How the media circus was — and wasn't — responsible for the end of Biden's reelection bid
There has been so much news in such a short period of time it’s been hard to keep up.
The latest whirlwind cycle culminated — well, maybe — in President Joe Biden’s announcement on Sunday, July 21 that he was dropping out of the presidential race. Media duly jumped in, despite Biden simply making the announcement by social media on an otherwise lazy Sunday.
Fitting.
Because make no mistake, this has been a media-driven story since about 20 seconds after Biden started speaking in his June debate with Donald Trump. That’s when the texts and tweets began. What was going on? Biden was off, he was so old, he was not up to the task. His voice was weak. He rambled, froze. He stood in split-screen with his mouth hanging open while Trump spoke.
And then it began.
The New York Times called for Biden to quit the day after the debate
Most stories, no matter how big, follow a predictable pattern. The news breaks, reporters report on it, columnists and news personalities offer their opinion. On to the next story. But sometimes a story takes on a momentum of its own beyond that, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, and that’s what happened here. By the time Biden dropped out of the race it had long seemed like a foregone conclusion, his protestations along the way notwithstanding.
It started quickly. Since the debate websites and airwaves and news pages have been filled with stories, opinions and polls. The New York Times called for Biden to drop out of the race the day after the debate. The next day David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, did the same in the (online) pages of his magazine.
The stories with unnamed sources began. “Conversations with high-level Democrats with knowledge of the situation who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of an ongoing story” — those kinds of sources. (I’m paraphrasing in my description, but not much.) Translation: The people I spoke to want Biden off the ticket but they’re scared to say so in public, but this story is too big to ignore them so we’re just going to go with it.
Soon, however, some Democrats did say so in public. This was duly reported, as it should be. It also added momentum.
Biden went on the offensive, sort of. He sat for an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. Biden was … fine. He held a press conference at the end of a NATO summit and showed command of foreign policy. He also used Trump’s name when talking about Vice President Kamala Harris; earlier in the day he referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin.” One step up, two steps back.
Biden did some other interviews, but it was too little, too late.
Biden supporters accused media of protecting Trump
“Every appearance he made, people were watching,” ABC News’ Martha Raddatz said. “People were judging every word, every hesitation.”
Meanwhile Biden supporters, particularly vocal on social media, began complaining. Why was the media protecting Trump, who lied his way through the debate? Why was Biden’s age more important than Trump’s 34 felony convictions? Why is the media ignoring that? Unsubscribe from the New York Times! Or whatever media outlet ticked you off most recently.
The media weren’t ignoring any of that, by the way. The reason the people complaining about all of these things even know about them is because of the stories written and broadcast about them. But media can get distracted by the latest shiny object, and Biden’s debate performance was definitely that.
It was also a really important story. The Philadelphia Inquirer won praise from this crowd when it called on Trump to step down because of his “bombastic litany of lies, hyperbole, bigotry, ignorance, and fear mongering.”
Fair enough.
In the middle of all this, Trump survived an assassination attempt on July 13. Two days later the Republican National Convention began. Trump was a changed man, the networks told us, based on their reporting. He tore up his original convention speech and rewrote it.
I shudder to think what the original must have said. Trump did begin with a message of unity but it quickly devolved into the usual flood of lies and ugly attacks. It was genuinely bizarre, if not entirely unexpected.
This, too, was duly reported — and the next day the stories went back to, “What about Biden?”
Why didn't we know more about Biden's health?
Other people complained about reporting on Biden’s health — or the lack of it. Why didn’t we know about his frailty before the debate? Why couldn’t the White House press corps penetrate the wall of protection around the president? Were they protecting Biden or just incompetent? This, too, isn’t wholly fair. There had been reporting on Biden’s mental acumen, though not enough (and it was shot down by the same people who blamed the media for protecting Trump).
But it’s also true that the extent of Biden’s decline caught people by surprise, including to a lot of the journalists covering him. This led to a lot of those unnamed-sources stories, as they played catch-up.
This truly has been a news cycle like no other. Massive, historic stories have been breaking one after the other. But the media have also become part of the story. It’s perhaps inevitable in an age of 24-hour cable news, endless social-media rants and a nation so divided politically that it would play out this way.
Now, finally, mercifully, it’s on to the next thing, whatever that thing turns out to be.
'An absolute earthquake': How Fox News and CNN reacted to Biden dropping out
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Biden re-election bid ends — how media made it a foregone conclusion