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Liberal Media Partisanship Squashed the Scandal of Biden's Decline
The time: 1960.
Longtime journalist Theodore H. White releases his ground breaking book The Making of the President 1960.
The Pulitzer Prize winning book, the first of its kind, follows the behind-the- scenes doings of Democrats and Republicans as they maneuver to nominate their 1960 presidential nominees. The tale, White reports, “begins long before” the fall election. He notes of the election that finally narrowed down to Republican Vice President Richard Nixon and the Democrat, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy:
It is an adventure for which men have planned, plotted and calculated years before the country wakes to their ambitions.
A decided part of White’s tale is his behind the scenes reporting on the media of the day. Or as called in the day, the press. In this case that would mean the political reporters from the various newspaper, television and radio outlets of the day who were assigned to cover Kennedy and Nixon.
What catches the eye on what is now a long ago period of American political history is the similarity between the political media of that day and its descendants of today - a full 65 years after the Kennedy-Nixon campaign.
This time around the liberal media bias revolves not just around a presidential campaign but instead a campaign to hide a president’s cognitive decline.
Let’s start with this from 1960.
In the day it was the practice of presidential campaigns in the last stage of the election to hire buses or planes to transport the reporters covering the campaign. In practice this meant there was a “Kennedy bus or plane”and a “Nixon bus or plane”, with each campaign trailing the candidate to which they had been assigned by their journalistic bosses.
Human nature being what it is, the occupants of each bus or plane traded stories with each other as they rolled across America, reporting, laughing gossiping (and drinking!), stopping only to cover their assigned candidate as he stopped to speak to crowds of thousands in a strategically located city in a strategically located state.
As the election begins to approach its conclusion, White notes the differences between the coverage of the reporters on the Kennedy bus and plane and the coverage from those on the Nixon bus and plane. The Kennedy staff “respected the press”, whereas, not surprisingly, the Nixon staff felt there was hostility to to their candidate.
White writes:
There is no doubt that this kindliness, respect and cultivation of the press colored adversely the reporting of the Nixon campaign. By the last weeks of the campaign, those forty or fifty national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of the his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps-they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers. When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr. Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier.
Yet if it was so, it was difficult to deny credit to the Democratic candidate for what he had achieved-or commiserate with Mr. Nixon for the distance he had made between himself and the men who sought to explain him.
Years later, the 1964 GOP presidential nominee Senator Barry Goldwater’s biographer Lee Edwards would write this of the press coverage of Goldwater in that campaign, a mere four years after Nixon’s 1960 experience.
Writing in his book Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution, Edwards wrote:
Convinced that Goldwater would be dangerous for the country and the world, the media elite tilted their coverage in favor of (President Lyndon) Johnson, looking the other way when the president was out of control-rhetorically or physically.
Now jump ahead to today’s America. Here is this headline in The Washington Examiner:
Credibility bonfire: How the leftist media covered up Biden’s physical and mental decline
Reporter W. James Antle III reports:
The cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s age-related decline is as much a media scandal as a political one. An appropriately skeptical press would have asked consistently penetrating questions about the oldest president in history and continued to press the issue when it was clear the White House was hiding something (often, the president himself). Instead, they often supplied a megaphone to the defenses of Biden in what were meant to be straight news stories.
Bingo.
But that did not happen.
It’s as if, were this the 1970’s, Washington Post Watergate reporters Woodward and Bernstein got all the clues they did in fact get of wrong-doing in the Nixon White House and simply shrugged their shoulders, focusing instead on allegations of corruption in the Washington D.C. city government.
The problem here - and a problem with serious consequences - is that President Joe Biden sat in the White House and was battling, as the polite phrase goes, “cognitive” problems. Which is to say, the President was suffering from dementia.
And the all too obvious question is: Where was the media?
Back there in the 1970’s Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein won awards for turning over every rock and looking in every crevice of the Nixon White House, winning all manner of journalistic awards for investigating and reporting on what has become known to history as the Watergate scandal.
Now? Here we are with a sitting President of the United States suffering, as his staff, family and advisers were aware, with “cognitive decline” problems.
To its everlasting credit, The Wall Street Journal had reporters on the story, headlining:
Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping
Participants in meetings said the 81-year-old president performed poorly at times. The White House said Biden is sharp and his critics are playing partisan politics.
But where was the army of Watergate-style investigative reporting like that which took on Nixon?
Silence.
Suffice to say, it’s one thing for the media to still be afflicted with the kind of liberal media bias that was evident all the way back in 1960.
It’s another thing entirely when liberal media bias keeps today’s journalists from doing a Watergate-style investigation of a severely troubled President who has the nuclear codes in his possession. A President surrounded by loyalists who are all about protecting the President - and not the country.
Not good. Not good at all.
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