Like at least a few other Democrats and journalists, I have been inclined to keep giving President Joe Biden a fighting chance, at least through his scheduled one-on-one with NBC’s Lester Holt last Monday. His NATO press conference reinforced that inclination, partly because it made me more skeptical of how “the press” (where I have worked for decades) has ballyhooed his flubs and his age while downplaying Trump’s derangements.
Many reporters who questioned Biden just after the NATO conference were looking to work media reports of his decline into what should have been rigorous questioning about NATO and foreign policy. Wouldn’t more such questioning have been a real “cognitive” test of Biden’s presidential abilities? What was gained by asking him, as many did, in effect, “Why aren’t you telling us what we’ve told others about you?”
The problem with that method is that too few journalists whom I have known in my years as a daily newspaper editor, NPR commentator, and frequent columnist truly understand or ever experience the difference between the phrase-turning that many of us do rather easily and governing. Few of us could actually govern a polity’s way out of a wet paper bag, let alone out of challenges that Biden knows how to face. He has been doing it even better as president than when he was younger and more “articulate.”
Biden has made speech gaffes ever since his youthful stuttering and across a half-century in politics. Yes, these missteps have become more frequent, worrisome, and suggestive of decline. But if he can win reelection, he won’t need to run for office again and can devote most of his time and energy to making wise decisions like the ones he has been making for the past four years. Yes, he has been more wrong than right in backing Israel in Gaza, but has anyone shown credibly that he has lost his ability to do better not only than Trump, whose “foreign policy” is wholly self-serving, but also than any other likely Democrat, who would be “starting from scratch” in that and many other ways, as Biden noted at the press conference? No one comes even close to Biden’s depth of experience and, yes, wisdom in this.
I don’t mean to be hard on reporters and editors only. American media’s own fragility, fragmentation, and, in many ways, its cognitive derangement is accelerated but not caused by journalists. Owing to technological upheavals since the early 1990s, with more coming soon, and owing to the mercurial nature of finance capital, “news media” no longer has a conception of a “public” whose “right to know” it keeps on invoking. Instead of a public—a citizenry, a civic-republican culture—we have been broken up into audiences, assembled and disassembled by entertainment and marketing conglomerates (including the so-called news outlets that they own), on whatever pretext (erotic, nihilistic, sensational) will maximize profits.
That algorithmically driven derangement of our democratic dispositions incentivizes and rewards deliberating citizens for becoming impulse buyers. Its methods aren’t necessarily malevolent, as right-wing media’s methods certainly are; for the most part, its methods are mindless, algorithmically driven in ways that I have explained at some length in the Los Angeles Review of Books and in Salon.
In consequence, the decisive problem right now isn’t Joe Biden or the press; it is what is being done to the American people. David Brooks, of whom I am no fan, once noted that when he had tried to introduce his 10-year-old son to John Kerry, Kerry couldn’t find an appropriate word to say to the boy, and Brooks decided, “Anyone who can’t relate to a 10-year-old boy can’t relate to the American electorate.”
That was and is lamentably true, for reasons I have just mentioned. But some of the questions at Biden’s press conference last week—followed by the louder-than-usual barnyard caterwauling of the reporters as Biden departed—made me wonder whose decay is more obvious: the American people’s, or the advertising-driven, polls-befogged news media’s.
Far too many of us journalists move in herds, not in rational arguments and evidence. Such stampeding gave us the Gulf of Tonkin incident that prompted our Vietnam folly and, later, our search for “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, not to mention our descent into ethno-racial identity politics at its worst (see the “Media Myopia” chapter in Liberal Racism). It has given us the plausibility of a strongman such as Donald Trump becoming president once again: Recall CBS’ Les Moonves’ infamous dictum that the media’s featuring Trump day and night may not have been good for the country, “but it’s damned good for CBS.”
If that is what we have come to, it is more than any elected Democrat will conquer by staving off Trump, imperative though it is to block him. Biden might prove to be more persuasive at that than most of us think. Give him another few days or weeks of unscripted public appearances before you decide.
