I n the past couple of weeks, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre experienced a first as a Biden administration mouthpiece.

She faced an adversarial press.

But don’t be fooled by the harsher tone of the news coverage. Even if the effort to get to the bottom of President Joe Biden’s health were a good-faith one, it wouldn’t be enough to repair the damage the news industry has done to itself. With the corporate press once again “discovering” the truth of a major story it had previously dismissed and derided as right-wing treachery, we may have reached the point of no return as far as public trust in major media is concerned.

One may be aggressively wrong only so often before the public turns its back for good.

White House reporters are “miffed,” as Ed O’Keefe of CBS News put it last week, that the administration has been less than forthcoming regarding Biden’s health. Indeed, as the world saw on June 27 during the first (and likely last) 2024 presidential debate, Biden is not, as White House aides claim, “sharp as a tack.” He is not a policy whiz who “does the reading.” He obviously cannot run circles around staffers half his age. He can barely string together a coherent sentence or walk down steps.

With the grand “reveal” that Biden is as infirm as anonymous Twitter users have claimed since even before the 2020 presidential election, some journalists are scrambling now to salvage the Democratic Party’s chances in November. There’s a reason the White House now faces an overwhelming wave of negative, leak-sourced press coverage.

Others in media are scrambling to salvage their reputations and the reputations of their employers. After all, there are only two reasonable explanations for why the country learned of the extent of Biden’s infirmities from Biden’s own performance and not from our supposedly eagle-eyed, hard-boiled press corps: Either the journalists were too stupid to see it, or they were in on the cover-up. Either way, they, like the president, are unfit for the job. Perhaps recognizing the damning nature of the only two reasonable explanations for why they “missed” the Biden health story, the press has become unusually aggressive with the White House, as if to make up for its obvious failures.

Yet no amount of suddenly hard-hitting news coverage or aggressive press conferences can repair the damage the media have done to their credibility. Indeed, even if you believe that the adversarial coverage is part of a genuine attempt by the media to return to good old-fashioned reporting (instead of an attempt to pressure Biden off the ticket, thus cutting the risk of a second Trump presidency), it won’t erase the press corps’ earlier efforts to shield the president from questions and criticisms regarding his health.

Indeed, before Biden himself proved he had lost his mojo, an all-too-eager news media had picked up the White House’s line that any video showing the president as confused and senile is a “cheap fake,” that is, a supposedly selectively edited video designed to make the president look old and senile. When journalists and commentators were not swearing up and down that Joe Biden is the very model of mental agility, major media happily parroted White House officials who assured the public that the president was very engaged, lively, and definitely in charge behind closed doors.

The press told you that you were nuts for questioning Biden’s capacity. You were told fake videos had duped you. You were warned of a vast right-wing conspiracy to make Biden look too feeble to govern the country for four more years.

Then came the debate. Everything changed after that. Suddenly, newsrooms sprang into action, publishing story after story detailing the president’s decline. Journalists would very much appreciate it if you believed them when they say that, until the debate opened their eyes, the Biden administration had hoodwinked them.

Come on, man. Who is going to fall for this again? The sudden interest in holding the Biden White House accountable can’t erase that this scandal is the latest in a long string of serious media failures.

These things keep happening.

Remember: The Biden age scandal comes not too long after the press insisted the Hunter Biden laptop was fake and likely a dirty trick by the Russians. The laptop is real, and its contents are authentic.

Before that, the press told you the lab-leak theory for Covid-19’s origins was a deranged right-wing conspiracy, not to mention racist. When it became impossible to dismiss the idea of a lab leak, especially as evidence of U.S. funding of the Wuhan lab and the lab’s gross negligence became more explicit and transparent, the media recalibrated, pretending it had always considered the theory legitimate.

Also, don’t forget pandemic school closures. You were told the short- and long-term consequences of closures were negligible, that reopening schools would kill all the grandmas. You were told all this despite the existing and emerging knowledge of how the virus spread and despite the obvious costs to kids’ well-being.

Gradually, after Biden won the presidency, newsrooms began to admit what they had previously rejected: that the school closures were harmful. Some even admitted the closures were a terrible idea.

Notice a trend? Weirdly, these media failures keep happening, and they all follow an identical modus operandi.

The press has long benefited from a type of amnesia in which its errors are forgiven and forgotten just in time for the cycle to repeat itself, often within minutes. The late author Michael Crichton called this the “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect,” named for the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, with whom the author concocted the theory.

“Briefly stated,” Crichton said during an address in 2002,

the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. . . . In [my case], show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story and then turn the page to national or international affairs and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. . . . But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

This theory is correct. However, we’re in a slightly different era. It’s not just mistakes or mischaracterizations. It’s not just plain ignorance. We’re talking about corporate media outright dismissing major stories of serious consequence for political or personal reasons, all while attacking anyone who goes near the truth. When reporters try to shut up people who then turn out to be right all along, they’ve gone too far.

Sloppiness can be forgotten, even forgiven. The conspiracies to shut down debate, followed by the press eventually reporting what it had condemned others for saying, is much harder to forget. It’s certainly much harder to forgive.