In great detail, Voegeli recounts how the mainstream media covered up for Biden for his entire term until the debate, whereupon it became mission-critical to save what was left of its credibility.
The debate, however, nullified these political calculations. It now seemed highly likely that insisting Biden was still fit for duty would wind up helping rather than hurting Trump. Pre-debate, maintaining that Biden was up to the job had been the best bet for preventing Trump’s return to the White House. Post-debate, Biden’s continuing candidacy, which had appeared to be the Democratic Party’s least bad option, turned into its most bad option. (Following Trump’s victory in November, Jon Favreau, a speechwriter in the Obama White House, said on his “Pod Save America” podcast that internal Biden campaign polling, reflecting the impact of the June debate, showed Trump on track to win 400 electoral votes if Biden remained the Democratic nominee.) With only 53 days between the June 27 debate and the opening of the Democratic convention in Chicago, the mission of driving Biden out of the race in favor of a candidate who could speak audibly and in complete sentences was daunting, but a risk that had to be run. The Post was prepared to do its part by publishing a long, detailed article about Biden’s decline. A story that had been impermissible, in Mark Halperin’s phrase, for more than three years became imperative within just one week.
Like a kicked-over anthill, suddenly the media was churning out (previously verboten) articles about Biden's limitations. No media source was more obtuse than the Washington Post:
Though The Washington Post is not a lone violator, I’ve chosen to discuss how journalists did, but mostly did not, cover the story of Joe Biden’s decline by concentrating on that paper for a couple of reasons. One is that, to the best of my knowledge, no other media outlet that was AWOL on this story from 2020 through June 2024 has had the lack of self-awareness, or perhaps the surplus of disingenuousness, to scold the Democratic establishment for failing to be forthright with the public. If The Washington Post is not part of the Democratic establishment, then it is certainly the house organ or hometown paper for it, and has been for many years. Given that fact, and given the record of what the Post did and did not say about Biden during his presidency, it takes remarkable chutzpah for the Post to run an editorial three days after the election titled “Trying to Protect Biden, Democrats Sacrificed Their Credibility.” Their credibility?
A month after Trump's first term began, the Washington Post adopted their smarmy, self-regarding slogan of "Democracy dies in Darkness." Then they spent the last three-and-a-half years contributing to that darkness.
Read the whole thing.
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