The War on Biden

Another example of "democracy" as media despotism

I will begin this post with another recap of the Biden post-debate controversy: This recap mostly intends to be descriptive. In describing that the media is attacking Biden excessively, I do not mean to convey an opinion that Biden does not deserve to be attacked to any extent. Likewise, in appraising Biden’s performance in the pursuit of aims that are from his perspective obviously rational, I am not “rooting” for him. I am a disinterested observer.

A Vehement Defense

I mentioned in Friday’s post, that I had been eased incorrectly into an impression that the media had calmed from the alarmism of the early hours after Biden’s terrible debate; and that, in fact, I realized this to be false while writing the article.

Over the weekend, the media has continued to circle Biden like proverbial sharks, and since Saturday, a number of outlets including the New York Times this morning have published a prima facie irresponsible story regarding a streak of White House visits by Kevin Cannard, neurologist and (these stories would all but put it) “Human Parkinson’s Canary.” I will discuss the unseemly aspects of this story further below.

Meanwhile, Biden called into “Morning Joe” a few hours ago to field questions on his mental fitness and calls for his stepping aside (msnbc.com), delivering a boisterous, acerbic, and rambling but mostly well-played defense of his current standing and future prospects among voters. In this interview, the hosts were hardly eager to allow an impression that Biden’s mental fitness is not a political crisis — delivering instead the familiar American scene of the press attacking a public servant on the grounds that “people are asking” things.

Morning Joe backdrop used during interview

Cohost Mika Brzezinski delivered a particularly indelicate prompt at 9:00 minutes, using the pretext of a question about Biden’s examination history: The question clearly seemed carefully scripted, and yet seeks only to “replay” a topic already implicitly addressed in Biden’s previous interview with Stephanopoulos: What cognitive tests has Biden undergone?

Not only had Biden already answered the question in that prior case, when he (obliquely) batted down the idea of having a new, independent and public neurological evaluation outside of his annual physicals (so there is nothing new he could say except to create a headline by contradicting himself in some way), but Brzezinski’s commentary on the rationale for the question was superfluous to asking it again:

[If someone I knew had a night like Biden’s debate], I’d probably wanna do some sort of work-up, medical work-up, and make sure he’s ok. Have you been tested for any age-related illnesses, pre-Parkinson’s, or anything like that, that might explain, sort-of, having a night like that where you couldn’t finish sentences?

It’s hard to imagine that this pointed phrasing was the product of coordination between the show and the White House; it seems instead to add one more swipe to the media onslaught, seeking to test when Biden will finally be ready for an all-out assault leading to a color revolution within the Democratic ticket.

For his part, the President built on the slow improvements in his focus and energy that have characterized the last week (but have done nothing to staunch the negative press), and the interview generated some confident sound-bites which may improve his appearance in the headlines. He delivered a particularly well-designed response to the question of his detractors within the party, casting himself as the leader whose political savvy was able to correctly predict Democratic success in 2020 and 2022 when his present-day detractors were in the dark. Unlike Stephanopoulos, who was cold and implacable in Friday’s sit-down, the “Morning Joe” hosts allowed Biden to enjoy a bit of old-fashioned Regime Insider-rapport at this and other moments.

The problem with selective media scrutiny

Is it actually good for the press to enquire into the mental fitness of the President, potentially prompting a change of the present or future leadership of the country?

The reader may already be aware that I am no free speech zealot. Yet still, it would seem the only possible answer to the above question is yes — otherwise, why have a free press at all. The corollary to the classic notion that “democracies” require an informed public, in order for the government to represent the will of the people, is that at some point or other free information will bar or remove specific men from office: Otherwise it is obviously and literally useless, as no actual work is being performed in the context of who governs.

But if the answer is “yes, this is good,” then the question once again becomes why this enquiry did not take place sometime in the previous three years. At least some conservative media was already calling this story at the end of 2022, a year which featured not only the following gaffs, but the same masking (absence of facial expression) and flat intonation which the mainstream press just now reports as common signs of Parkinson’s:

(This can be contrasted with the Biden of mid-2021, who was still in possession of somewhat natural expressiveness; see his July 4 remarks (youtube.com).)

In fact, one interpretation in the “discourse” surrounding the media’s current meltdown is that the attacks on Biden are motivated by embarrassment for these years of willful silence: Biden’s debate, by making it impossible to maintain the collective indifference to his rapid decline, indirectly exposed media complicity in “covering up the truth.”

I do not really buy this interpretation of the press’s motives: The parallels with the last-minute negative coverage of Hillary Clinton’s “emails,” possibly handing Trump his 2016 victory, suggest a habit that doesn’t depend on embarrassment. Even if one could (correctly) argue that the press should have scrutinized a nepotism appointment Secretary of State’s “opsec” long before 2016, there is no reason to imagine anyone in the media feeling that the story reflected a lapse of duty on their part; yet they still latched onto it once it emerged. Meanwhile in the present year, the vindication of the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop by the DOJ in court (cnn.com) has not resulted in a reversal of media indifference to the entire story. Whenever these 180-degree reversals in American media consensus do occur, the consistent pattern is rank shamelessness.

