The press does its own Watergate

Dishonesty and deceit designed to keep power, at a fearsome cost to the country. Have we seen this before?

The exposure of Joe Biden’s manifest unfitness to execute the office he holds — and still less to hold it for another four and a-half years — was not last week’s most ominous lesson. Instead, it was the treachery of the press. Press dishonesty works a particularly insidious sort of danger to the country, for reasons that, ironically, the infamous Watergate scandal make clear.

In Watergate, we depended on the press (admittedly with its own partisan motives) to bring to light the efforts of a sitting President to remain in power by immoral and, to the Republic, terribly corrosive means. Now, the press itself is a main actor, if not the main actor, in doing much the same thing as the malefactors it once exposed. In Watergate, the press was the principal tool in showing us that the President was morally unfit for office. In Senilitygate, the press has been the principal tool in concealing from us that the President is mentally and physically unfit for office. If there’s a difference, it’s that, in a dangerous world, the all-encompassing nature of the current President’s unfitness poses a threat to the country’s well-being more immediate and frightening than the “mere” moral deficits we were facing in 1974. At least Nixon could function.

The institution the country then depended on to expose the dangers posed by a continuing crippled Presidency has become the institution that, by months of hiding Biden’s dilapidation and just as often flat-out lying about it, turned its own once essential civic value — not to mention its moral standing — inside-out.

Joe Biden is probably going to lose in four months or so. But the dishonesty of the press and the distrust it has earned will damage our country for much, much longer.

As so often happens, the incomparable Heather Mac Donald lays it out for us in the City Journal.

A day before Thursday’s presidential debate, the New York Times ran a front-page story in its print edition railing against the posting of unflattering videos of Joe Biden. Among the president’s many “adversaries,” observed the Times, was the “distorted, online version of himself, a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.”

Such voter concerns were misguided, according to the Times and its sources….The public was simply too credulous, according to the Times. A pollster complained that “people that already are concerned about his age are quick to accept what they see in the video, and not question whether that’s selectively edited.”

The Times ended its story on an upbeat note. “People are going to see actual footage [during the debate] that contradicts that [cognitive decline narrative],” said the digital director for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. “They’re going to be pleasantly surprised and constantly be reminded that the president is in a lot hardier shape than they’ve been told.”

Ms. Mac Donald is too polite to call this assessment, published a day before the debate, a masterpiece of bad timing. I feel no such constraint.

It turns out that nothing prepared viewers for the debacle that was Biden’s debate performance. The mainstream media cannot blame selective editing for the impression that Biden lacks the mental acuity to function another four years in the White House. That impression was generated from 90 minutes of live broadcast.

Hey, but wait, he had a cold! You’ve probably had a cold too every now and again, but my guess is that it didn’t cause you to forget the point you wanted to make 15 words ago when you started your sentence.

[N]ow the Times and other media outlets have revised their history. It turns out they had their doubts all along! In an editorial calling for Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, the Times admits that the president’s catastrophic performance on Thursday night “affirmed concerns that have been mounting for months or even years.”

……..which might lead someone to wonder whether the editors of the Times read their own paper. Not that you could blame them if they don’t, but journalistic narcissism being what it is………

On June 11, the Washington Post had attacked Republicans for posting “misleading” videos that seemed to show the president as “infirm, addled or out of his depth.” Such baseless impressions were just part of the right-wing “politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories,” the Post wrote. Now it, too, is acknowledging that “questions about whether [Biden is] up for another four years in the world’s toughest job” are “legitimate.”

You might need to pinch yourself to remember that it was that self-same Washington Post that led the “let’s-get-to-the-truth” investigative journalism that exposed Nixon. So what’s the difference now?

A cynical person might suspect that the difference is that Nixon was a Republican. Still, we should do our best to eschew such nasty cynicism, because, as someone once said, “Democracy dies in sucking up to Biden’s handlers darkness.”

Ms. Mac Donald then observes (emphasis added):

To the crisis afflicting the Democratic Party after Thursday’s debate, add a crisis of media legitimacy. For months, the mainstream press attacked anyone who claimed that Biden was cognitively infirm. In particular, Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden for retaining classified documents, should demand an apology. When Hur declined to prosecute Biden in February 2024 because he had “diminished faculties in advancing age,” the press portrayed Hur as a Republican stooge.

Would that Biden were unfit only for trial. The issue before the country now is whether he can fulfill his duties even through November, since every month will bring further cognitive decline.

It’s actually not that much of an issue. A huge majority understood months before the debate that Biden is too old for the Presidency.

The effort to dismiss that decline recalls the leadership insecurities of totalitarian regimes. Fittingly, the Democratic administration and its media allies also arrogate to themselves the power to declare large swathes of scientific thinking and dissent from liberal orthodoxies “disinformation” that may rightly be suppressed. But Americans got an uncensored look at the president on Thursday and can now make up their own minds about Biden’s capacity to serve another four years.

Paul and I have been covering that ploy for almost as long as Ringside has existed. Probably the most memorable example was the Left’s decree that “science” demanded masks forever and six feet of distance and closing schools, shuttering businesses etc., etc., and decreeing with equal force that if you thought otherwise, you were a nutjob conspiracy theorist, if not a fan of the Black Death. Only it was (1) considerably overstated and (2) all but oblivious to the substantial long-term damage it did to children, whose chances of being infected with COVID were next to zip.

Ms. Mac Donald then takes a survey of how the press will cover for Biden, noting that it’s not going to work (which is why the Democrats are in a panic):

[W]hat the public saw was not a bad night, consisting of missed opportunities or miscalculated emotional affect. What the public saw was not a “lack of vigor.” What the public saw were the all-too-familiar symptoms of senility—which only gets worse, never better. The question is not what the last three and a half years of the Biden presidency were like but what another four would bring. Being softspoken is not disqualifying. The inability to form words or to avoid cognitive cul-de-sacs is. Biden’s incapacity with numbers was especially concerning. He inflated or deflated them a thousandfold: his administration created “15,000 new jobs;” we have a “thousand trillionaires” in America; raising taxes on the wealthy would raise “$500 million”; "400,000 people” would allegedly not have health coverage without the Affordable Care Act.

That of course barely scratches the surface of Biden’s whoopers — which, I must in honesty concede, are not newly obvious signs of incapacity but, for Mr. Biden, old hat. That inflation was 9% when he took office or that there were no servicemen killed on his watch are not falsehoods borne of dilapidation. They are mere incidents of the routine obliviousness to truth Biden started showing 50 years ago.

The latter part of Ms. Mac Donald’s article dissects what may remain of Biden’s campaign, and is well worth the read. But the most deadly point is the one at the outset: Once upon a time, we had recognizable journalism in this country. That era is over with. What we have now, in by far most of the press, is advocacy thinly disguised as journalism. Real journalism at least tipped its hat to honesty, even if the follow through was often dicey. What we have now is layer upon layer of deceit, topped with the routinely belligerent warning that we wahoos had better swallow it.

The Left’s problem, probably as much as Biden’s fumbling, is that we wahoos are now onto it and not real happy about it — one of the main underlying reasons, I suspect, that Trump will win.