The media’s role in covering up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline is getting more attention ahead of the release of a new book by journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios. Some have argued the media tried their hardest and can’t be blamed for failing to confirm (via journalism) what was obvious to most Americans because the White House kept telling them Biden was just fine and running circles around his younger aides. Others have argued (more persuasively) that journalists allowed themselves to be duped by ridiculous spin because they were afraid of being denied access and, above all, they wanted Trump to lose.
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Few so-called journalists were more shameless in their defense of Biden than Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, cohosts of Morning Joe on MSNBC. They are almost certainly the most highly compensated of Biden’s media sycophants, as the married duo is believed to earn around $25 million per year. Biden reportedly loved watching Morning Joe, and it’s easy to see why. “The role they’ve played is just doing the bidding of the Biden White House and the Biden campaign,” one Democratic consultant told the Washington Post last year. Biden spoke “often” with Scarborough, according to Axios, and his “years-long love” of Morning Joe would affect “how the White House runs.” Top advisers thought “the show gives Biden a fairer shake on issues than other news shows and media outlets.” The cohosts were just as passionate in their antagonism toward Donald Trump, which prompted MSNBC brass to briefly suspend the show after Trump was nearly assassinated at a rally in Pennsylvania.
The relationship ran deep. Brzezinski’s brother, Mark Brzezinski, served in the Biden administration as U.S. ambassador to Poland. Joe and Mika were regular visitors at the White House, and Biden would sometimes invite Morning Joe regulars to take part in off-the-record conversations with policy experts. Biden, who rarely engaged with the press on account of his decline, did a softball interview with Scarborough in 2023, days before announcing his reelection campaign. Brzezinski interviewed Dr. Jill Biden in January 2024. When Biden was facing mounting pressure to resign in July 2024 after his disastrous debate performance, Biden called in to Morning Joe for a friendly conversation that allowed him to read from notes off camera while defending his ability to function and denouncing his critics. The cohosts sat patiently as Biden rambled on semi-coherently. “This is a guy who, look, we talk about debate, look at his performance at debates,” Biden ranted. “He lied over, you know, Trump had 50 lies that he’s—I mean, look, this a guy who says 10 percent of univer—ahhh, yeah, I don’t want to get into [it], but anyway. He’s just a liar.”
Some journalists and other Democrats have pleaded ignorance, citing a lack of access to the president for their inability to observe his evident decline. It’s true that Biden’s staff went to great lengths to limit his public exposure, but there were still plenty of Democrats who were shocked by his condition beginning in 2021. Few individuals appear to have had more access to Biden than the Morning Joe cohosts, yet they still claimed to have been surprised by his awful debate performance. “Those of us who have spent a lot of time talking to President Biden, who know President Biden, were stunned by what we saw,” Scarborough said, a claim that defies credulity.
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In February 2024, an ABC News poll found that 86 percent of respondents, including 73 percent of Democrats, said Biden was too old to serve another term. Scarborough and Brzezinski spent the next several months aggressively defending the president’s fitness while denouncing his detractors. Scarborough seethed with rage after Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents, concluded (accurately) that a jury would be unlikely to convict the president because he came across as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Scarborough was practically shaking throughout the segment, lambasting Hur for his “irrelevant conclusions” and “politically charged Trump-like ramblings.” He dismissed the special counsel as a “stupid” and “clueless” “Trumper” determined to “politically damage” Biden. At one point, Mika chimed in to comment that Hur’s report was “poorly written.”
In early March 2024, Scarborough delivered the most outrageous and impassioned defense of Biden’s fitness to serve that would ever be recorded over the course of the campaign. “Start your tape right now, because I’m about to tell you the truth. And F you if you can’t handle the truth,” he said. “This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever, not a close second. … If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.” Dr. Dan Axelrod, a media ethics expert, told the Washington Free Beacon that Scarborough’s outburst made him sound “more like a publicist than a journalist.”
In early June 2024, several weeks before the infamous debate on CNN, the Wall Street Journal reported that Biden had shown “signs of slipping” behind closed doors. Scarborough leapt into action, slamming the “Trump hit piece” as “false” and “biased,” citing Democratic politicians who agreed with him. After the debate made it harder to defend these claims, Scarborough finally (sort of) acknowledged that the vast majority of Americans might be right about Biden’s ability to serve another term. “If he were CEO, and he turned in a performance like that, would any corporation in America keep him on as CEO?” he asked.
Scarborough seemed less convinced of that initial post-debate assessment in the days that followed. After letting Biden phone in an interview on Morning Joe to denounce Democratic “elites” and reiterate his refusal to drop out, he appeared to have “moved back into Biden’s column,” according to prominent Democrats who spoke to the Washington Post. He urged the Democratic Party to “unite” behind a candidate in order to defeat Trump, appearing to suggest that backing Biden was still a viable option. Days later, when actor George Clooney published a New York Times op-ed calling on Biden to step aside, Brzezinski delivered what journalist Chris Whipple described as “one of the strangest segments in recent television history.”
Biden Didn’t Recognize George Clooney at Infamous Hollywood Fundraiser: ‘It Was Like Watching Someone Who Was Not Alive’
After Scarborough dismissed Clooney as a celebrity of minor influence, Brzezinski insinuated that former president Barack Obama was behind the actor’s op-ed while implying that Biden, but not Obama, had achieved “historic accomplishments” during his presidency. Recent reporting suggests Brzezinski was regurgitating a commonly held view in Biden’s inner circle. The other Morning Joe guests on set that day were perplexed by Brzezinski’s “extraordinary takedown of Clooney and Obama,” Whipple writes in his book Uncharted, but were warned by a producer communicating over their earpieces: “Don’t interrupt her. Don’t interrupt her.” The segment incited a profanity-laced shouting match between Clooney and a Morning Joe producer. “How the fuck could you let her link me with Barack Obama saying he made me write the op-ed?” Clooney said.
Perhaps the simplest explanation is that Scarborough and Brzezinski will say and do anything in the name of ratings and self-promotion. Widely despised at MSNBC for their bullying, conniving, self-dealing, and hypocrisy, the Morning Joe cohosts went running to Mar-A-Lago less than two weeks after Trump won the election. Their liberal viewers were stunned, not least because the duo had spent years denouncing all the “pathetic people trying to cozy up to Trump.”
Who’s pathetic now?
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