An inability to remember basic facts ‘doesn’t affect decision-making or judgment, brain experts say,’ reads one typical report.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the recent wave of coverage of President Biden’s mental acuity, call out another example of poor framing in coverage of Israel, and cover more media misses.
Leave It to the ‘Brain Experts’
The media has had wall-to-wall coverage of President Biden’s mental fitness to be the leader of the free world in the days after a report from special counsel Robert Hur on the president’s mishandling of classified documents described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
In the four days after the report was published, the Washington Post published 33 stories about Biden’s fitness, while the New York Times published 30 and the Wall Street Journal shared 18.
But some of the coverage sounded more like White House PR, despite the damning characterization in the report.
Investigators found Biden’s “memory was significantly limited” when they conducted interviews with the president. