Now that the 2024 election is over, journalists are admitting they missed the biggest story in American politics — 81-year-old President Joe Biden’s decline — prior to the June presidential debate. The event marked the beginning of the end for Biden, who gave a hoarse, rambling, and incoherent performance, and withdrew from the race weeks later.
Biden’s refusal to withdraw from the presidential race until July is now widely considered one of the main reasons that Democrats lost to Donald Trump again in November, and many journalists and observers now wonder whether the results of the election would have been different if Biden’s competence had been widely interrogated sooner.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that, while presidents “always have gatekeepers” the Biden White House has, throughout his term in office, placed “limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him, and limits around the sources of information he consumed.” But for much of Biden’s presidency, there was little reporting about his mental acuity. On CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford called Biden’s cognitive decline “undercovered and underreported” — something “that became undeniable in the televised debate.”
Many people who viewed Biden’s debate with Trump speculated that the president was exhibiting signs of “sundowning,” a symptom of dementia in which a person enters into a state of confusion at night.
“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,” Crawford said. “It could have changed the scope of the entire election.
In Semafor’s annual list of things that members of the media got wrong this year, several more journalists and pundits acknowledged missing Biden’s decline.
“I thought Joe Biden was going to prove his doubters wrong at the big debate,” said blogger Matt Yglesias. “I know that ever since that humiliation the whole world thinks the entire media was in on a massive coverup, but the fact is many of us (and seemingly many members of his team) genuinely thought the situation was better than it was.”
He added that “it’s more embarrassing to have been gullible and wrong when so many people with no sources and no inside info could see it clearly, but that’s what happened.”
Journalist Josh Barro similarly admitted he missed Biden’s decline, too. “I was shocked and appalled by [Biden’s] performance in the June 27 debate, but I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was,” Barro said, adding that he “had put too much stock in his satisfactory scripted performances” and “misread the president’s avoidance of unscripted settings as a (misguided) effort to keep him on-message rather than a sign that he was incapable of engaging in them in the way he did not very long ago.”
He added that people close to Biden “have essentially been engaged in elder abuse.”
Mehdi Hasan, editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo, said that “2024 was the year I posted my wrongest ever tweet.” The post on X read: “I think Republicans will regret setting the bar so low for Biden, and helping spread the distorted image of him as a guy who is totally out of it, suffering from dementia, no grip on reality, no ability to speak. A very low bar for him to clear tonight.”
Biden did not clear that bar: “A few hours later, he was promising to ‘beat Medicare,” Hasan continued. (Biden “meant to say he beat Big Pharma,” per a spokesperson.) Hasan added, “Like many others, I was completely, utterly, totally, embarrassingly wrong about Biden’s lack of mental competence. (But I remain right about Trump’s!)”
Talk show host Brian Lehrer shared Hasan’s sentiments: “Many callers to my show said Joe Biden was in no shape to run for reelection. I mostly dismissed it as ageism. Then I watched the debate,” he said.
We’ll never know what could have been — but Biden’s debate performance, his subsequent withdrawal, and Harris’ election loss all suggest that the media should have covered Biden’s health more closely, much sooner.
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