Why Did the Media Stay So Silent About Joe Biden’s Health?

It was at a conference on hunger in September 2022 where President Joe Biden scanned the crowd and called out, “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” No response. “I think she was… she was going to be here.”

Jackie Walorski, one of the conference organizers, had died in a car crash the previous month. After her death the White House sent condolences in Biden’s name, saying how he “appreciated her partnership” in setting up the conference.

Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, explained Biden's asking for Jackie by saying that she was “ top of mind ” for the president at the conference. She would repeat the answer “top of mind” over a dozen times when questioned by reporters. It was a nonsensical response. If Walorski was “top of mind” for Biden, then her death would have been too.

The Daily Beast reached out to Jean-Pierre, but she declined to comment on any of the questions raised in this article.

Fast-forward 18 months. Was President Biden’s catastrophic June 27 CNN/Trump debate performance a “ bad episode ” as he claimed, or the culmination of a systematic White House cover-up that concealed signs of change in Biden over a period of two to three years?

Were officials, lawmakers and the media insufficiently curious? To what extent did the media and the White House collude to protect the public from understanding Biden’s gaffes were getting worse, possibly signaling something more serious for fear it might enable his Republican opponent?

Speaking anonymously this week, a writer for a leading conservative magazine was in no doubt where the blame lay (he had recently joined the magazine and didn’t wish to speak publicly). “It was the worst-kept secret in Washington. It was essentially a failed cover-up. I don’t blame the White House because the White House was doing what it could to protect the president. The media, however, told a story that was demonstrably false by the evidence of their own eyes. Voters had been telling pollsters for years that Biden was too old.”

David Smith, D.C. bureau chief for the Guardian , told the Daily Beast that the White House role, was “complex, and it’s more nuanced. The White House probably did over-protect Biden but was it a ‘conspiracy’? No, I think it’s something that happened inadvertently. They were wrapping him in bubble wrap. They presented him for far fewer sit-down interviews and press conferences than any president since Ronald Reagan.”

Biden’s team facilitated a significant number of less formal, on-the-run exchanges with journalists (as he walked across the South Lawn to Marine Force 1 helicopter for instance).

These so-called ‘gaggles’ were more numerous, according to White House sources, than for Obama, George W. Bush, or Clinton. But Biden also did far fewer formal sit-down interviews than his six predecessors, as Axios reported.

Jacqui Heinrich, a senior White House correspondent for Fox News, was more explicit about where, and with whom, the blame lay. “It had a lot to do with some of the key architects of that strategy. Anita Dunn (a former senior adviser to Biden) has since departed the White House. In the days and weeks since the president dropped out of the race you have seen him be more engaged with the media. I think that that is what we were lacking for a very long time when Anita Dunn was in her role.”

Heinrich says that this strategy, ultimately, was a losing one. “It worked against him in the end. He said he had a bad night (at the debate), but because of their strategy the problem was that you hadn’t seen him having lots of good nights.”

Dunn was the first Biden confidante to leave the White House after Harris assumed the role of nominee. Andrew Bates, senior deputy press secretary at the White House, told the Daily Beast, “Anita was a proponent of wide-ranging media engagement, from long-form sit-downs to constituency media.”

“Did we miss some chances to connect some dots?”

The “Where’s Jackie?” episode was not an isolated one. In two separate press conferences in February of this year President Biden twice referred to dead European leaders—François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl—when telling anecdotes about conversations he had with two (living) European leaders, President Emmanuel Macron of France and then-Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

The Guardian headline , not ideal for a president wishing to assert his mental well-being in an election year, read, “Biden mistakes living European leader for dead one—for second time in a week.”

Jean-Pierre offered a defense of sorts. “As it relates to the names and what he was trying to... say, many people, elected officials... they tend, they can, they can misspeak sometimes.”

Mitterrand died in 1996. Kohl died in 2007.

In April, at a trade union conference in D.C., Biden inadvertently incorporated a teleprompter instruction into his speech, “Imagine what we could do next. Four more years. Pause.” Within minutes clips like these flooded social media and helped build a narrative that was finding its way into the polls: Biden was losing it.

Were these episodes too readily dismissed as just the latest from a self-confessed “gaffe machine”? After the debate, one D.C. correspondent conceded to the media commentator Brain Stelter in Vox that the press corps may have missed the significance of these so-called one-offs, “Did we miss some chances to connect some dots? I think that’s a fair question.”

Biden and his age is not a new concern. Since 2022 voters, in significant numbers, had been telling pollsters that they considered Biden too old to run again for president. By 2023 an ABC/ Washington Post poll found that 74 percent of voters thought he was too old. It was not an outlier; virtually all polls told the same story. Earlier this year a poll found that 86 percent of Americans thought Biden was too old.

