OPINION:
On the last Sunday of the year, a “Face the Nation” panel discussed the most underreported stories of 2024 when correspondent Jan Crawford offered that she thought President Biden’s “obvious cognitive decline” should have received more attention.
She is right about that, but “underreported” is the wrong way to describe it. It would be more accurate to say that the White House lied to cover up the president’s condition, and the national news media helped the administration do it.
The discussion on CBS was spurred by a recent Wall Street Journal report on the depths of the deception inside the administration, with some anecdotes dating back to the first few months of Mr. Biden’s term in 2021. As a result of all of this, it is hereby recognized in this column that “Joe Biden is fine” was the Lie of the Year for 2024, as told by the Biden administration and facilitated by the White House press corps.
The only question remaining is whether it’s the greatest lie and political scandal in the nation’s history.
As the world now knows, the current president has suffered a decline in mental acuity since his election in 2020. His one debate with Donald Trump in the 2024 race exposed this situation. After Mr. Biden had been shown to be a diminished and confused shell of himself, Democratic heavies forced him to withdraw from the campaign and replaced him with Vice President Kamala Harris. Mr. Trump handily dispatched Ms. Harris, winning all seven battleground states.
With the massive lie about Mr. Biden’s health already exposed, Ms. Crawford weakly chided reporters on that last Sunday show of the year, allowing only that “we should have much more forcefully questioned whether he was fit for office for another four years.”
But this mild criticism comes nowhere close to the devastating critique the news industry deserves after the last presidential election cycle. The pack reporting and blind devotion to protecting the incumbent Democratic president from his own decrepitude revealed media that are so far in the tank for one side that their reputations should never recover.
Case in point: The very network on which this conversation was occurring had also aired a story five months earlier about how certain evil Republicans were manipulating video clips to make Mr. Biden seem more feeble than he was. The Biden White House had labeled these things as “cheap fakes” since they were real clips alleged to be presented out of context, not to be confused with “deepfakes” that are digitally created or altered.
“Anybody can take an image and manipulate it to make it look like it suggests something that didn’t happen,” CBS News chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes reported, taking up the language and arguments of the White House communications office.
She said those words on June 19, leaving the intended impression that Mr. Biden was mentally and physically vigorous and that any videos appearing to show otherwise were to be discounted as forgeries produced by his political enemies. The “cheap fakes” narrative took off in the corporate media, always pushed by the White House and journalists got behind the idea that Mr. Biden was in fine shape to take on Mr. Trump.
It instantly became a matter of faith among media that questions about Mr. Biden’s capabilities were nothing more than Republican dirty tricks that had already been disproved. White House aides, Cabinet members and Democratic talking heads hit the television circuit to attest to the president’s sharpness and the inability of much younger and fitter staffers to keep up with him. Republicans who raised questions on these same shows were shouted down and prevented from discussing the topic.
But the debate happened just eight days after the CBS “cheap fakes” report, and the lie could no longer be continued.
Millions of Americans watching from home could tell something hadn’t been right with Mr. Biden for a long time, so reporters who routinely saw him in person should have been able to discern a problem. Those supposed journalists who went along with Mr. Biden and denied the obvious should never be trusted again.
Most Americans knew it was bogus long ago, but at least it’s too obvious now for even the media to keep peddling it. But in the recent Wall Street Journal piece that described the cover-up, it’s clear that White House flunkies are still at it.
It’s the Lie of the Year for 2024, and by God, they will stick with it, even if their media pals have already ducked for cover.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and the founder and principal of Line Drive Public Affairs LLC. He served as a senior adviser to the 2024 Trump campaign and as communications director of the 2020 Trump campaign.
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