Looking at the Biden “Cover-Up” Books
In the Columbia Journalism Review, out this morning
Longtime readers of this column may recall that I raised questions about President Biden’s age and the journalism being done (or mostly not being done) around it starting in the Fall of 2023. I returned to that issue the following winter. So when Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, was announced in February, I was especially eager to read it.
Happily, the Columbia Journalism Review agreed to run my review, signing the requisite NDA, and it is being published this morning to accompany the release of the book itself. For both fairness and completeness, CJR’s editors and I thought we should also include two earlier volumes from recent months that have touched on the question of Biden’s age and infirmity, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House and Chris Whipple’s Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History.
The considerable coverage so far of Original Sin has seemed to me to stay mostly on the surface, and to almost entirely omit the responsibility of the press for the Biden debacle. I tried to look a bit more closely at the book’s omissions and inner contradictions, and to think about what it tells us about journalism.
In lieu of a column this week, then, here’s a link to the CJR review. I’d particularly welcome your comments on it. See you again here soon.
PS The CJR review was written, edited and scheduled for publication before President Biden’s recent diagnosis. There’s nothing in it that I would change, but I do wish him all the best personally. He served this country well for many years, and did a great deal of good.
Thanks for this approach to exploring these books. It's clear that the press -- and the country -- needs a better understanding of and more conversations about aging.
No matter the actual contents of this or any book on this subject, you land squarely and correctly on the simple point that it is our (journalists) responsibility to independently evaluate claims about health and mental competence of leadership. The recent failings go in both directions: looking the other way at Bidens slippage, and glib, semi-hysterical diagnosis of Trumps mental states.