Did the media blow it on Biden?

The fight for the nomination between Biden and Kamala Harris was covered extensively. But the public deserved to know more about Biden's fitness for the presidency.

A video still from a CNN segment where the White House pushed back on claims that Biden “froze” at a Hollywood fundraiser. Subsequent reporting has revealed that Biden’s condition at the fundraiser gravely concerned Democrats, and that he hadn’t been able to recognize George Clooney.

Beginning in 2023, I repeatedly criticized both the media and Democratic partisans for failing to take former President Biden’s age and fitness for office seriously enough. This was not exactly a popular opinion at the time: the more common complaint, at least until Biden’s disastrous debate, was that the press was covering the story too much.

So I’ve been pleased to see two new high-profile books on Biden, Fight by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which include extensive reporting on his struggles to hold onto the Democratic nomination and — no less importantly — to manage his presidential duties.¹ If you read these books, it’s pretty clear that Biden was not fit for the presidency by the end of his term — it is, after all, the hardest job in the world. With limited uptime and sometimes more severe symptoms like an inability to recall basic names and facts — Original Sin reports that Biden couldn’t even recognize George Clooney at a Hollywood fundraiser — his Cabinet worried about his capacities in a crisis.

Biden’s allies have pushed back on the claims by challenging critics to point toward specific instances where Biden’s incapacities produced a situation “where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job.” It might be true that the United States faded the risk of an acute red-phone crisis, but Democrats close to Biden feared one. For instance, according to reporting in Fight, after Biden told a group of Democratic governors that he’d have to avoid scheduling events after 8 p.m., one of them wondered what might happen if a foreign policy crisis unfolded late at night. “Somebody better tell the Chinese when they can attack us, because I don’t want [them] to do that and wake him up.”

And as Noah Smith recently pointed out, the world has become considerably less safe since Biden first took office. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has produced the biggest crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold War. Hamas’s October 7 attack and the ongoing war in Gaza reversed years of diplomatic progress in the Middle East. The most important bilateral relationship in the world, between the United States and China, has steadily deteriorated. And India and Pakistan are now on the brink of war.

It is difficult to know how much of the blame to attribute to Biden, President Trump, or factors beyond the United States’ control. As an American citizen, though, I don’t think it’s great for the country that we’ve now had three presidents in a row (counting Trump twice) whose judgment I wouldn’t trust in a crisis. Consider, for instance, Biden’s forgetfulness in his interviews with special counsel Robert Hur, which led to Hur describing Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Those occurred just as the war in the Middle East was unfolding; in fact, Biden had just gotten off the phone with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It probably ought to have been President Harris, not Biden, representing American interests in the crisis, with Biden resting at home after having resigned the presidency.

Meanwhile, Biden’s domestic agenda was undermined by his chronic inability to make decisions, and particularly to set priorities for the huge amount of stimulus spending that contributed to inflation but produced few “shovel-ready projects”. And that’s not to mention the greatest indictment of Biden’s decision-making, which was his choice to run for president again.

Why didn’t we know about this sooner?

Democrats close to Biden, appropriately, are receiving considerable blame for shielding him and covering up his condition; for instance, some of the same advisors who hectored reporters for speculating publicly on Biden’s health were privately discussing putting him in a wheelchair, Original Sin reports.

But I’m not sure the media should be taking a victory lap for this exactly, instead of reflecting on its own role. Given that we’re talking about the guy in charge of the nuclear codes, it would have been nice to know about all this in 2023 or 2024 once the problems had become more acute.

Why these facts didn’t come to light sooner is a complicated question. Some of it, undoubtedly, is that the people around Biden were keeping a tight ship until the consequences of the political disaster he produced for Democrats became fully apparent on Election Day last year. “Almost all” of the interviews for Original Sin occurred after the election, Tapper and Thompson have said. For their part, Allen and Parnes said in Fight that all of their interviews were conducted on background, meaning that they were allowed to use the information but not to attribute it to specific individuals. That method of reporting, while a common journalistic technique, can take a long time to calibrate and cross-check, as journalists may want confirmation from several unnamed sources if they lack people willing to go on the record.

I’d argue that people close to Biden who were aware of his condition had a patriotic duty to inform the public about it. But Democrats have a culture of ostracizing those who piss within the tent. Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman who mounted a late and unsuccessful challenge to Biden, said he was blackballed from MSNBC after speaking openly about Biden. While that might be sour grapes, it’s easy enough to believe. Consider that Symone Sanders-Townsend, the former press secretary for Bernie Sanders who is now an MSNBC host, recently criticized Democrats who spoke to reporters for an extensive New York Magazine article on Sen. John Fetterman, who has behaved erratically after a 2022 stroke. It ought to be embarrassing to MSNBC, if it considers itself to be a serious news organization, that their talent is discouraging sources from speaking with reporters.

And this tendency to circle the wagons gets worse in the middle of an election campaign. Fundamentally, the question that JD Vance posed last year after Biden finally stepped aside was logical: if Biden wasn’t fit enough to run for another four years, then why was he fit to still be president at all? Democrats were undoubtedly worried about validating that sort of concern. But the result of that attitude was a nominee, Kamala Harris, who was chronically unable or unwilling to distance herself from Biden and who even hired Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who had run Biden’s campaign, to captain her campaign too.

