Gastonia, NC
One housekeeping note before anything else, because it matters to the argument and I have already heard people get it wrong twice this week.
“Cheap fake” is two weeks old. The press secretary used it in the middle of June, about three specific clips — the G7 skydiver, the Juneteenth event, the Morehouse graduation. It is not a three-year doctrine. It is a phrase that arrived about a hundred days before an election and eleven days before the man in question lost ninety minutes on live television.
I say that as a copy editor, which is to say as somebody who gets paid to notice when a word is being used to cover more ground than it can hold. If we describe the last three years as the cheap-fake era, the first person to check a date will throw the whole argument out, and he will be entitled to.
What was actually going on for three years is less catchy and worse. The press covered Biden’s age constantly. It was the most polled question in American politics. What it covered was age as a political liability — a number that hurt him with voters — rather than age as a capacity question about whether the man could do the job. Those are different stories and only one of them required anybody to reach a conclusion.
The polling story is safe. You can run it forever. It has no verb in it, nobody has to be wrong, and the framing is that the public has a perception problem.
The capacity story requires somebody to say: here is the unscripted sample, here is what it shows, here is what it would mean. Almost nobody ran that until June, and the outlet that came closest — the Wall Street Journal in early June — got hammered for leaning on Republican sources, which was a fair criticism of the sourcing and a very convenient way to avoid the subject.
So my answer is the first half, with the timeline fixed. It should have been a governing question from the point the unscripted product started diverging from the scripted one, and the failure was not suppression. It was a three-year decision to file it under polling.
Thursday night did not create a fact. It removed the last place to file it.
Owatonna, MN
Minnesota is not going to pretend the press ignored this. It did not ignore it. It wrote about Biden’s age more than it wrote about almost anything else in his presidency.
What it wrote was that voters were worried about his age. That is a different sentence from “the president is diminished,” and the difference is the whole question.
The polling frame lets everyone stay employed. Nobody has to make a finding. The story is about what the public thinks, which is unfalsifiable and endlessly renewable, and it comes with a built-in implication that the public’s concern is a perception to be managed rather than an observation to be checked. Three years of that produced a country that knew the number and had never been told what it was a number about.
The capacity frame requires a reporter to look at the unscripted sample and say what it shows. That gets you called ageist, it gets your sourcing attacked, and if you are wrong you are wrong in public about a man’s health. I understand entirely why the beat did not want it.
The party has less excuse and I would put more of the weight there. The press is not obligated to select a nominee. A party is. And this one arranged a nominating process in which the incumbent faced no debates, no serious challenger, and a calendar built to end the question before it started. Dean Phillips ran and was treated as an embarrassment rather than as a test. Whatever you think of the man, a party that will not let anybody take a swing at its nominee has decided in advance that the nominee cannot take one.
That decision was made in 2023. It was made by people who had seen everything the rest of us had seen and considerably more.
So: a governing question from early, yes. But the honest version of the failure is not that the story was hidden. It is that the story was reported as arithmetic for three years, and the one institution with an actual duty to test the man cancelled the test.
Prescott Valley, AZ
Out here, if a man cannot find the gate twice, you do not call the neighbor a liar for mentioning the gate. That is the version of this everyone is running and it is not quite what happened.
The neighbor did mention the gate. Constantly. What he said was that a lot of people are worried about the gate, which is a way of mentioning something without being on the hook for it.
I taught for a long time and this is a distinction worth putting in front of students, because it comes up everywhere and it is rarely this clean. There is a difference between reporting that a claim is being made and evaluating whether the claim is true. The first is safe and produces infinite copy. The second requires you to be right.
For three years the age question was covered almost entirely in the first mode. Poll numbers. Voter concern. Strategist worry. Democratic anxiety. Every one of those stories was accurate and none of them required anybody to look at the tape and say what it showed.
Then Thursday happened and the second mode became unavoidable, because ninety minutes of unscripted television is not a poll.
I want to be fair about the difficulty. Evaluating a man’s cognitive condition from video is genuinely hazardous, journalists are not clinicians, and the people making the loudest claims in 2022 were mostly making them for sport. A press corps that refused to diagnose was not being cowardly about that specific thing.
But there was a question available the whole time that required no diagnosis at all. Who is making the decisions, and can the public see him make one? That is an Article II question, it can be answered with a schedule and a tape, and almost nobody asked it.
So the answer is that it should have been a governing question, and the specific failure is narrower than the one people are claiming this week. Not silence. A three-year preference for the version of the story that nobody could be wrong about.
Dayton, OH
A shop does not wait for the customer’s final inspection to admit the line is drifting. That is my whole view of this and I want to put the weight where it belongs, which is on the party rather than on the reporters.
Reporters do not select nominees. Parties do, and a party has exactly one mechanism for testing whether a man can still do the job in public. It is called a primary and it works by making him stand next to somebody who wants his job for two hours with no cards.
There were no debates. Not one. The committee declined to sanction any. The calendar was rearranged so South Carolina went first, the only declared challenger was treated as a nuisance and won nothing, and the whole exercise concluded in March without the incumbent ever being required to hold a stage against an opponent.
In process terms that is an inspection station that was removed from the line, in advance, by people who had seen the parts.
I want to be careful not to claim more than I can support. A party is entitled to renominate an incumbent and every party has done it. The unusual thing here is not renomination. It is the deliberate removal of the one event that would have produced the data — and then, on Thursday, the first unscripted ninety minutes anybody had seen in years happening in front of fifty million people with the nomination already locked.
