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Clueless or complicit.
That’s Ted Cruz’s take on the media’s coverage of Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity, which came under scrutiny after the president publicly unraveled in last week’s debate.
On Monday, the Republican senator from Texas tweeted to me: “There are only two options: (1) the Dems & their media shills were so clueless that they had no idea that Biden is mentally incompetent, or (2) they KNEW & they deliberately LIED about it. Both are damning. I vote #2.”
Cruz isn’t the only one taking aim at the media after the debate.
Right-wing commentators are imagining that news outlets covered up Biden’s frailty for years. Some on the left are asserting that the White House press corps should have probed Biden’s health more closely, which could have prompted a fuller primary process. Journalists (including the one writing this column) are doing some reassessing of their own, asking if the clearly aging 81-year-old president was given the benefit of the doubt too many times.
But I’m sorry, Ted Cruz, there are more than two options.
And after talking to top reporters on the White House beat, what emerges is a far more nuanced picture.
The national media wasn’t dodging the story: The biggest newspapers in the country published lengthy stories about Biden’s mental fitness. The public wasn’t in the dark about Biden’s age: Most voters (67 percent in a June Gallup poll) thought he was too old to be president even before the debate. But questions about Biden’s fitness for office were not emphasized as much as they should have been.
That’s the third option: The stories should have been tougher, the volume should have been louder.
“The hard thing about ‘Biden is old’ as a story is that it had a dead-end quality to it,” said Charlotte Alter, senior correspondent for Time magazine. “Biden is old. We know. So now what? You can’t turn back time. You can’t make him younger.”
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