NYT Did The Exact Opposite Of ‘Report Deeply’ On Biden’s Decline

All of the dying media are in perfect sync right now unashamedly acting like they were just as victimized as everyone else by Democrats who “hid” Joe Biden’s cognitive free fall when he was president. But what New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said with a straight face this week about his own newspaper’s role in the sordid affair truly took a special kind of brass.

In a speech at Notre Dame on Tuesday, which was then fashioned into a 5,500-word op-ed, Sulzberger declared without laughing, “A free people need a free press,” before going on about how virtuous and fair the Times is.

“We’re not the resistance,” he said. “We are nobody’s opposition. We’re also nobody’s cheerleader. Our loyalty is to the truth and to a public that deserves to know it. That is the distinct role that independent news organizations like The Times play in our democracy.”

Apologies to any readers with a strong gag reflex.

The best part, though, was when Sulzberger claimed that the Times is just as tough on Democrats as it is on Republicans, and as an example, he earnestly cited the paper’s coverage of Biden’s plainly disintegrating mental faculties.

“President Joe Biden and his aides, for example, frequently lashed out at journalists and news organizations who dared to ask questions about his age and fitness, even as they went to historic lengths to avoid unscripted exchanges with reporters,” he said. “I know this firsthand, because Times journalists reported deeply on these questions and called attention to his evasion of the press. President Biden’s White House and his supporters attacked them for it constantly.”

It’s enough that the dying media are feigning a sense of shock at the extent of Biden’s deterioration, given that everyone with vision saw it and the same media denied that reality for the sake of propping up Democrats heading into the 2024 election. But for Sulzberger to assert that his publication “reported deeply” on the issue requires sociopathic levels of gall.

Not even close. To the contrary, the Times, like every other dominant (though dying) news outlet — CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, Atlantic magazine, NPR — was a principal player in the conspiracy to convince voters that what they saw with their own eyes wasn’t real.

After a slew of videos in summer 2024 showed Biden appearing confused or unsure of where he was in public, the Times called them “misleading” and “lacking context.”

When a special counsel in February 2024 released his assessment that Biden presented as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and with “diminished faculties,” the Times enlisted a neuroscientist to explain it away as “normal” for anyone “to be more forgetful as you get older.” The paper also consulted “medical experts” who said the special counsel’s opinions “were not based on science and that its methods bore no resemblance to those that doctors use to assess possible cognitive impairment.”

Apparently the only NYT news article to seriously consider the ramifications of the special counsel report was written by the Times’ chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, who took it as an opportunity to put it in the context of Donald Trump. “Mr. Trump has suffered his own bouts of public perplexity lately,” wrote Baker, adding that “neither candidate seems eager” to discuss his respective age.

See? They both struggle! Guess it’s a wash. What’s for lunch?

In November 2022, as Biden was readying to turn 80, the Times fielded yet more “experts” to offer that “people in their 80s who are active, engaged and have a sense of purpose can remain productive and healthy.” The author of that piece also said that Biden’s “wisdom and experience” were “important factors to consider.” Can’t forget about those while watching Biden wander into the woods!

All of Biden’s physical deficits were apparent from the beginning, before Biden even became president. And yet the Times repeatedly brushed it aside as a “stutter.”

“Joe Biden’s Stutter Is His Superpower,” New York Times, September 2020

Only after Biden’s infamous debate performance in late June 2024, during which —for the first time of the campaign — he could be directly compared to his opponent in the same room, did the Times acknowledge the president’s degeneration. Democrat leaders, including nursing-home heartthrob George Clooney, had determined it was time to dump Biden as the nominee, and the Times readied to do its part.

Five days after the debate, voters were finally treated to a four-person-bylined article in the Times that characterized Biden’s debate performance as “devastating” and provided testimony from sources indicating that “he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.” A week later, it was the Times that published Clooney’s op-ed calling for a new nominee and for party officials to get on board and do the same.

I’m sure the Biden people were mad at the Times for those pieces, but that wasn’t deep reporting. It was political convenience. They knew, just as everyone knew, that Democrats would definitely lose the election with Biden as the nominee. So they pulled the alarm and broke the emergency glass.

Sulzberger wants to rewrite the record of the “paper of record.” He can’t.