That is the sequence that matters. Not that the test was failed. That the test was scheduled for after the decision.
Any manufacturing operation that inspects after shipment has a name for the resulting condition, and the name is a recall. That is what the last four days have been, and it is running now with fewer than five months on the calendar because the inspection was moved to the end.
The press failure is real and secondary. The primary failure is a party that decided in 2023 it did not want to know.
Wheeling, WV
I have watched a lot of people cover for a man who could not do the work anymore, and it is almost never a conspiracy. It is a room full of people who each figure it is not their place to say it.
That is what I think happened here, and it is worse than a conspiracy because there is nobody to fire.
The reporters figured the doctors should say it. The doctors were not talking. The staff figured the family should say it. The family was the last people who would. The party figured the polls would say it, and the polls said voters were worried about his age, which everybody read as a messaging problem. And every one of those people could look at the next person in the circle and say honestly that it was not really his call.
That is how a shop lets a foreman work six months past the point everybody knows. Nobody lies. Nobody wants the conversation. And then something happens on the floor and afterward every man in the building says he had been worried for a year.
Fifty million people watched the something happen on Thursday.
Now, I will give the press one thing, because our side has been unfair about it this week. They did write about it. The Journal ran a real piece in early June about how he was behind closed doors, and it got taken apart over the sourcing — a lot of it was Republicans, and McCarthy was in it, and that is a legitimate objection to a story. It is also exactly the objection that makes the next editor decide the piece is not worth the fight.
That is how the circle closes. Not suppression. A hundred small decisions that it was somebody else’s job.
Governing question from early. Should have been. And the reason it was not is the reason it usually is not, which is that saying it first costs the person who says it and saying it late costs nobody at all.
Tyler, TX
East Texas would ask a simple question about this: what did they know and when could they have known it. That is an underwriting question and it has an answer.
Available in 2021: unscripted clips, disputed, plus an eighty-year-old man in the hardest job there is. That is a risk indicator, not a finding. I would not have written the policy off that.
Available in 2023: three more years of the same clips, a schedule with fewer interviews than any president in decades, and a party arranging a nominating process with no debates. That combination is where an underwriter starts asking for a physical, because the pattern of avoidance has become more informative than any individual clip.
Available in February this year: a special counsel report describing the man’s memory in terms nobody at the White House disputed as fabricated, followed four days later by a press conference where he mixed up two heads of state while insisting his memory was fine.
Available Thursday: ninety minutes.
So the honest answer is that the file got materially worse at three separate points and each time the response was to manage the coverage rather than reassess the risk. That is not the same as saying it was obvious in 2021, and I would rather not claim it was, because people who claim they knew all along are usually reconstructing.
What I will say is that by early 2023 the avoidance itself was the evidence. When the thing you cannot get is an unscripted hour, and the reason you cannot get it is never stated, the unavailability is the finding. Insurers learn that early and cheaply. This country learned it on Thursday, expensively, with the nomination already signed.
Long Island, NY
I write disclosure memoranda, and the standard I apply is not whether a fact is proven. It is whether a reasonable person would want it before deciding.
By that standard the capacity question was disclosable from about 2022, and the failure was not that nobody said anything. It was that the two institutions with the duty each defined their duty in a way that excluded it.
The press defined its duty as accuracy about claims. It reported, correctly and constantly, that voters were concerned about the President’s age and that Republicans were making an issue of it. Every one of those stories was true. None of them required a judgment about the underlying condition, which is precisely what made them safe to run indefinitely.
The party defined its duty as selecting a nominee, and then removed the process by which selection tests anything. No debates were sanctioned. The one declared challenger was treated as noise. The calendar was arranged to close the question in March. A nominating process that cannot produce adverse information is not a selection mechanism; it is a ratification with a schedule.
Neither of those is suppression, and I would not use the word. Suppression implies somebody knew and sat on it. What happened is more ordinary and harder to fix: two institutions each declined a duty on the ground that it belonged to the other.
The disclosure that was actually required needed no medical judgment at all. It was: here is the unscripted sample over three years, here is its frequency and trend, here is the access policy that produced it, and here is the question that follows about who exercises the authority when the officer is not available. That memorandum could have been written in 2022 by anyone with a calendar and a video archive. It was not written, and Thursday night was the substitute for it.
A disclosure delivered by collapse is not a disclosure. It is a discovery, and discoveries arrive with no time to act on them, which is the position the country is in this morning.
Cheyenne, WY
I keep books, and the entry I would post here is not the one everybody is posting this week.
The press did report it. Constantly. What it reported was that voters were worried about his age, which is a poll result rather than a finding. Three years of accurate reporting about a perception, and almost none about the thing being perceived.
That is a real distinction and it is not the same as a cover-up, and I would rather say so than sign onto a version of this that falls apart the first time somebody pulls up the archive.
The party is a different account. A party has one mechanism for finding out whether its man can still do ninety minutes, and it is a debate stage. There were none. No sanctioned debates, no serious challenger, a calendar arranged to end it early, and the whole thing wrapped by March.
So the first unscripted ninety minutes anybody saw in three years happened on June 27, after the nomination was locked, in front of fifty million people. The test came after the decision. Tests that come after the decision are not tests. They are results.
That is the entry. Not that they hid it. That they arranged the year so nobody would have to know until it was too late to do anything, and then it was too late to do anything.
