It seems astounding that this should still even be a question after four years of pretense that Joe Biden was capable of the presidency, but Michael Schaffer at Politico looks at journalists’ discomfort — as a matter of courtesy, manners, and “ethics” — at reporting candidly on geriatric politicians’ observable diminishing grip on reality and on the things they’re elected to govern.
The story opens with reporters getting 88-year-old D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton to say she was running for re-election, followed by her office disavowing that she has actually decided to do so. For a person of less advanced age, one would expect her to actually know what she had decided, and what she hadn’t, on the central question of whether to run again or retire. Schaffer notes, properly, the relevance of the problem: “For people interested in how Washington works, it’s an increasingly common issue in our era of gerontocracy: Just how are you supposed to interact with an elected official who might not be all there? It’s an ongoing private conversation among reporters, animated by a sense that the watchdogs haven’t been zealous enough — but featuring no real agreement on how to handle these moments.” He quotes former CNN Capitol Hill producer Kristin Wilson: “Every reporter has a story about this.” Wilson, who left journalism to work at a public relations firm, is now at liberty to be blunt: “I think we have pulled punches . . . The Hill is like living in a small town. And you know all these people, and you’re around them all the time. Are you going to be that person in that small town that you’re in?”
Schaffer goes on:
There’s a long history of spokespeople cajoling media outlets into cleaning up the incorrect, impolitic, or downright addled things that lawmakers say when they get buttonholed by Capitol Hill reporters. Oftentimes, these involve non-craven fixes. “My rule of thumb was that I’m not in the business of playing gotcha,” said Todd Gillman, a former longtime Washington bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News. “People misspeak. They mix up a bill, a vote or a person. There’s a slip of the tongue. I’ve always let people clean up things like that. I’m going for substance.”
Yet the culture of cleaning up makes it harder to say no when you suspect that the slip of the tongue may actually be the substance. “Seems like the tradeoffs don’t change, though the calculus might,” Gillman told me. “Are you willing to incur some wrath for ignoring their lobbying?” Until Joe Biden’s presidency pushed the national conversation about aging officials, the answer wasn’t always self-evident.
Schaffer softens up liberal readers by following his reference to Norton with examples involving three Republicans (Thad Cochran and Orrin Hatch having senior moments and Kay Granger descending into full-blown dementia). Still, as I detailed back in January, the Congressional Black Caucus is a particular locus of the problem, exacerbated by the hesitancy of racially-gerrymandered districts to vote out incumbents and an atmosphere in which those incumbents and their staffs are not above playing the race card at skittish reporters. (I had to chuckle that the photo with the article is captioned “Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) arrives for a roundtable on the ethics crisis at the Supreme Court on Capitol Hill, on June 11, 2024.”)
It is fair for reporters to clean up more prosaic verbal miscues that might just confuse readers — which can happen to anyone in politics, but is obviously much more common in older folks. But reporters have a duty to report, not just on the votes cast but on serious matters of incapacity. They shouldn’t let press secretaries harangue them out of taking pictures of old or frail politicians arriving for work in wheelchairs, or out of simply describing what they see on a daily basis — which the folks back home can’t see for themselves.