In addition to shielding the president over the course of two years, the White House’s policy was to hit back hard at journalists and media outlets for even broaching the topic.

Peter Baker, White House correspondent for the New York Times , told Stelter, “They really hate us over these stories. The administration’s pushback is pretty strong and their resentment of the coverage is pretty deep, to the point that they’ve complained to our editors.”

Alex Thompson , national reporter for Axios, told CNN, “I’ve covered the Biden White House for three and a half years. The response every single time that it’s come up has been to deflect, to gaslight, to not tell the truth, not just to reporters, not just to other Democrats, but even at times to themselves about the president’s limitations at his age.”

Heinrich told the Daily Beast, “We all were derided, any time you dared ask about age. It perpetuated the idea within the press corps that asking about Biden’s age was not a legitimate topic.”

Throughout our reporting a number of questions were raised about how the White House shielded the president from greater press and public scrutiny, and also about how the White House press operation reacted to coverage of the president’s age. Some of those questions related directly to Jean-Pierre and Andrew Bates.

In a series of communications with the White House they were unwilling to answer many of the specific questions asked them. Instead, Bates told the Daily Beast, “President Biden has given over 50 interviews this year alone, recently held a one-hour, thorough press conference, done over 580 gaggles with the White House press corps in office, and travels the country speaking directly to the American people.”

Bates continued, “Joe Biden has always said that it is fair for reporters to ask about his age.”

The experience of journalists was very different.

Another favored response of the White House was to claim that many of the Biden clips on social media were heavily edited and thus distorted.

One celebrated incident is “ the meandering clip. ” On June 13 this year Biden was with G-7 leaders in Italy waiting for a group photoshoot. On one clip he appears to meander aimlessly away from the other leaders.

A different angle and edit shows that he was turning to have a conversation with a group of just-landed sky divers. But the full unedited clip also shows Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni ushering Biden back to join the group. Neither clip reflects well on him, although the first is deeply misleading.

At a White House press briefing 10 days before the presidential debate, Jean-Pierre addressed what she called “cheap fakes,” in response to the “meandering clip”—suggesting that the term was first coined by the media. “I think you all have called this the ‘cheap fakes’ video. And that’s exactly what they are. They are done in bad faith.”

Some of what appeared on social media were posted by bad faith actors and were harshly edited or distorted. The New York Times , Washington Post , and NBC News investigated the growing phenomenon. Politifact , in their reporting said, “Not every video of Biden having an awkward moment or making a gaffe is a cheap fake. But increasingly, footage of the president has been manipulated to push false and misleading claims.”

Heinrich, from Fox News, told The Daily Beast, “There were images of him that were misleading on social media. But they used that to make the allegation that anything that you saw was fake. They really wanted to be able to suggest that whatever you saw that might be unflattering might not be real.”

“I think it’s a White House strategy to bunker him”

Anxiety around Biden’s age surfaced years before it started appearing in polls around 2021. In 2019, Jack Shafer, Politico’s well-regarded former media critic, wrote a piece headlined “ Is Biden too old? ” In it, he said, “Some consider it taboo to ask whether a candidate is too old to serve as president. Not the press.”

Shafer told the Daily Beast, “When I wrote my piece in 2019 I pointed to all of the pieces in leading media asking the question, Is he too old, is he mentally up to the job? What I concluded was that they all asked the question—but didn’t answer it.”

Many other articles followed over the next few years in frontline media such as The Atlantic , the NYT , CNN , the Washington Post and other news outlets. Media Matters, a progressive media watchdog, declared that in a study of six major mainstream news outlets between January and June 2024, “We found 144 articles focused on either or both Biden’s and Trump’s ages or mental acuities in the period studied.”

Many of the pieces on Biden were probing, inquisitive and well-reported, so why did they fail to capture the shocking vision of the president—faltering, vacant, incoherent, lost—that the nation saw at the debate?

The pieces that did appear were not part of a relentless campaign in the way that some news outlets might cover, say, climate, curbs on voting rights, or the threats to democracy. Like the process of aging itself, they ebbed and flowed, often prompted by news events.

The release of Special Counsel Robert K. Hur’s report in February this year prompted one such flurry. Hur declined to press charges on Biden’s handling of classified documents, in part because of the way the president would present to jurors.

Hur wrote, damningly, “At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

The special counsel continued: “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” (He died, aged 46, in 2015.)

Biden angrily defended himself at a specially convened press conference and tore into the special counsel saying “how in the hell dare” Hur claim he forgot the year his son died. At the same presser, Biden referred to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the “president of Mexico.” Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is the president of Egypt.