Still, when something is an open secret to the extent that Biden’s condition was among elites — to the extent that many people close to him felt it jeopardized national security — you’d hope for the press to report on it more aggressively.

Instead, the press was engaged in a funny equilibrium on Biden’s age; until the debate, the constant attempts by Democrats to work the refs on the story may have been somewhat effective. Democratic partisans frequently criticized media execs like New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn for daring to cover the story at all, charging him with false equivalence for ignoring Trump-related storylines they saw as more important. Although Kahn sometimes ably pushed back on the critics, until the debate, Biden’s age was rarely the top story in the New York Times or elsewhere.²

Rather, some coverage endorsed the White House party line, particularly in its tendency to characterize claims about Biden’s acuity as “misinformation”. Republican videos that appeared to show Biden in a confused state were dismissed as “cheap fakes,” even though there had been little editing apart from using different camera angles and insiders like Clooney had experienced exactly that sort of confusion when seeing Biden in person.

After the debate, reporting on Biden’s age of course proliferated. But it was treated as a “horse-race” story, meaning the media was primarily interested in the urgent question of whether Harris (or someone else) would replace Biden as the Democratic nominee — and not so much in his fitness for office. Once Biden dropped out, reporting on his age quickly reverted to its previous levels, even though he was still president in a dangerous world and perhaps progressively getting worse.

Biden was increasingly absent throughout his term

But the thing is, you don’t need to have had inside information to suspect Biden’s age was a big problem, and overwhelming majorities of voters figured this out even if the media didn’t. Just looking at actuarial curves suggests a strong possibility of a problem: in particular, the late 70s and early 80s are associated with an inflection point in the increase for dementia symptoms. That Biden was mostly OK toward the start of his term and mostly not OK by the end of it — as the new books suggest — would reflect a fairly typical pattern.

There was also Biden’s increasing absence from the political scene. I’ve compiled data from Roll Call on Biden’s daily schedule to see how often he had at least one public-facing event during the day instead of being entirely out of the public spotlight. This required more work than I thought because there are some ambiguous cases.³ You can check my work by using the spreadsheet below, and undoubtedly, you’ll find a few disagreements, especially since I went through all 1,462 days of Biden’s schedule quickly.

Biden Schedule

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Overall, you can detect a highly statistically significant⁴ decline in Biden’s visibility. He held at least one public event on 69 percent of days in 2021, but then rarely hit that mark from mid-2022 onward, falling to as low as 23 percent of days with a public appearance by August 2024.

The number of extended absences particularly increased. In 2021, Biden had just one stretch where he went four days or more consecutively without a public appearance. But he had four such instances in 2022 and then eight each in 2023 and 2024.

Biden’s schedule also became more irregular. Early in his term, he nearly always had packed weekdays, but then nearly always took weekends off at his home in Delaware. By last year, however, Biden was absent from the public eye even on around one-third of weekdays.

Make no mistake: for a normal person, this is still an extremely busy schedule. But the leader of the free world isn’t a normal person. The president also has lots of commitments that are essentially obligatory, meanwhile, from state dinners with foreign leaders to hosting winning sports teams at the White House. At times, Biden wasn’t doing much beyond this minimum of obligations, or at least not in a way that was verifiable to the public. He gave just four news conferences in 2024 and 2025, for example, the lowest number for any president in a year since Ronald Reagan in 1987.

Journalists, however, can be uncomfortable with probabilistic thinking. Between the debate, the actuarial data on his age, and his increasingly sparse schedule, one ought to have had an extremely strong prior that Biden was not firing on all cylinders. To report this is a hard fact is a higher threshold, however, particularly if sources are unwilling to go on record. So instead, the media essentially compromised with the horse-race framing: they could report on the concerns other Democrats had about Biden as a process or palace intrigue story, but without necessarily validating them or reporting on them further.

So while I appreciate the reporting in the new books, I’m not sure it should count as a case of “better late than never” — or rather, its counterpart, “too little, too late.” The media ought to take away the lesson that rather than being shy about reporting on a president’s medical condition, as it consistently has been since at least the days of FDR, this is instead at the core of its mission in serving the public interest. And, of course, the press ought to be equally tough in reporting on President Trump, who is now the same age as Biden was at the start of his term and will be 82 by the time his term ends.

1. I read Fight cover-to-cover. I haven’t read an advance copy of Original Sin, which will be published next week, though I did read the extensive excerpt of the book in the New Yorker.

2. The critics who doubt this didn’t do their homework: it’s easy to cherry-pick data from a publication like the NYT, which publishes on the order of 200 to 250 stories a day.

3. I consider the following to be public-facing events: press conferences, bill signings, public speeches (including those delivered virtually), campaign events (including fundraisers), ceremonies hosted at the White House to open press, meetings with foreign leaders (including by phone), meetings with elected officials, touring disaster sites, touring local businesses, media hits and participating in meetings with nonpartisan committees.

I don’t include meetings with the vice president or Cabinet officials, private briefings, travel, attendance at Biden’s regular church, exercise like golf outings, or private visits to friends or family.

4. A logistic regression analysis, where the dependent variable is whether or not Biden held a public event and the independent variable is the day in office, finds less than a 1-in-1,000 chance that this pattern occurred by chance alone.