Guardian:

Bitter tensions as reporters feel misled by White House over Biden health

Press briefings become flashpoint as journalists criticise culture of denial and non-disclosure around the president

Robert Tait in Washington

Sat 13 Jul 2024 19.00 AEST

It was the moment when long-simmering media resentment at a seemingly opaque White House broke through the surface with startling intensity.

With Joe Biden’s candidacy teetering in the wake of last month’s alarming debate showing, journalists who had covered his presidency full-time for years suddenly asserted that it lacked that most basic political element: credibility.

The trigger was the revelation – disclosed in several news outlets – that a specialist in Parkinson’s disease had visited the White House eight times in as many months. The press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, was forced in a live televised briefing on to the defensive over a supposed lack of transparency.

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“My first [question] to you is on the credibility of this White House when it comes to talking about the president’s health,” the Associated Press correspondent, Zeke Miller, asked Jean-Pierre, who, taken aback, responded by calling for “a little respect”.

The exchange quickly devolved into an angry back-and-forth over whether Jean-Pierre had given an accurate picture about the president’s health and her continuing refusal to confirm the name of the visiting specialist, despite it already being in the public domain. The White House ultimately clarified matters in a subsequent news release that confirmed the specialist as Kevin Cannard and explained that he had visited the White House in January to carry out the neurological part of Biden’s annual medical check-up.

Yet the flare-up went beyond one narrow episode.

Many journalists increasingly feel they have been bamboozled by a White House culture of denial and non-disclosure. People who pride themselves in holding power to account in the world’s leading democracy have been asking how they could have been so blinded to Biden’s diminishing state before it burst into the open so vividly on the debate stage in Atlanta.

At least some have reached the conclusion they have been misled by a campaign of obfuscation by White House staff – some of whom themselves privately complain of feeling deprived of access to the president that their seniority would normally have assured.

Wider staff access, the argument runs, could have given more people a clearer picture of whether Biden was in decline – which, in turn, would have created a higher chance of the true state of his functioning coming to light.

But Biden’s age-related decline was a media issue long before his disintegration at the debate, which the Biden campaign asked for partly in an effort to discredit such speculation. Little more than a week beforehand, widely circulating videos purporting to depict the president in varying states of confusion were reported in several respected outlets as tendentiously-edited “cheap fakes”.

“The evidence was there for people to see, and it’s somewhat disingenuous in the press corps to say, well, you know, we were kept in the dark,” said W Joseph Campbell, professor emeritus of communication of American University in Washington.

“Trump was ranting about Biden’s troubles and his gaffes in the 2020 campaign, so I think it depends on what outlets you were following. And to use a phrase the administration seems to be employing these days, this is a big-boy town and you find your news where you can – it doesn’t necessarily have to be ladled out to you by the White House press office.”

Yet those who did report the matter quickly found themselves rounded on by an outraged White House. When the Wall Street Journal published a 3,000-word front-page article in early June carrying detailed anecdotes that questioned Biden’s cognitive faculties, an administration spokesman, Andrew Bates, dismissed the stories as “false claims” made by Republicans.

The article – which has since been vindicated by reports in other US news sources, including the New York Times – was also attacked by the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a Biden supporter who later called on him to stand aside after the debate.

In a social media post showing that disquiet over Biden’s cognitive faculties was neither secret nor new, James Rosen, White House correspondent of the hard-right Newsmax outlet, recalled being ostracised after asking Biden in a press conference two and a half years ago about polling showing public concern about his perceived decline.

“When I asked Potus on January 19 2022, ‘with utmost respect for your life accomplishments and the high office you hold’, why the electorate harboured such profound concerns about his cognitive fitness, it was considered rude, and I was blackballed in briefings for eight months,” he wrote on X the day after the debate, accompanying his post with a transcript of the exchange.

Just as the whisperings over the president’s age and health have escalated into a roar, so too have the long-running tensions between the administration and the New York Times, which this week published its second editorial in 10 days urging Biden to end his campaign.

The calls have been in line with similar pleas from rival outlets but animus may have been sharpened by a lack of access to the president, keenly felt by an organisation that styles itself as America’s newspaper of record.

“The newspaper carries its own singular obsession with the president, aggrieved over his refusal to give the paper a sit-down interview that Publisher AG Sulzberger and other top editors believe to be its birthright,” Politico reported earlier this year.

Biden has given fewer press conferences and media interviews than any US president since Ronald Reagan, in what now looks like a deliberate strategy to conceal his deterioration. Trump – who has frequently denounced the media as “enemies of the people” – gave nearly three times more news conferences and interviews in office than Biden.

With a rash of hastily organised interviews and a high-profile news conference at Thursday’s close of the Nato summit, the administration is now trying to rectify that – a panicked tactical change which, if it results in more verbal flubs, may only serve to justify the previous approach.

It is an unintended irony that the White House has been shielding Biden from media accountability – a key component of the democratic process – and rubbishing questions over his age in an effort to maintain his credibility as a self-proclaimed defender of democracy and a bulwark against Trump’s authoritarian visions, which the administration insists is inimical to press freedom.

That circle, says Campbell, cannot easily be squared.

“It does seem to be in conflict with this greater goal as a protector or defender of democracy if you’re protecting the chief executive for an extended period of time, and then really criticising any attempts to pierce the veil.”