Brian Stelter Rejects Claims Media ‘Covered Up’ Biden’s Age Problems: ‘It’s Not That Simple’
AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File
Brian Stelter asked a pertinent question in a piece for Vox on Tuesday: “Did the media botch the Biden age story?” His answer, in short: It’s complicated.
In a lengthy analysis of various forms of media coverage of President Joe Biden’s age and health — including traditional news outlets, cable news, digital outlets, the White House press corps — Stelter dove into whether or not it was fair to ask if the media consciously tried to hide what viewers saw the night of the first presidential debate between Biden and former President Donald Trump. In the week since the disastrous showing for Biden, who appeared frail, raspy, and unable to stand up to his opponent, people have pointed fingers at the White House, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, and the media for “covering up” the health decline of the president.
But Stelter stated that it was “just not that simple”:
Prominent journalists who were outspoken about voters’ age concerns, like New York Times podcasters Ezra Klein and Astead Herndon, were pummeled by partisans in social media comment threads. (“Americans have said consistently that they wanted someone else to be the nominee,” Herndon pointed out again on CNN after the debate last week.)
The tensions are still palpable this week: Every time I appear on CNN (my old home) or the BBC to discuss the Democratic Party’s post-debate state of crisis, I get messages from liberal viewers who believe I’m helping hand the election to Trump. The former president looms over every story and TV segment about Biden, and some Washington reporters have privately griped that Biden got a bit of a free pass because Trump was so aberrant and so dishonest.
But the White House reporters I know weren’t slacking off or going soft on Biden because they wanted to help the Democratic Party defeat Trump. That’s just Infowars-style conspiracy thinking. Reporters live for scoops, and a scoop about Biden being debilitated would be a blockbuster. It’s just not that simple.
In addition to what unflattering coverage of Biden looked like politically to some, there was definitely an aspect of keeping the delicate story in “bubble wrap”:
The triumphant nature of Biden’s State of the Union address enabled White House aides, and Biden-friendly media outlets, to dismiss his mental misfires and physical deterioration. For a long time, “they did an incredibly effective job of bubble wrapping him,” a DC anchor told me. It worked, sometimes, with some audiences.
It’s not working anymore. The bubble wrap is off.
On the flip side was the “bad-faith” coverage by right-wing outlets such as Fox News:
Fox News stars have been taking a victory lap this week, having spent years and countless segments portraying Biden as incompetent and incapacitated. They feel like they deserve credit for being early to the story that’s now consuming Washington.
But Fox supplied precious little actual reporting on the subject of Biden’s health. Instead, hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham queued up video clips of Biden looking helpless and played those clips on a loop, devoid of any context or balance. When Biden would deliver a forceful speech, as on State of the Union night, Fox’s commentators seemed caught off guard.
Consider the recent controversies over so-called “cheapfake” videos of Biden. He really has, at times, appeared to wander off and freeze up in front of cameras. But some of the videos hyped by Biden critics were misleading, even maliciously so.
Pro-Trump media outlets took a clip of Biden pausing before sitting down in a chair and claimed that there was no chair there at all. Online meme makers imagined that he was defecating during a D-Day ceremony.
Those types of lies caused at least a little bit of hesitation among good-faith reporters. As one said to me, “I didn’t want to feed into a bad-faith caricature.”
So, did the media botch the Biden health story? In some cases they did, in some cases they didn’t, and as Stelter pointed out: “[E]ven if you narrow the media-criticism conversation down to a handful of high-profile, down-the-middle national outlets, the record of how effectively Biden’s health was covered is complicated, just as aging is a complicated process.”
