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The whole topic burst into the national conversation with the release on Thursday of special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified information, which concluded that no criminal charges were warranted but that Biden had displayed “poor memory” in his interactions with investigators. The New York Times caused a furor with an eruption of stories on Biden and aging. CNN, meanwhile, drew mockery for this attempt at putting the issue in 10 words:
And they wonder why we say the media is failing us. Shame on you @CNN! pic.twitter.com/Vsf8VxUpVo
— Skyleigh Heinen-Uhrich (@Sky_Lee_1)
February 11, 2024 As the debate churns, we need to look at the model laid out by MSNBC — one of institutional denial and stubborn unwillingness to level with its viewers.
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In a discussion last Thursday night on Biden’s age and fitness for office, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said, “He rides a bike.” With that remark, Maddow put forth one of MSNBC’s more creative means of soft-pedaling the president’s declining faculties. Here was a real problem for MSNBC. An issue that received extensive rotation on Fox News — the conspiracy channel — was now showing up in a Justice Department document. In a nearly 400-page pdf, no less. What ensued on MSNBC airwaves was a pushback effort highlighted by Maddow’s velo-polemic plus a series of far wonkier talking points repeated well into the night, cheating every one of the network’s viewers.
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On the Biden-fitness-for-office front, one incident has stuck with me. In September 2022, Biden spoke at an event on hunger and nutrition at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington. In his remarks, he delivered shout-outs to supportive lawmakers. “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” the president said as he scanned the room. “I didn’t think she was — she wasn’t going to be here — to help make this a reality.” That was a reference to Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who had died in a car crash more than a month before the event, prompting Biden to issue a statement offering his condolences. Asked about the president’s calling out for a deceased lawmaker, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre struck a posture of implausible denial, saying the late congresswoman was “top of mind” for Biden.
Here was a twofer for any news organization — a moment of gobsmacking breakdown by the president followed by some gaslighting from the press secretary’s lectern. NPR, The Washington Post and the New York Times were among the many outlets that wrote it up. Yet MSNBC didn’t air it, as pointed out by media critics from the Hill, Fox News and Newsbusters. There was no excuse, considering that the “Where’s Jackie” episode — as well as Jean-Pierre’s subsequent obstructionism — was best appreciated on video.
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Other networks, including CNN, also didn’t air the “Where’s Jackie” moment, an omission that merits further inquiry in light of recent events. MSNBC, though, has a particular place among cable news networks in shielding Biden from age-related criticism. Why didn’t it cover the story? We asked the network and have yet to receive a response.
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace interviewed then-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain just days after the “Where’s Jackie?” episode, a perfect time for some accountability. As she approached the issue, Wallace sounded as though she were going to take it head-on, saying she was posing “a question to you that I think our viewers won’t like — I’m not sure you will like.” But the question wasn’t about the actual episode; it was about what happened in a subsequent meeting between the president and Walorski’s grieving family. After Klain gave an unspectacular answer, Wallace said, “We’ll leave it at that. Enough has been made of that story.” Viewers were entitled to wonder what she was talking about.
As for MSNBC’s general coverage of Biden’s age over the past three years? Those tens of thousands of hours of programming are difficult to abridge. I asked MSNBC for segments in which it has covered the president’s various slipups, and I’m awaiting specific examples. Coverage does include mentions of polling that shows concerns among voters about Biden’s age, and there were at least a couple segments pegged to the September column by The Post’s David Ignatius on why Biden should call it quits after one term. MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle, in an interview with Biden in May, posed this bubble-wrapped question: “It is fair to say that there’s not a Fortune 500 company in the world looking to hire a CEO in his 80s. So why would an 82-year-old Joe Biden be the right person for the most important job in the world?” Biden ate it up.
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The release of the Hur report smoked out the network’s position. Again, there were concessions that Biden is elderly and may have memory issues, and MSNBC.com published a solid piece on the issues at hand. In hour after hour of its initial coverage, however, the network scrambled to discredit the findings — or at least those dealing with Biden’s memory. The counteroffensive against Hur’s work splintered into a number of arguments, each of which got a lot of rotation on the network: Witnesses under oath commonly testify that they don’t recall things. Biden’s detractors couldn’t point to anything substantive — like a policy or initiative — that had been mishandled because of Biden’s lapses. Hur, a Trump appointee, was overstepping his boundaries by including gratuitous information while declining to prosecute, just as then-FBI Director James B. Comey did with the Hillary Clinton email investigation in 2016 — “It’s nasty and snarky for no reason,” MSNBC host Joy Reid said. And Attorney General Merrick Garland had screwed up by allowing such “garbage” in a Justice Department report, to quote MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.
“It is so clearly sort of a partisan swipe,” said Andrew Weissmann, a former top Justice Department prosecutor and MSNBC legal analyst.
