Biden's Age and Mental Decline: A Media Cover-Up

A panel of political journalists has admitted to downplaying President Biden's age and mental decline out of concern for helping former President Trump.

A panel of political journalists has admitted to downplaying the issue of President Biden's age and mental decline out of concern for helping former President Trump.

The admission came during a panel discussion at the Texas Tribune Festival earlier this month. The panel included Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Jonathan Lemire, MSNBC host and Politico White House bureau chief; Laura Barrón-López, "PBS NewsHour" correspondent; and David Smith, The Guardian Washington bureau chief.

Biden's Age and Mental Decline: A Media Cover-Up

Smith conceded the possibility of bias, saying, "There was perhaps, even on an unconscious level, the notion that if you focus so much on Joe Biden's age, you are somehow helping Donald Trump."

All of the panelists weighed in on how their news outlets and the media broadly handled the subject of the 81-year-old president's apparent mental decline. They were asked to compare that to their ongoing coverage of former President Trump, the 78-year-old Republican nominee who has remained in the race.

Biden's Age and Mental Decline: A Media Cover-Up

Barrón-López pointed to a discussion she moderated on "NewsHour" with two doctors about memory and age before Biden ended his presidential bid. However, she noted that they also discussed Trump, citing his gaffe mixing up Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi during the GOP primary.

"We weren't relentlessly covering, the way some of my peers were, Biden's age necessarily, even all the way up until the debate," Barrón-López said.

Biden's Age and Mental Decline: A Media Cover-Up

She continued, "It is and was a valid question. Many times when I was on the trail, even before the debate, voters would bring it up. Almost every single voter I spoke to would bring it up, even if they were planning to vote for President Biden. Compared to now, I definitely think that Donald Trump's age could be covered more by the press."

Lemire called the issue of Biden's age a "persistent story line" and suggested Biden brought it upon himself after he previously suggested during the 2020 campaign that he would be a transitional one-term president.

Biden's Age and Mental Decline: A Media Cover-Up

"I think that even though that led to the, shall we say, unhappiness of some of the MSNBC's viewing public who felt like, ‘Hey, why are you focusing on this? It shouldn’t matter. He's doing a great job.' And I think our job is to simply call it like we see it," Lemire said.

The MSNBC host said there has been "more scrutiny" towards Trump's age in recent weeks, but pointed out how the former president "has always sort of been rambling and all over the place," adding "it's hard to see the change perhaps."

Biden's Age and Mental Decline: A Media Cover-Up

Smith said that the further away one is from Washington, "the clearer you can see the problem." He recalled how his colleagues at The Guardian were questioning why Biden was the Democratic nominee and expressed concern about his age.

"And then the closer you got to Washington, the White House in particular, the more caveats, the more ambiguous it became," Smith said. "You had all sorts of people - Democratic insiders and White House officials playing this down… It took a while for Washington to catch up and in a sense the media as well."

Biden's Age and Mental Decline: A Media Cover-Up

Baker called Biden's age a "hard issue" to cover, but suggested journalists broadly need to do some "soul-searching" on how they handled it after the election.

"It's very personal. Anybody who's had a father or mother whose age and you talk to them by taking away their keys, these are not easy issues. That's a sense of what the country is going through with Biden," the Times correspondent said. "And how do you write something in the appropriate way, balanced and yet tough… We wrote these stories, aired these stories repeatedly over the last couple years. The editors, our writers got massive complaints from the White House about it. The campaign took after the reporters who did focus on this. And yet it was our responsibility to do so."

Baker agreed with Barrón-López that there should be more coverage towards Trump's "rambling, incoherent statements," but said Trump has been able to "mask" the issue of age because of his "volume and energy."

"Biden had a hard time projecting his voice. It was hard to hear him. He'd shuffle when he walked. He came across in a physical way, as frail in a way that Trump doesn't, right? Trump is very loud and loud seems to cover in some ways for the, you know, the undiagrammable sentences," Baker said.