Joe Biden’s decline has, on one of America’s longest-running current affairs shows, been labelled the most underreported story of 2024.
The designation was made on CBS’s Face The Nation, which has been airing since 1954, by Jan Crawford, the network’s chief legal correspondent, after the show’s moderator, Major Garrett, asked reporters in a panel discussion to identify the most uncovered issues in a review of the year’s events.
“Undercovered and underreported. That would be, to me, Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in the televised debate,” Crawford said in Sunday’s broadcast.
She was referring to the Junepresidential debate between Biden and Donald Trump in Atlanta, where the president’s confused display triggered deep concern among Democrats about his ability to win the election. Biden’s debate performance ultimately led to him withdrawing as the party’s nominee in favour of Kamala Harris.
Crawford castigated fellow journalists for not shedding light much earlier on the effect of ageing on the now 82-year-old Biden’s prowess.
“We should have much more forcefully questioned whether he was fit for office for another four years, which could have led to a primary for the Democrats,” she said. “It could have changed the scope of the entire election.”
Crawford also voiced astonishment over recent reporting – disclosed in a profile in the Washington Post about Biden’s reflections on his presidency – suggesting that he regretted abandoning his campaign and believed he would have beaten Trump in last month’s poll.
“Yet still – incredibly – we read in the Washington Post that his advisers are saying that he regrets that he dropped out of the race, [and] that he thinks he could have beaten Trump. And I think that is either delusional or they’re gaslighting the American people,” she said.
Soul-searching among the US media about its failure to interrogate Biden’s supposed loss of acuity is not new. In the months since the debate, members of the White House press corps have pointed at the administration’s press team, saying questions about Biden’s physical and cognitive abilities triggered harsh pushback from the White House while the president’s appearances were tightly controlled
One journalist who said he had raised the matter years earlier reported being “blackballed” in White House briefings afterwards.
Crawford – who has taught journalism at American University – cited a recent Wall Street Journal report that chronicled how Biden’s advisers had worked throughout his four-year term to restrict access to the president as his functioning abilities “diminished”.
Significantly, given Biden’s reported belief that he could have won last month’s election, the report – published just before Christmas – suggested the president was not talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing Trump. Instead, they sent memos on their findings to senior campaign staff, but saw no evidence that Biden personally saw the data they were sending.
In July, as pressure mounted on him to step aside after the debate, Biden surprised senior Democrats by describing the presidential race as a toss-up when polls consistently showed Trump ahead by increasing margins.
The Journal also described how press aides were told by senior staff to exclude negative reports about him when they were preparing news stories for Biden to view
Senior Democrats in Congress also complained of a lack access. Adam Smith – who was among the first Democrats to call on Biden withdraw after June’s debate – said he was unable to reach Biden to warn him of misgivings in the run-up to the botched military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, at a time when Smith chaired the House armed services committee.
“The Biden White House was more insulated than most,” Smith said. “I spoke with Barack Obama on a number of occasions when he was president, and I wasn’t even chairman of the committee.”
The Wall Street Journal published a report detailing evidence of Biden’s supposed cognitive slide more than three weeks before the Atlanta debate. The report triggered an angry denunciation from the White House, which complained that the reporting relied mainly on Republican or anonymous sources.