Hur-oriented harrumphing colonized MSNBC airwaves to such a point that it overshadowed what the report actually said about Biden’s memory, which was a fair bit. As far back as 2017, notes the report, Biden showed memory issues in recorded conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer. Things got “worse,” says the report, when Biden sat with investigators over two days in the aftermath of Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel — a stressful time, to be sure, for interviews of any sort. Biden couldn’t say when he’d started or finished his term as vice president, according to the report. As for his late son: “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” notes the report. And in a detail that hasn’t gotten its due in media reports, Biden told investigators that he differed on Afghanistan policy with Gen. Karl Eikenberry. Actually, the report says, Eikenberry was an “ally” cited by Biden in an important memo to then-President Barack Obama.
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The legal ethics of including such material in a special counsel report are legitimate grist for cable news — they go straight to the integrity of the Justice Department. Yet media outlets receive newsworthy information from people playing fast and loose with ethics all the time, from overstepping prosecutors to out-and-out slimeballs and hackers. And then they run with it. In segment after segment, MSNBC has behaved as though the information from Hur had been printed on sheets of black mold — such was the network-wide allergy to it.
The cynical takeaway here: whoop-de-do, big surprise. MSNBC is America’s liberal cable news network; it hired Jen Psaki, Biden’s first White House press secretary, as well as Symone D. Sanders Townsend, chief spokesperson for Vice President Harris. As Axios reported, Biden has an obsession with “Morning Joe” and regularly consults with co-host Scarborough and program contributors. Jeff Weaver — a senior adviser to Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.), who last year launched a primary bid for the Democratic nomination and told Politico that he’d been dissed by MSNBC — issued this statement: “Pretending that the special counsel’s report is merely a partisan attack flies in the face of what Americans can see for themselves — unless they watch MSNBC.”
On Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press,” Psaki ripped coverage of the Hur report by noting that Trump had just “suggested that Vladimir Putin should have free rein in attacking NATO allies. And what did we see when we wake up this morning? Wall-to-wall coverage of whether a guy who’s four years older than his opponent is too old to be president.” Fair point. Trump, who has his own record of lapses, inevitably makes critical coverage of his rivals look like small potatoes. But fierce and disinterested coverage of the president — whatever its timing and circumstances — is one norm we can’t let Trump ruin.
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There was a time when debates over how media outlets covered presidential campaigns had a relaxed, academic feel to them. Among many other quaint aspects of American life, Donald Trump destroyed that luxury by obliterating the viability of comparisons between himself — a lying wreck of a man — and his opponents. This bundling problem came into focus last week, as concerns again arose over the mental fitness of 81-year-old President Biden.
The whole topic burst into the national conversation with the release on Thursday of special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified information, which concluded that no criminal charges were warranted but that Biden had displayed “poor memory” in his interactions with investigators. The New York Times caused a furor with an eruption of stories on Biden and aging. CNN, meanwhile, drew mockery for this attempt at putting the issue in 10 words:
And they wonder why we say the media is failing us. Shame on you @CNN! pic.twitter.com/Vsf8VxUpVo
As the debate churns, we need to look at the model laid out by MSNBC — one of institutional denial and stubborn unwillingness to level with its viewers.
In a discussion last Thursday night on Biden’s age and fitness for office, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said, “He rides a bike.” With that remark, Maddow put forth one of MSNBC’s more creative means of soft-pedaling the president’s declining faculties. Here was a real problem for MSNBC. An issue that received extensive rotation on Fox News — the conspiracy channel — was now showing up in a Justice Department document. In a nearly 400-page pdf, no less. What ensued on MSNBC airwaves was a pushback effort highlighted by Maddow’s velo-polemic plus a series of far wonkier talking points repeated well into the night, cheating every one of the network’s viewers.
On the Biden-fitness-for-office front, one incident has stuck with me. In September 2022, Biden spoke at an event on hunger and nutrition at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington. In his remarks, he delivered shout-outs to supportive lawmakers. “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” the president said as he scanned the room. “I didn’t think she was — she wasn’t going to be here — to help make this a reality.” That was a reference to Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who had died in a car crash more than a month before the event, prompting Biden to issue a statement offering his condolences. Asked about the president’s calling out for a deceased lawmaker, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre struck a posture of implausible denial, saying the late congresswoman was “top of mind” for Biden.
Here was a twofer for any news organization — a moment of gobsmacking breakdown by the president followed by some gaslighting from the press secretary’s lectern. NPR, The Washington Post and the New York Times were among the many outlets that wrote it up. Yet MSNBC didn’t air it, as pointed out by media critics from the Hill, Fox News and Newsbusters. There was no excuse, considering that the “Where’s Jackie” episode — as well as Jean-Pierre’s subsequent obstructionism — was best appreciated on video.
