FROM THE PUBLISHER | Why didn't they get the story?

Nobody who covers the White House was able to dig in enough to report that the President had declined, mentally and physically, until it was right there in front of everybody at the debate. That’s a serious failure.

Well, let me amend that slightly. The Wall Street Journal did, in fact, report on the decline, a couple of weeks earlier than everybody else. That’s to the Journal’s credit. Excellent newspaper, excellent work.

But let’s not kid ourselves: It’s pretty evident in retrospect that his decline didn’t just start in the last couple of weeks. Go back and watch video clips of gobbledygook and mix-ups for years and you can see it. It’s also gotten worse. He’s not what he was.

I’ve already said in this space that President Biden’s handlers did everybody a disservice by hiding him from the press. He never has done a sit-down interview with serious journalists from the Journal, the New York Times or the Washington Post. He’s held fewer live press conferences than any president in memory. That’s a decision that he and his PR people made, and it was a terrible one for everybody, not least of which Biden himself.

But just because the handlers hid him doesn’t excuse journalists. They should have been able to suss this out themselves.

My conservative friends will immediately jump from here to the conclusion that the “liberal media” was covering up for Shaky Joe. Something like that.

Hard to argue against that, since the bottom line is that they didn’t get the story. Editors need to seriously think about why they didn’t assign a team to get to that story, because that’s what it would have taken. Or, if they did assign a team and that team came up empty, then they just didn’t do a good enough job, which prompts another set of questions.

I can certainly understand the hurdles. It would’ve been tough to get anyone to say anything, because the people closest to the President are inclined to protect him, and those inclined to question his mental fitness generally have a political axe to grind. The best way to get at it – which is how the Journal eventually did it – is to talk to diplomats from other countries who interact closely. Getting them on the record would also be tough, because outing the Leader of the Free World is a pretty risky maneuver if you’re in line for foreign aid. But that’s still your best shot.

Real journalists – editors and publishers included – have one main motivation, and that is to get the story before anybody else. What the consequences of that story are is generally not much of a consideration. I know it’s hard for the general public to believe that, particularly in this binary era. But it remains true.

So, why didn’t they get the story? I imagine we’ll learn more about this as years go by and books come out, but it’s certainly a black eye for journalists, and a prompt for serious self-examination.