NYT reporter blames sources for media’s failure to cover Biden’s decline

New York Times (NYT) columnist Ezra Klein claimed during a Wednesday podcast that mainstream media outlets could not get sources to verify whether former President Joe Biden’s health was in decline during his presidency.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson published “Original Sin” on Tuesday, which asserts that Biden’s inner circle hid the former president’s decline. Tapper, on “The Ezra Klein Show,” criticized the media’s failure to cover Biden’s deterioration, but Klein defended the press, saying sources’ reluctance to speak out prevented coverage.

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“There are a lot of failures in this book, and certainly the news media, it’s hard to argue that we were on top of this,” Tapper said. “Even people like you and me who were questioning this publicly, it’s hard to argue that any of us, in retrospect, covered this sufficiently.”

“Although there was — I do — I want to give credit to a bunch of my newsroom colleagues here and Alex and others,” Klein replied. “There were a bunch of stories, there were great Times stories, great Wall Street Journal stories, Axios stories. It was harder to get people to say anything. And it’s hard to get — I mean, you need evidence for stories. But we were trying to crack this.”

While corporate media spent years downplaying Biden’s decline ahead of his calamitous June 2024 debate against President Donald Trump, voters and Republicans raised doubts about his health as far back as his 2020 campaign. Despite the concerns, the NYT published an opinion piece in November 2020 titled “Stop Worrying About Biden’s Age. We Need His Wisdom Right Now.”

“I can’t be bothered with the despicable Sleepy-Joe canard that the right is peddling, except to say that if this is what dementia looks like, I don’t know what to call my own flashes of forgetfulness, in which words, keys and hair scrunchies regularly desert me,” the piece reads.

Although special counsel Robert Hur published a February 2024 report finding that Biden mismanaged classified documents, he opted not to charge him as a jury may perceive him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Corporate media publications such as the NYT and The Washington Post defended Biden’s lucidity and attacked Hur as partisan and deceptive following a transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden revealing memory lapses, like seeming to forget when he began and ended his vice presidency, and the date of his late son Beau’s death.

The NYT reported that the transcript showed “Biden appeared clearheaded most of the time” and that he “went into great detail about many matters.”

NewsNation host Chris Cuomo argued on “CUOMO” Tuesday that “Original Sin” is itself a cover-up — of the media’s political bias in favor of Biden over Trump. He said the former president’s decline was clear, and the media’s reluctance to report on it was not due to ignorance, but its desire for Biden to beat Trump.

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