President Joe Biden’s “age problem” is all over the news again. The other day the president confused the name of France’s president with the name of a dead French president. Not long after, he used the name of a late German chancellor when he meant a former living one. Then on Thursday special counsel Robert Hur, a Republican former U.S. attorney appointed by former President Donald Trump, declined to prosecute Biden for his mishandling of classified documents, in part, Hur wrote, because he believed a jury would see Biden sympathetically as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Then, just hours after Hur’s stinging report was released, Biden, at a news conference, referred to the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, as the “president of Mexico.”
Biden’s slip-ups and Hur’s jab have triggered another avalanche of news articles about Biden’s advanced age and his fitness for office. It’s safe to wager that this cycle is going to repeat itself again and again before Election Day.
Trump doesn’t deserve to escape scrutiny of his mental acuity.
The national media has a responsibility to document and interrogate Biden’s mental acuity. But it’s imperative that it do so responsibly. One can’t help but feel, though, that the media is entering a Hillary Clinton-emails level of fixation.
In 2016, major mainstream publications were so obsessed with the former secretary of state’s email server and the investigations surrounding it that stories about the issue eclipsed substantive coverage of policy and created a false symmetry between her and Trump’s apparent corruption. The Columbia Journalism Review found that in the six days after then-FBI Director James Comey announced his reopening of his investigation of Clinton’s email server, “The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” That obsession had
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