A renewed focus on Biden’s age followed. The Washington Post wrote a leader comment, stating, “Voter concerns about Mr. Biden’s age and mental acuity are not only widespread but also perfectly legitimate.” A week later influential New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recorded a podcast in which he said that Biden needed to step aside as the Democratic nominee. Klein predicted the fury that would follow, “I know a lot of Democrats are going to be furious at me for this show.”

In a sign that many Democrats were blind to or dismissive of the age issue, Klein said, “To say that people are worried about Biden’s age because the media keeps telling them to be worried about Biden’s age? If you have really convinced yourself of that, I almost don’t know what to tell you.”

Social media lit up with criticism of Klein. Biden’s age was a live issue, again.

And then the president delivered a State of the Union Address which was well-received in many quarters. Commentators wrote approvingly about the fiery, robust delivery. Even Republicans seemed impressed. Trump told a radio show host that Biden was, “ all jacked up at the beginning .”

Andrew Prokop , senior political writer at Vox, suggested that the address should put an end to questions over Biden’s age, “The verdict from the media is in—President Joe Biden put to rest concerns about his age. That verdict shows just how silly the discourse on Biden’s age has gotten in recent weeks.”

The focus on Biden’s age lapsed again, until the Wall Street Journal published a months-long investigation in early June, just weeks before the CNN/Trump debate, headlined “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”

The Journal had spoken to over 40 people, and their read-out on Biden’s mental acuity echoed what pollsters had been told since 2022. “Some who have worked with him, however, including Democrats and some who have known him back to his time as vice president, described a president who appears slower now, someone who has both good moments and bad ones.”

The response from the White House was immediate, and sustained. After the piece appeared, the Journal reported that, “Andrew Bates, the White House spokesman, used his official X account to attack the reporting, posting roughly 80 times and privately reaching out to journalists at other news outlets to criticize it.” (One of the Journal reporters told the BBC that their investigation was prompted by Hur’s report and the realization that the special counsel had spent more time with the President than any journalist in recent time.)

And it wasn’t just the White House. Many media outlets derided the Journal ’s reporting, claiming that it drew overwhelmingly from Republican sources. Which it did, not least because not enough Democratic officials were willing to speak on the record, or indeed at all.

A veteran D.C. political reporter, who now writes for a center-right news site, spoke anonymously to the Daily Beast: “This was the problem around D.C. You couldn’t get Democrats to go on the record, you couldn’t even get them to sound the alarm off the record.”

A more pointed criticism of the piece, emphasized by Nancy Pelosi , was that the article omitted Democrats who did go on-the-record about particular meetings and instead gave preference to Republicans speaking anonymously.

In a post on X, she said, “Many of us spent time with @WSJ to share on the record our first-hand experiences with @POTUS, where we see his wisdom, experience, strength and strategic thinking,” Pelosi wrote. “Instead, the Journal ignored testimony by Democrats, focused on attacks by Republicans and printed a hit piece.”

Jennifer Rubin , the Washington Post politics columnist, went further: “Maybe the overwhelmingly negative response by other journalists to what was essentially the promotion of a right-wing meme will reduce such irresponsible reporting as the election year continues.”

That’s not how things turned out. And after the debate the WSJ article was seen as remarkably prescient.

The White House also deployed another tactic (alongside shielding Biden and alleging “cheap fakes”) to tamp down inquiries on Biden’s age. They questioned why journalists were pursuing the issue at all, when they could be reporting on the threat former president Trump posed to democracy.

At the off-the-record media gathering at Biden’s HQ in Delaware in April when the Biden team disclosed their appetite for an early debate, reporters quizzed them about the issue of Biden’s age.

A senior D.C.-based reporter told the Beast that the response was frosty. Officials bristled. “The suggestion was that the media shouldn’t be obsessed with age when the other guy is a dictator.”

“I wasn’t very smart…I almost fell asleep on stage”

Biden’s performance apart, the most remarkable aspect of the debate was that it took place in June, a historically early date for a presidential debate.

Speaking anonymously, a senior D.C.-based political reporter said that at the special off-the-record gathering for media at Biden’s HQ in Delaware in April this year, the Biden team disclosed that they were annoyed that Trump “was hogging the limelight so much with his court cases.”

The Biden team told reporters and editors that they wanted an early debate to switch the narrative back to the dangers of Trump. “There was a feeling that the electorate needed to be jolted back. Hence their appetite for an early debate.”

Be careful what you wish for.

From the moment that Biden walked stiffly on stage the optics were awful. His voice was reed thin and, on split-screen, he stared over at Trump with a vacant expression. As one critic noted, even if you had the volume turned down, Biden still performed terribly.

In his worst moment—a competitive field—he finished an answer on immigration with, “And I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the—the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.”

