NEW YORK (AP) — President Joe Biden’s fitness for a second term has been a top story since his hesitant performance at the debate against Donald Trump last week. Under the pressure of the moment, the president at times seemed unable to finish or articulate some thoughts.
Some press critics reading these stories now are asking another question: Why did it take so long?
“It’s just astonishing that the entire country, including its most experienced reporters, was so shocked by the ugly and painful reality of Biden’s debate performance,” Jill Abramson, former editor in chief of the New York Times, told the website Semafor this week.
Although it was “super hard to cover this story,” she said, it could have been done. Instead, Abramson said, the American press failed in its duty to hold those in power accountable.
There is no shortage of “I told you so” sentiments among Biden’s opponents. “Conservatives have noticed this for a long time,” said “Fox & Friends” host Ainsley Earhardt.
It’s a complicated story that’s been brewing for months – and one could argue that the American people were the first to figure it out.
Great resistance from Biden
Throughout the campaign, Biden’s aides have vigorously rejected the notion that he has lost influence, and some supporters are upset that this issue is receiving so much attention compared to reports on whether or not Trump is telling the truth.
Nearly a year ago, in August 2023, the Associated Press-NORC poll found that three-quarters of American adults said Biden, 81, was too vintage to effectively serve another four-year term as president. AP-NORC found in February that six in 10 adults were “not very” or “not at all” convinced that Biden has the mental capacity to serve as president, although the sentiment was roughly the same for his 78-year-old Republican opponent, Donald Trump.
Media standards for reporting on a president’s health have changed significantly over the years. It was little known back then, but after President Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke in 1919, his wife ran the government for the rest of his term. And in the days before television, the press was largely hushed about the disability that kept Franklin D. Roosevelt in a wheelchair most of the time.
Four Times reporters collaborated on an article published Tuesday that said several people who met Biden behind closed doors noticed that “he seemed increasingly confused or listless or lost in conversations.”
Few uncontrolled public appearances
Biden’s lack of public presence in situations that are not tightly controlled has been evident throughout his presidency.
The 36 press conferences he has given through June 30 were fewer than any president during the same period since Ronald Reagan, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project. Biden gave 128 interviews in total, compared with 369 interviews by Donald Trump at the same stage of his presidency and 497 by Biden’s former boss, she said.
This became clear in February when Biden declined to do an interview during the Super Bowl pre-election coverage, a relatively up-to-date presidential tradition that draws an audience of tens of millions of people.
Under pressure after the debate, Biden agreed to an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Friday and his team said he would hold a press conference next week.
Biden’s aides may have done him a disservice by shielding him from such situations, said Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist at Cornell University. “In general, it’s good for a politician and for an older person to practice and deal with stressful situations,” he said. In other words, practice helps.
If there were signs beyond public speeches that Biden was impaired in his ability to hold office, he should have been investigated, said Pillemer, a professor of gerontology at Weill Cornell University. But he said he was not aware of such evidence, unlike with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein before her death.
“I don’t think the media could have done much more,” said Pillemer.
The situation shows that the media’s pressure for more access is more than just whining, said Ben Smith, co-founder of the news website Semafor and a former media columnist. Even off-the-record conversations with a president are valuable in getting a feel for him, and Biden has not done that to the extent his predecessors have, Smith said.
If there had been a crisis situation before the debate where Biden’s problems were obvious, the press might have jumped on the story sooner. “But many Americans believed the president was really unwell, and the media kind of dismissed that,” Smith said.
“We should all have taken tougher action,” he said.
A challenging story for journalists
Abramson told Semafor she was concerned that many journalists had not tried to get the story because they did not want to be accused of helping Trump get elected.
In a June 4 article by Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes, the Wall Street Journal said some people who worked with Biden had described him as “a president who now seems slower, someone who has both good and bad moments.”
Journal reporters interviewed more than 45 people, both Republicans and Democrats, for the article. But because the article, which appeared in a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, featured prominent quotes from Republican House Speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, many dismissed it at the time as partisan.
A similar example of the challenges of covering this story is the Biden campaign’s harsh criticism of the Times when it wrote about concerns about Biden’s age. Even before the campaign’s report, the Times cited articles suggesting the paper did not ignore the issue.
Politico suggested in April, citing an unnamed Times employee, that the newspaper’s attention to the issue had been “quietly encouraged” by publisher AG Sulzberger, who was upset that Biden had not agreed to an interview with Times reporters.
The newspaper strongly denied this, issuing a statement calling it disturbing that Biden had “so actively and effectively dodged questions from independent journalists during his time in office.” On Wednesday, Times editor-in-chief Joe Kahn sent a message to the paper’s editorial board on the issue, acknowledging that there was “abundant speculation” about what the media had and had not done.
“What I have seen, and what our readers have experienced from our team, is consistent, fact-based reporting on this issue that began a few years ago when we documented Biden’s age-related challenges in several industry-leading articles,” Kahn wrote. “We have stuck with this story every step of the way, always with nuance and context, leading up to today’s excellent report.”
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Linley Sanders of the Associated Press poll team contributed. David Bauder covers media for the AP. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder.
