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Curtis Houck
Curtis Houck currently serves as the Managing Editor of NewsBusters after almost two years as a news analyst in the Media Research Center’s News Analysis Division. During that time, he served as the sole evening news analyst, chronicling the best and worst of the network evening newscasts, primetime cable shows, and late-night comedy programs. From January 2016 to April 2016, he also acted as the Sunday news analyst for NewsBusters.
Posted late Wednesday, Puck founding partner Dylan Byers wrote that, based on multiple anonymous conversations, chicken-hearted members of the Biden White House press corps have purposefully been refusing to make President Biden’s mental decline an issue and instead kept it from the American public so as not to lose access to Biden officials and/or incur their wrath.
The subhead said it all:
“For better or worse, many in the WH press corps have spent the last couple years noticeably avoiding the topic of the president’s agility and acuity because it felt indelicate or irrelevant. Now, the Hur report has stirred some soul-searching.”
In other words, it’s the White House press corps cosplaying CNN’s Baghdad bureau during the reign of Saddam Hussein.
Thanks to the fallout over Special Counsel Robert Hur’s damning report on his use of classified documents, Byers explained the past week “has a number of journalists covering the president second-guessing some of their reporting decisions and looking at their subject with fresh eyes.”
Revealing he “surveyed members of the White House press corps—reporters, on-air correspondents, photographers, etcetera,” Byers said “they all” anonymously sounded off on how “symptoms of Biden’s age had become more noticeable in recent months and a frequent discussion topic at the desks behind the Brady briefing room.”
He even had a quote from one seeming so casual in pointing out anyone “cover[ing] this showing the signs of his age—he whispers, he shuffles, he misremembers” like someone’s “elderly parent”.
In a totally-not-shocking twist, Byers explained that Biden’s age, when covered, was only broached “in often gentle or euphemistic ways” (and thus downplayed) and, of course, was by design to not been cut off from the regime:
Nevertheless, several of the journalists I spoke with said the true significance and importance of that issue, as they observed it, was not reflected in the coverage—often due to the sense that it was sensitive or unseemly, or because there was no obvious evidence that it had affected his performance as president beyond optics. Or, left unsaid, perhaps because they didn’t want to ruin their relationship with the White House by being the lone wolf to speak up.
One cowardly White House correspondent confessed to Byers they saw being honest with Americans about Biden’s mental incapacitation as “indelicate”.
Another sheep told him that “[t]he amount of time we spent talking about it versus the time we spent reporting on it was not the same” and “[t]here should have been tougher, more scrutinizing coverage of his age earlier.”
Yet another tool of a reporter fretted Biden’s age could be an issue for not just this year, but “the next five years” if he’s reelected.
Byers sought to cover their tails by claiming “[t]he Hur report has obviously given the press corps greater license to cover the issue—in the same way, one journalist noted, that the Monica Lewinsky scandal gave the White House press corps greater license to talk about the flirtatious behaviour they’d witnessed Bill Clinton exhibiting toward some women, but never felt like they had the freedom to write about in their pages.”
The former CNN media reporter advised his friends “to be honest brokers without losing sight of the fact that” Donald Trump poses “national risks of a whole other magnitude.”
Byers only arrived at the above revelations after some heaping tablespoons of sucking up to Team Biden, meandering from David Axelrod’s infamous knocking of Biden’s age in June 2022 to this hand-wringing about the Hur report:
Biden advisers and surrogates also tended to utilize another familiar, imperfect argument: Behind closed doors, where it matters, the president is sharp, detail-oriented, on top of it, and in full control of his faculties, they insist. This talking point has become an exhausting refrain[.]
And while this depiction of Biden may be true, it’s an impossible argument to win because it inherently contradicts what many Americans just watched, themselves.
(….)
I’m not here to validate a cable news disagreement. Of course, both arguments are flawed. The presidency is an office, and Biden is surrounded by brilliant and capable people who help guide his decision-making and have led the country out of Covid, aligned NATO against Russia, passed historic infrastructure, manufacturing, gun-safety, and inflation-reduction legislation, and facilitated economic growth of 3.3 percent in the most recent quarter. And yet, this isn’t—or shouldn’t be—a binary issue. Just because Biden defeated Trump in a once-in-a-lifetime election, which featured mail-in voting during a pandemic, doesn’t mean he alone can defeat him now…The Democratic machine is openly hostile to any contemplation of another option and, as the Axelrod affair demonstrates, gets seriously pissed at anyone with the temerity to break rank.
