Too trusting, too late. How reporters failed the country on Biden

Why didn’t we know?

The release of Jake Tapper’s book about the inside story of President Joe Biden’s health slide raises important questions about how much blame to assign to White House reporters.

Tapper’s book, titled “Original Sin – President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and his Disastrous Choice to Run Again” is co-authored with Politico reporter Alex Thompson. It lays out an infuriating tale of missed signs, tone-deaf denial by Biden’s inner circle, and some terrible judgment by Biden himself.

Much has been written in recent weeks about why Tapper and Thompson are looking backward focusing on Biden’s judgment when so many terrible decisions are being made right now by President Trump. It’s clear to me, after reading the book, that last year’s debacle has directly led to the disaster we’re sentenced to living through for the next four years.

So, what can we learn to avoid a repeat? And, what lessons should journalists take from it? Having the American public stunned to see Biden’s condition at the June 2024 debate tells me that the press corps failed in a major way at keeping Americans informed about a critically important issue.

Not even 20 pages into the book, there are early indications of Biden’s declining health as he campaigned in Iowa prior to the 2020 caucuses.

“At events in Iowa in January 2020, aides privately noted that voters were seeing a diminished man who was not as he had been just two months earlier. Voters were coming out of Biden’s events less likely to support him. Precinct captains disappeared or said no thanks after attending a Biden rally.”

Biden finished fourth in Iowa. At the caucus I attended that night, Biden wasn’t even viable, meaning he didn’t get enough support to get any delegates. I thought to myself at the time, “Wow. Biden is finished. It’s over.”

Of course, it wasn’t. Biden rallied to win the nomination and the White House. He was a competent president, but the decision to run again has cost America dearly.

How did so many reporters miss the story of his decline so badly? Is it really possible for handlers to isolate the president that much from the White House press corps?

To gain insight into what it’s like inside the White House press room, I turned to my Mizzou journalism classmate John Ferrugia, who covered the Reagan White House for CBS News. A different era, but John’s one of the best reporters I’ve known and has had an award-winning career in network and local TV news.

John Ferrugia

Ferrugia says “reporters were not doing their jobs.” In some ways, he thinks they got lazy because after four years of the first Trump administration where reporters were lied to multiple times per day, they let their guards down because Biden was not the inveterate liar that Trump is. “He (Biden) had built up enough credibility compared to Trump that they were willing to accept the denial of any problems,” Ferrugia says. Mistake #1.

The second critical mistake was missing the red flag when Biden stopped doing news conferences or impromptu interviews.

“You have to know the jailers…”

Ferrugia says the biggest problem was reporters not doing enough to confirm their own suspicions. “Covering the White House is like covering prison,” he says. “You have to know the jailers and you have to get your sources through the jailers. When I worked at the White House, Lesley Stahl, Bill Plante and I worked together so what I could get from a staff member that I knew overlapped with what Bill could get from staff members which overlapped with what Lesley could get.”

Ferrugia says those covering the Biden White House badly dropped the ball. ”What’s before your very eyes is you’ve got a president that’s diminished. You can see it happening. And if you’re in the press corps, what are you doing? What’s more important than that? This is the president of the United States. And these people simply were not doing their jobs.”

The rest we know. Americans could not un-see what they saw in the June debate and the Democrats were swimming upstream from that point forward.

Going forward, never again should reporters accept anything they hear from any administration. Lying, misinformation, denial is now commonplace in every White House. Reporters must push harder than ever to get direct access to the president.

“You cannot take things at face value,” Ferrugia says. “You have to triangulate every single fact, especially today. If you’re at the White House and somebody tells you something, I don’t care if that person has been right 100% of the time, you still gotta get a second or third source. If somebody tells you the president is fine and you take that to the bank…you’re a fool.”

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So many wonderful writers in the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Check out this column by Todd Dorman in Cedar Rapids, writing about how promises made by Iowa statehouse leaders following the murder of George Floyd quickly disappeared.

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