Other networks, including CNN, also didn’t air the “Where’s Jackie” moment, an omission that merits further inquiry in light of recent events. MSNBC, though, has a particular place among cable news networks in shielding Biden from age-related criticism. Why didn’t it cover the story? We asked the network and have yet to receive a response.
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace interviewed then-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain just days after the “Where’s Jackie?” episode, a perfect time for some accountability. As she approached the issue, Wallace sounded as though she were going to take it head-on, saying she was posing “a question to you that I think our viewers won’t like — I’m not sure you will like.” But the question wasn’t about the actual episode; it was about what happened in a subsequent meeting between the president and Walorski’s grieving family. After Klain gave an unspectacular answer, Wallace said, “We’ll leave it at that. Enough has been made of that story.” Viewers were entitled to wonder what she was talking about.
As for MSNBC’s general coverage of Biden’s age over the past three years? Those tens of thousands of hours of programming are difficult to abridge. I asked MSNBC for segments in which it has covered the president’s various slipups, and I’m awaiting specific examples. Coverage does include mentions of polling that shows concerns among voters about Biden’s age, and there were at least a couple segments pegged to the September column by The Post’s David Ignatius on why Biden should call it quits after one term. MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle, in an interview with Biden in May, posed this bubble-wrapped question: “It is fair to say that there’s not a Fortune 500 company in the world looking to hire a CEO in his 80s. So why would an 82-year-old Joe Biden be the right person for the most important job in the world?” Biden ate it up.
The release of the Hur report smoked out the network’s position. Again, there were concessions that Biden is elderly and may have memory issues, and MSNBC.com published a solid piece on the issues at hand. In hour after hour of its initial coverage, however, the network scrambled to discredit the findings — or at least those dealing with Biden’s memory. The counteroffensive against Hur’s work splintered into a number of arguments, each of which got a lot of rotation on the network: Witnesses under oath commonly testify that they don’t recall things. Biden’s detractors couldn’t point to anything substantive — like a policy or initiative — that had been mishandled because of Biden’s lapses. Hur, a Trump appointee, was overstepping his boundaries by including gratuitous information while declining to prosecute, just as then-FBI Director James B. Comey did with the Hillary Clinton email investigation in 2016 — “It’s nasty and snarky for no reason,” MSNBC host Joy Reid said. And Attorney General Merrick Garland had screwed up by allowing such “garbage” in a Justice Department report, to quote MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.
“It is so clearly sort of a partisan swipe,” said Andrew Weissmann, a former top Justice Department prosecutor and MSNBC legal analyst.
Hur-oriented harrumphing colonized MSNBC airwaves to such a point that it overshadowed what the report actually said about Biden’s memory, which was a fair bit. As far back as 2017, notes the report, Biden showed memory issues in recorded conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer. Things got “worse,” says the report, when Biden sat with investigators over two days in the aftermath of Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel — a stressful time, to be sure, for interviews of any sort. Biden couldn’t say when he’d started or finished his term as vice president, according to the report. As for his late son: “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” notes the report. And in a detail that hasn’t gotten its due in media reports, Biden told investigators that he differed on Afghanistan policy with Gen. Karl Eikenberry. Actually, the report says, Eikenberry was an “ally” cited by Biden in an important memo to then-President Barack Obama.
The legal ethics of including such material in a special counsel report are legitimate grist for cable news — they go straight to the integrity of the Justice Department. Yet media outlets receive newsworthy information from people playing fast and loose with ethics all the time, from overstepping prosecutors to out-and-out slimeballs and hackers. And then they run with it. In segment after segment, MSNBC has behaved as though the information from Hur had been printed on sheets of black mold — such was the network-wide allergy to it.
The cynical takeaway here: whoop-de-do, big surprise. MSNBC is America’s liberal cable news network; it hired Jen Psaki, Biden’s first White House press secretary, as well as Symone D. Sanders Townsend, chief spokesperson for Vice President Harris. As Axios reported, Biden has an obsession with “Morning Joe” and regularly consults with co-host Scarborough and program contributors. Jeff Weaver — a senior adviser to Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.), who last year launched a primary bid for the Democratic nomination and told Politico that he’d been dissed by MSNBC — issued this statement: “Pretending that the special counsel’s report is merely a partisan attack flies in the face of what Americans can see for themselves — unless they watch MSNBC.”
On Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press,” Psaki ripped coverage of the Hur report by noting that Trump had just “suggested that Vladimir Putin should have free rein in attacking NATO allies. And what did we see when we wake up this morning? Wall-to-wall coverage of whether a guy who’s four years older than his opponent is too old to be president.” Fair point. Trump, who has his own record of lapses, inevitably makes critical coverage of his rivals look like small potatoes. But fierce and disinterested coverage of the president — whatever its timing and circumstances — is one norm we can’t let Trump ruin.
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