In all the media coverage of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the national crisis the country now finds itself in, one aspect of the emergency has been left out. The American media, once powerful enough to put in motion Nixon’s eventual downfall with the New York Times ’s publication of the Pentagon Papers – a damning history of US involvement in the Vietnam War – has become virtually powerless. Or to put it painfully, and more precisely, the New York Times itself, once the proud flagship of American liberalism, has been emasculated.
In the past two weeks, the Times has run not just one, but two house editorials calling for Biden to step aside as the Democratic candidate for president. If the paper had called for Clinton or Obama to step aside, let alone Truman or Kennedy, the candidacies of all four men would have been cut off at the knees. For generations, the paper had that kind of clout.
Just as 30 million Americans – something like 20 per cent of the adult population – once watched the legendary anchorperson Walter Cronkite present the evening news every night on network television, educated Americans, from teachers to novelists to politicians, drew their sense of reality from the Times every morning. A forceful call for a sitting president to withdraw as nominee of the president’s party on account of what the paper argued was clear evidence of the nominee’s mental deterioration would have had a devastating effect on their candidacy. Instead: nothing.
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