Washington Submit media critic Erik Wemple mirrored on his personal “failure” Monday in scrutinizing press protection of Joe Biden and his cognitive decline, significantly after the notorious “Where’s Jackie?” gaffe.
Because the legacy media continues to face a reckoning over the way it dealt with masking the previous president’s psychological acuity earlier than his disastrous 2024 debate efficiency, Wemple wrote a scathing piece calling out information organizations for not admitting any errors with the headline, “Did legacy media fail in its Biden coverage? Not if you ask them!”
In his prolonged critique, Wemple revisited an episode from a September 2022 occasion the place Biden known as for Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., who had died simply weeks earlier in a automotive accident.
Biden beforehand launched an announcement acknowledging her demise after it occurred and the occasion he attended equally honored her reminiscence.
“Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” Biden mentioned within the viral second. White Home press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended the president on the time, insisting Walorski was merely “top of mind.”
“It’s time to turn this exercise on my own byline,” Wemple wrote Monday. “The ‘Where’s Jackie’ episode was my cue to start hammering mainstream outlets for not pushing on this story. Never happened — that was a failure.”
Wemple famous, as Fox Information Digital did on the time, that neither CNN nor MSNBC provided any protection of the “Where’s Jackie” remark.
Whereas acknowledging some within the press, like Axios’ Alex Thompson and The Wall Avenue Journal’s Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes for his or her pre-debate reporting that make clear Biden’s cognitive decline, Wemple knocked the media for broadly missing the vigor to resolve it sooner.
“White House coverage must involve more than observing the president in action and writing up analysis pieces about his comings and goings,” Wemple wrote.
“It needs to include a muckraking component detailing behind-the-scenes strategies, conflicts and debates over all manner of issues, particularly those relating to the president’s mental acuity. An adjacent question relates to whether Biden himself was fully abreast of and in charge of day-to-day decisions.”
“And it’s on these fronts that major media organizations fell short: Though Biden’s declining faculties were clear to all, they never ignited one of those glorious mainstream-media investigative frenzies that colonizes television and radio broadcasts,” he added.
Thompson’s “Original Sin” co-author, CNN anchor Jake Tapper, mentioned there needs to be “soul-searching” within the legacy media for a way Biden’s clearly obvious points had been lined.
“Few souls are undergoing a pat-down,” Wemple wrote.
