New Year Offers Legacy Media a Chance for Redemption

A new year brings hope for a fresh start. No one needs a reset more than the legacy media, which has lost most people’s trust through its failure to report the news without fear or favor.

The legacy media, embarrassment, and opportunity

Luckily, the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, AP, CNN, and all the rest have a chance to make amends thanks to a barnburner of a scandal – the years-long efforts to hide President Biden’s diminished capacities even as his administration pursued transformational policies. Unpeeling this rotten onion would allow news outlets to showcase their reporting chops on a massive story they were deeply complicit in covering up. They would have to detail not only White House perfidy but their own.

Biden’s stark decline was Washington’s worst-kept secret. In September 2023, an ABC News/Washington Post poll reported that 74 % of Americans said Biden was too old to be reelected. In February of 2024, Special Counsel Robert Hur declined to recommend prosecuting Biden for illegally retaining and sharing classified documents, in part because he said it would be hard to convict a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

The legacy media deceived the people

Instead of pursuing this important story, most outlets performed the deceptive two-step that has defined their partisan coverage during the last decade. Just as they peppered false Russiagate articles with brief acknowledgments that there was no real evidence showing Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election, their dismissals of concerns about Biden’s capacities usually included a few caveats admitting what was plain to see. There is no greater indictment of their dishonesty than their brief bows to the truth. (For a much fuller account of the issue, read William Voegeli’s superb essay, “All the President’s Mental Lapses,” in the Claremont Review of Books.)

One might have expected the lid to be blown off this issue once Democrats forced Biden out of the race in July following his incoherent debate performance – just as one might have expected the Mueller Report to ignite soul-searching among those who advanced the Trump/Russia conspiracy.

Biden’s exit raised an obvious and urgent question: If he can’t run for office, how can he run the country? The legacy media, however, ignored this obvious concern – underscoring how we live in an Emperor’s New Clothes environment, in which most of the people are like the little boy who recognizes reality while powerful progressive elites insist on their own false narratives. There was, after all, an election to win against the man they were smearing as a modern-day Hitler. Inconvenient questions, especially Vice President Kamala Harris’ role in the cover-up, would just complicate the cause.

Finally someone can avow it without ridicule

The dam finally broke six weeks after Trump’s victory, when the Wall Street Journal – which had been pilloried by its peers for a similar article it published last June 4 – ran a piece headlined, “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge.”

With echoes of Woodrow Wilson’s second term – when much of the nation’s business was channeled through his wife after the president suffered a stroke – the Journal reported: “Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.”

The Claude Rains treatment

In the weeks since, the legacy media has continued to deceive. Like Claude Raines’ character in “Casablanca” – who says he is “shocked, shocked” that gambling is taking place even as he pockets his winnings – legacy outlets have largely described WSJ’s reporting as a “shocking” “bombshell,” casting themselves as the victims of some sort of sophisticated conspiracy. On Sunday, CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford came closer to the truth when she called Biden’s decline “the most underreported story in 2024.” Tellingly, however, she cast this failure as a missed opportunity to help the Democrats. “We should have much more forcefully questioned whether he was fit for office for another four years, which could have led to a primary for the Democrats,” Crawford said. “It could have changed the scope of the entire election.”

A betting person would wager that the legacy media will leave the story there. Error has been suggested. Why dwell on the past? Let’s turn the page!

That would be a grave mistake. First, this is a once-in-a-lifetime scandal. The idea that a cabal of unelected officials was covering up the president’s infirmities so that they could govern in his name sounds like the plot of a political novel. The Wall Street Journal’s excellent article left the juiciest questions unanswered. We know the why; the who, what, when, and where remain shrouded in mystery.

Questions remain

A few of the innumerable outstanding questions include: Was there a single mastermind who first floated the idea of the power grab, or did it arise organically as officials and aides came to the same conclusion about their boss? Was the takeover discussed openly or just allowed to happen? Did the players understand the constitutional questions their actions raised? If so, how did they justify them? Was Biden even aware of the situation? How extensive was Jill Biden’s role in the deception? Most importantly, what key decisions were made with little or no input from the president? By whom?

The legacy media must also investigate its failure to address such questions in real-time. Every White House correspondent who ignored what they saw – and the editors who signed off on their misleading work and the opinion commentators who parroted the White House line – should be held to account. If they knew the truth and ignored it, they have no business in journalism.

On the plus side, the legacy media has occasionally owned up to its grave errors in the past. The New York Times, for example, distinguished itself in 2003 when it admitted that one of its reporters, Jayson Blair, had fabricated dozens of articles, and again in 2004 when it owned up to its faulty coverage in the lead-up to the Iraq war. These efforts strengthened the bond between the newspaper and its readers.

A time for soul searching

It is hard to believe the Times and others will engage in such soul-searching this time around. Their refusal to address clear problems in their coverage of recent scandals, including Russiagate and the evidence of influence-peddling revealed on Hunter Biden’s laptop, suggests that they are committed to burying news that might hurt Democrats or themselves.

That posture, however, will only further their decline and irrelevance in an era when Americans have more choices than ever for how and where they get their news. Honest reporting on the Biden White House will probably not be enough to restore people’s trust in the legacy media. But if they squander this opportunity to do their job, good riddance.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.