Was there some sort of organized conspiracy within the mainstream media?
The effort to downplay the toll that age has been taking on Joe Biden may have begun in the White House, but it did not stop there. Plenty of senior Democrats must have known there was a problem, and a significant section of the media played along.
As Jeff Blehar put it the other day:
So what the hell happened to the mainstream media during this entire period? Where were our sentinels of the republic, our tribunes of truth? How could the Fourth Estate, with its eyes forever upon the world of Washington politics, have missed Biden’s advancing mental and physical decrepitude? Why did so many journalists claim they weren’t even suspicious after it all came crashing down in late June?
I have an appealingly simple theory to explain the mystery: They didn’t miss it at all. Everyone knew, and the sorts of people who would have normally pursued these whispers about Biden’s remoteness — obvious enough from his calendar and the behavior of his public minders — simply decided not to because it was not in the best interests of the Democratic Party to do so, at least as perceived by the “herd mind” of the media, the left-tinged blob of assignment editors, investigative reporters, and liberal commentators across Washington.
Was there some sort of organized conspiracy within the mainstream media? Let’s just say it’s much more likely that many of its players either knew what was expected of them or, for the reasons that Jeff gives, agreed that the right thing to do, politically, was to play along.
And part of playing along was maintaining that claims that a cognitively impaired Biden was not up to the job were mis/disinformation. While it is certainly true that the President was at the wrong end of, say, video clips deceptively or unflatteringly edited to show that he was hopelessly confused, tactics such as those may have backfired. It made it easier for those denying that Biden had a problem to dismiss all such claims to the contrary as mis/disinformation and, by extension, not the sort of thing that should be believed or maybe even published. Call the EU!
Writing immediately after the catastrophic debate performance that was to end Biden’s candidacy, Dan Williams, a consistently sharp commentator on dis/misinformation (and, I should add, certainly no fan of Donald Trump) had, among other points, this to say:
As I have argued repeatedly (e.g., here, here, and here), the problem with highly expansive definitions of misinformation—those that focus not just on very clear-cut falsehoods and fabrications (e.g., literal fake news and deepfakes) but content that might conceivably be “misleading” in some way—is that there is no reason to think misinformation experts are well-positioned to apply such definitions reliably or impartially.2 Instead, their judgements will—like everyone else’s—be corrupted by bias, partisanship, wishful thinking, and more.
The presidential debate vindicated this assessment. Against a bizarrely popular view that worries about Biden’s age are merely a product of “misinformation” and right-wing echo chambers on social media, it turns out that this view was itself the product of highly misleading narratives circulating around liberal echo chambers.
More importantly, the debate also illustrated how the liberal establishment’s approach to “misinformation” can be very costly. It might be emotionally comforting to classify all challenges to preferred liberal orthodoxies of the day as “misinformation”. It might even serve short-term propagandistic purposes. However, it ultimately makes you look silly in the eyes of a less biased public and erodes trust in social science and liberal media outlets.
And here we are.
And yet here is Joe Biden ten days or so ago, speaking on the Pitchfork Economics podcast:
Post-World War II is over, done. Everything’s changing. But the biggest change taking place is the press. They’re not bad. They’re still good people. But where do people get their news? The thing is, don’t hold me to this. If the data’s correct, something only 5, 7% of people under the age of 25 are reading the newspaper.
We pick what news we want to hear. It’s a totally different deal. We’ve got to figure out how we deal with this significant technological change. If Nixon was more accustomed to television, he wouldn’t have perspired so much, and he would be president when he’d beat Kennedy.
I know that sounds silly. But think of the changes taking place. Where do you go? What is true? We have no evidence anymore. I’m not sure how that gets resolved. But I think it’s a big deal.
Biden says that he doesn’t know how this gets “resolved” (does it have to be?), but running through those comments is an obvious frustration that the ability to control the “narrative” through the “good people” in old media gatekeepers has crumbled. Similar feelings of frustration explain why the political establishments on both sides of the Atlantic are so keen to rein in social media.
Biden’s musings about the difficulty of knowing where to go to find “the truth” are more than a little ironic. After all, when it came to his ability to handle the presidency for the next four years, that place was not, for the most part, the mainstream media, the place where the “good people” are.