Even after The Wall Street Journal published a four-byline bombshell detailing how President Joe Biden's staff energetically hid his ongoing cognitive decline from the public, there wasn't a single question at the White House briefing. No reporters demanded answers about how they were misled, or complained they were pressured into silence.
They mustered that umbrage over the Hunter Biden pardon, but this slow-rolling scandal was apparently too painful to recount. Perhaps they thought that since Biden was talked out of a reelection bid, the matter was settled. This scandal is already over. But Trump scandals never stop emerging.
Radio host Hugh Hewitt proclaimed he had been calling Biden "infirm" for two years but didn't know the depth of the infirmity that's now been revealed. Everyone inside the White House must have known, including the reporters. He said they were "either explicitly complicit or recklessly indifferent" to Biden's decline.
Hewitt upset knee-jerk defenders of the media when he said, "With the exception of Peter Doocy, I would ban everyone from the White House press room who has been there for the past four years because they are obviously of no use to the country. They didn't tell us the number one thing, which is that [Biden] is not competent. Why in the world would Trump let them in?"
Hewitt's guest, author Bethany Mandel, agreed about the media failure: "It's really disturbing and it's funny because Brian Stelter and all the columnists decree the trust that we should all have in the media, that we should all respect them and their hard work and sacrifice. Can you imagine any other job in America where you could do your job that badly and still keep on failing up? The media is pretty much it."
For his part, Doocy expressed amazement on Fox that no one asked Karine Jean-Pierre a single question about this. His Fox colleague Jacqui Heinrich was present, but Jean-Pierre did not call on her (no need to wonder why).
The White House briefing room under Republicans is like a roiling shark tank. Under Democrats, it's a shallow kiddie pool. Donald Trump allows hateful reporters to question him. Pro-Biden reporters have supinely accepted getting few opportunities to interview Biden and Kamala Harris, until they decide they'll take a swing or two.
Everyone knew the president was babbling and bumbling. They knew because they observed it firsthand, and they knew because he was kept away from the press, and he was even kept away from his own cabinet members. They knew because reporters like Courtney Subramanian of the Los Angeles times were in on it. Photographs showed that in a press conference, she asked the question that Biden had on a notecard with her name and her face on it.
Some reporters -- like former CNN political scribe Chris Cillizza -- are confessing that they should have been pushed back when Biden aides furiously argued asking questions was ageist. He admitted, "I should have not let the shame campaign to make you feel bad for asking the question get to me." But CNN's audience expects relentless anti-Trump bias, and questioning Biden seems like it's helping Trump. That's the reflex -- don't do anything that helps Trump. Like your jobs.
This entire spectacle makes it sickening that leftist journalists are all running around right now worrying that Donald Trump's lawsuits against the press will cause them to "self-censor." As if they haven't been aerobically self-censoring for the last four years.