How Biden’s bad debate exposed the legacy media

The American media is in a credibility crisis following President Biden’s car-crash debate performance last week. How is it that so many reporters and pundits failed to reveal the depth of the commander-in-chief’s decline? Public trust in the media is in the basement — but it’s been tailing off since 2008, when the legacy media landscape in the United States fundamentally shifted.  

Before 2008, the legacy media — while always leaning to the political left — had maintained a patina of objectivity. When Bill Clinton lied to the American people about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, they belatedly pounced. When John Kerry’s campaign began to crater, they reluctantly covered it. They were, to be sure, oriented against Republican candidates and policies. But they recognized that their credibility innately relied on the public’s perception that they could put their own biases aside long enough to report accurately even on those with whom they agreed. 

Public trust in the media had been in a steady state of decline since the late 1990s — according to Gallup, 53 percent of Americans said they had a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media in 1997; in 2007, that number was 47 percent. 

Then came Barack Obama. In 2008, the media, in its insistence that Barack Obama was a philosopher-king, decided to adhere to his version of the facts at every available instance. They ignored or downplayed stories that hurt Obama. They insisted that his biggest scandal was the wearing of a beige suit. Obama was simply too godlike a figure for them to resist. They became, for all intents and purposes, extensions of the Democratic White House. And public trust began to crater. In 2008, those who trusted the media dropped to 43 percent. In 2016, with the media’s abominable coverage of the Trump-Hillary race, the number dropped to 32 percent. It recovered slightly over the next five, but then began cratering again: to just 36 percent in 2021, 34 percent in 2022, 32 percent in 2023.  

A consistent pattern of partisan coverage ate away at the media’s credibility, slowly and steadily.  

Then came Joe Biden’s debate collapse last week. And now, all media credibility is gone.  

Ernest Hemingway once described the process of going bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” The same is true of legacy media legitimacy. Legacy media lost the trust of the American people with its coverage of Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, Covid, transgenderism and the Hunter Biden laptop story. But they maintained some semblance of credibility by appealing to “new studies,” the “fog of war,” the difficulty of reporting an ever-evolving set of facts. When their lies were debunked and they were exposed they could simply claim they were just reporting based on the information they had at the time. They were just doing the hard work of Journalisming™ — just trusting the experts, who always slanted their political direction — and could continue congratulating each other for their brave and important work. Then came the Biden presidency. 

Either Biden is senile or he is not. And it does not take an expert in Russian relations, systemic racism or Covid biology to tell the answer to that question. Any child could do it. 

And yet the media kept lying for years. They proclaimed that we were nuts for saying he was addled; that behind closed doors, they had information we didn’t; that it was all partisan hackery. Don’t believe your own eyes. We know more and know what’s best. Trust us.

Then, suddenly, in last week’s debate, Joe Biden blew them up. He volunteered himself into contest where he set the time, place, channel, moderators and rules. There was not an advantage he did not have. And he showed the world that he was fully senile. Unable to get through a sentence. Slack-jawed and glassy-eyed. Hoarse and incoherent. We all saw it. 

The media, which had known all along, saw it too. 

This presented an existential threat to the media apparatus. They’d been defending Biden — lying for him in the same way they did for Obama — but without a safety net. They figured that the Biden campaign itself would be the safety net: that the campaign would never put the Old Man out there if he was likely to implode, that the White House staff would provide some level of plausible deniability for his senility.  

And then the campaign let Biden die onstage, in front of hundreds of millions of people.  

Biden screwed them. And in doing so, he revealed not just that he and the campaign and the White House were liars. He revealed that they, the legacy media, were liars. They were corrupt. They were his tools. 

In the aftermath of the debate, the Biden administration still treated the media this way. They told members of the media to calm down. To take a breath. To stop being “bedwetters.” 

That’s how you treat inferior employees, not independent human beings with the power of judgment. Because that’s what the media are: the Democrats’ employees. 

The media, however, cannot survive being pantsed this way by the man they’re supposed to cover. Biden’s revelatory performance ripped the veil away from their patina of objectivity: because they always knew that he was senile — and they lied about it to protect him. 

Which leaves the media with one choice: to lie some more. They have to pretend outsized outrage at Biden’s performance. They’re shocked — shocked! — to find that there’s been gambling going on at Rick’s! They simply can’t believe it! Who could have known?! How could this have happened?! Why, they talked to Biden just yesterday and he was performing one-man renditions of King Lear — and yet today, he’s babbling like Taber in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest! They’re surprised! They’re appalled!

They’re full of crap. But they have to be, because the alternative is unthinkable: their complete exposure before the American people as tools of the Democratic Party. They have to pretend they could not see that the emperor had no clothes. They truly thought he was dressed! It’s only now that they’ve discovered his balls hanging out in public! 

It’s not going to work. We can all see the game. It’s obvious. And it’s unfixable. There is no way for the media to earn back their credibility on this. At all. Which means a sea change for the media: either they well and truly separate off from their symbiotic relationship with the Democratic Party, or they merge totally with it, and become in name what they’ve always been in fact: the PR wing for the Biden White House. 

Americans have increasingly realized, over the course of decades, that they can’t trust the legacy media. But now that trust has been fractured beyond repair — likely permanently. Which means that either the legacy media redefine themselves, change direction and reorient toward their original purpose — informing the public about relevant information when they get it — or they find themselves in the ash can of history, alongside Joe Biden’s failed presidency.