Asked for a response Trump paused before summing up what a lot of the audience were surely thinking: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

Biden would go on to explain his performance by citing a cold and foreign travel. A few days after the debate he told donors at a fundraiser in Virginia, “I wasn’t very smart. I decided to travel around the world a couple of times … shortly before the debate. And then I almost fell asleep on stage.”

The presidential debate was on June 27. Biden returned from his international travels on June 14. He spent a week from June 20 at Camp David preparing for the debate.

Anita Dunn, the former Biden adviser, in her first interview since she left the White House, told Politico that the Biden team was encouraged and feeling confident after the debate prep. “We felt good, that he was fairly well prepared. He also had a terrible cold that got worse in the course of the week. I think there was no question that it played a role.”

Dunn told Politico that she watched the debate while getting real-time feedback from a group of undecided voters, “Voters didn’t particularly like Biden’s performance in the first half-hour. He wasn’t scoring well at all. They very much liked a lot of the second half of the debate.”

Dunn said that the polls immediately after the debate didn't suggest a problem for Biden. The negativity that engulfed his campaign in the following days was only caused, she said, by the press reaction: “We were seeing an environment in the press that was just unremittingly negative.”

Will Saletan , writer for the Bulwark, responded to Dunn’s interview: “This is a dismaying window into the willful blindness that kept him in the race long after he should have left.”

“For the first time ever the staff started talking”

Biden’s debate performance prompted a flood of recriminations. There were suggestions that the White House and large sections of the media had participated in an egregious political cover-up.

Among the many post-mortems: Megan McArdle in the Washington Post , “How the media sleepwalked into Biden’s debate disaster,” Philip Klein in the conservative magazine the National Review (“The Cover-Up of Biden’s Mental Decline Isn’t Just a Political Problem—It’s a Scandal”), and a Wall Street Journal editorial board comment blamed those closest to the president for hiding his mental decline, “Democrats Can’t Avoid the Biden Problem.”

Days later, a number of D.C.-based reporters conceded, all of them anonymously, to CNN that they had lacked sufficient curiosity and vigor in pursuing the story. One said, “Some reporters said that there has been a distinct change within the last year, and that the press corps should have reported more aggressively.”

But not everyone noticed a “distinct change.” And writers for many leading U.S. publications who covered the president in good faith wrote extensively about how they observed a man who on occasion faltered and appeared confused but who also had a tenacious grasp on policy issues, and reality.

When Biden biographer Evan Osnos met with the president for a lengthy New Yorker profile in January, he wrote, “His voice is thin and clotted, and his gestures have slowed, but, in our conversation, his mind seemed unchanged. He never bungled a name or a date.”

Smith, D.C. Bureau Chief at the Guardian , recalls a press trip a few months ago, shortly before the debate. “I traveled with the Biden travel press pool. It was a weekend of flying around from place to place on Air Force One, going to four campaign stops plus the commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. I thought that for an 81-year old he did pretty well for what was a hectic schedule for all of us.”

But others were seeing Biden hour by hour, day by day. And those people, the ones best-placed to reveal why Biden’s debate performance came as such a shock, are not yet speaking. By the end of the president’s reign as Democratic nominee, his inner circle had shrunk to longtime advisers Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed, his wife Jill, and her senior aides Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini.

These were the people who, according to the New York Times , were with Biden on the day before he decided to step aside. Ricchetti and Donilon presented the latest polls, “Mr. Biden was falling behind, nationally and in key battleground states. There was still a path to victory, they advised him, but the fight would be ugly.’’ Soon after, and having spoken to Jill, Bernal and Tomasini, he, according to the Times , “directed Mr. Donilon and Mr. Ricchetti to work on a statement, while the others took a pizza break for dinner.”

It’s almost impossible to conceive of Biden’s closest advisers risking Biden’s dignity, and legacy, by agreeing to a debate had they noticed a decline in the president’s mental acuity in the months before. But, equally, it’s almost impossible to think that his debate performance came out of a clear blue sky.

As of now, the full story of Biden’s mental acuity over the last few years—and what people knew, and when—has not been told. That may be about to change. The veteran D.C. reporter said, “The White House operation was famously loyal and leak-free. That changed after the debate, when the family turned on the staff for over-preparing Biden. They started blaming the staff, and for the first time ever in this leak-free White House the staff turned and started talking.”

Once the Biden White House dissolves, the recriminations will continue. Biden described the debate performance as a “bad night.” But this was a catastrophe months, and possibly years, in the making.

Over the last few years the Democratic Party, and the White House, was fighting what they said was an existential threat to democracy from Donald Trump. But they came up short in a battle much closer to home.

Read more at The Daily Beast.