump,” she said.
And there you have it.
That’s a political decision, not a journalistic one. And that makes them campaign operatives, not reporters.
But the worst part is that she gave them a pass on concealing stories to protect one side.
“I get that,” she said.
But then, after offering that absolution, she still pretended that everyone was unaware of what had happened when Mr. Biden unraveled.
“It is simply astounding for the entire country, including its most seasoned reporters, to be as shocked as everyone was by the ugly and painful reality of Biden’s debate performance,” Ms. Abramson said.
But millions of Americans weren’t shocked, because they’d seen enough of Mr. Biden to have suspicions. And many White House reporters who frequently see the president shouldn’t have been surprised either.
Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, famous for helping to topple President Richard Nixon, finally decided it was OK to say something detrimental about Mr. Biden. On CNN, he told Anderson Cooper that people close to the president say they’ve seen him many times in various states of befuddlement.
“There have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed,” Mr. Bernstein said. “And what’s so significant is the people that this is coming from, and also how many people around the president are aware of such incidents, including some reporters, incidentally, who have witnessed some of them.”
All journalists who have been present when Mr. Biden exhibited incoherence, memory lapses or prolonged breaks with the world around him and who did not report what they had seen because they were protecting their favored candidate ought to resign from journalism immediately.
So should any reporter who dutifully parroted the obvious White House lie that Mr. Biden appeared doddering in videos only because they’d been deceptively edited by Republicans?
And every journalist who tried to shame and silence anyone who ever questioned Mr. Biden’s health should never be awarded a byline again.
All of them rolled the dice. White House staff, Biden campaign staff and national news media.
They were gambling that Mr. Biden could make it through this debate and the next one and get past the challenges he’d face between now and Election Day without figuratively or literally face-planting in public.
They lost that bet, and the media quickly calculated that the charade could not continue. So they have viciously turned on Mr. Biden and disingenuously demanded to know how he could have deceived them all.
Except they weren’t deceived. They were in on it. They’re just mad that Mr. Biden let them down, exposing them all.
It shouldn’t be surprising, because it’s what they do. If Mr. Trump is on one side of an issue, they pick the other.
Mr. Biden isn’t addled; he’s sharp.
He’s not confused; the videos are “cheapfakes.”
COVID-19 didn’t come from a Chinese lab; it originated naturally.
Hunter’s laptop isn’t authentic; it’s Russian misinformation.
In this case, they didn’t just get the story wrong; they lied about it and tried to hide the fact that the president is functional for only a sliver of each day, at best.
They knew the truth about Mr. Biden but decided you shouldn’t.
And that’s why you should never trust them again.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist, a communications consultant, the co-host of the “Line Drive Podcast,” and the author of the Amazon bestselling book “Swing Hard in Case You Hit It: My Escape From Addiction and Shot at Redemption on the Trump Campaign.”
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