It is banal to observe that the press is a willing but not reliable tool for informing the public. Nothing seems to explain what motivates it to fulfill this function besides, at times, collective media preference, but more often, whatever drives viewer interest. In this regard the process is in its internal reality exactly what it is in outside appearance: American politicians spend their days taking turns at an open mic, until one (or many) of them manages to say something that, all of a sudden, prompt a cascade of statements and expressions that reverse the collective consensus that everything is fine. At this point — the emergence of the collectively perceived crisis — the media itself will drive the story until, either, there is a sacrifice of a FEMA director to appease the collective angst, or the consensus of “fine” simply returns out of boredom with all the sub-narratives of the crisis that the media has managed to play for attention.

The former mentioned case, of the press following their own preferences in hyping a crisis, might seem like the default in the era of Trump. But I would still guess that even for a media class habituated to producing hostile propaganda, the attack on Biden isn’t motivated by preference but by audience interest. If at times journalists pursue the ends of informing the public regardless of the public’s attention, those journalists are by definition rewarded for their efforts with nothing but obscure self-satisfaction; while those who focus on whatever transfixes the public are rewarded with feelings of importance and control. On the institutional level, news organizations that pursue the second strategy will survive while those who pursue the first fail. All this, too, is banal to observe.

But this does not mean that the media is typically a passive participant in public panic. The current reporting around the recent visits of a particular neurologist to the White House are a prime example of the media actively fanning the flames of the same crisis it “reports.” No one yet knows who Cannard went to the White House to see. To quote the New York Times story (duplicate link):

Records from the Obama administration, when Mr. Biden was vice president, show that Dr. Cannard made at least 10 visits in 2012 plus a family tour; four in 2013; one in 2014; four in 2015; and eight in 2016. Mr. Trump rescinded Mr. Obama’s voluntary White House visitors disclosure policy, so records are not available for his four years in office.

Dr. Cannard did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The White House would not comment specifically on the purpose of Dr. Cannard’s recent visits or whether they were related to the president. “A wide variety of specialists from the Walter Reed system visit the White House complex to treat the thousands of military personnel who work on the grounds,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. […]

Dr. Cannard’s eight more recent visits started on July 28, 2023, when he was listed as meeting with Megan Nasworthy, a White House liaison to Walter Reed. She was listed as the person visited for seven of those meetings, which consistently occurred early, between 7 and 9 a.m. on Fridays, with the exception of the last meeting, which occurred on Thursday, March 28, the day before Good Friday.

In such a state of known details, this isn’t a story at all: Merely the learning of a fact which was not previously known, but might well be routine and irrelevant, but is being learned while there is a “crisis.” This isn’t the same reality conveyed by the headline, “Parkinson’s Expert Visited the White House Eight Times in Eight Months.” To publish the story, especially with this headline, creates the belief among some portion of the public that a “Parkinson’s Expert” is visiting Biden once a month — something that the “story” only demonstrates may be true.

But it already was possibly true that Biden is being regularly seen and treated for secretly diagnosed Parkinson’s: This possibility existed as soon as the President began his outwardly visible decline after mid-2021.

To discern how the media in this specific case is an active player creating a “story” out of thin air, we may imagine instead that a writer set out to answer the question of whether Biden might be secretly receiving Parkinson’s care. One item which could be mentioned to the reader is the White House visiting schedule of all neurosurgeons who happen to specialize in Parkinson’s. But clearly, to observe “eight end-of-week visits between July and March,” since it is not abnormal with prior visit history, would not be remarkable merely because of the decision to observe the recent schedule in the context of this question, and wouldn’t provide any information on the question. Only the prior public ignorance of Cannard’s frequenting of the White House over the years renders “normal” a “story.”

A different despotism

In the mid-19th Century, the notions of individual rights and liberty were being re-defended from certain counter-enlightenment tendencies. In this context, it was argued that the purpose of a free press is to provide a check on despotism; to prevent the arbitrary designation of what is true and false according to the preferences of whoever makes up the government.

Our modern, mainstream media, which persists within and upholds a centralized narrative about what is true, certainly meets the standard of arbitrary when it ignores the President’s mental decline for two years, only to attack him over it a few months before an election: It is the arbitrary-ness of royal court or Soviet party groupthink, where the continued legitimacy of the executive is effectively decided not by votes, but by the collective of individual private preferences and public bids on the consensus preference. And this is only the media at its “best”: If it becomes certain from the outset that the executive newly appointed by public opinion is not preferred within the royal court, he is attacked by default.

In either case the “free press” only recapitulates the anti-“democratic” evil it was intended to remedy. Unless, in fact, the press is somehow forced to inform the public of every facet of what takes place behind closed doors in politics, it will always play the role of the “tyrant” who decides what secrets the public gets to know.

And no one in a “democracy” actually wants total transparency anyway. If divulging real political intentions were conducive to winning elections, politicians who have their real opinions revealed by secret leaks wouldn’t lose them: Revealing the truth before an election becomes another despotism, because it installs into government whoever succeeds in hiding it.

In the case of Biden’s cognitive decline, voters have had three years to see what policies are produced by whatever secret power structure of advisors influences the conduct of the Oval Office. Now they are “informed” that Biden seems unfit for the job (a fact that was already obvious), the only possible remedy is to nominate a candidate whose office would pursue different, still-unknown policy aims. The blame for this fact lies entirely with the media’s determination not to discuss this truth two years ago.

I do not hold out strong hopes that a Trump presidency will improve the country much: At best it may stop some of the damage being done by migration which would otherwise continue under Biden, but without much chance of reversing the last three years. Still, I would prefer that Trump wins.

And yet I cannot bring myself to wish for Biden’s detractors in his party and in the media to succeed in intimidating him off of the ballot: The press should not get to decide two elections in a row.

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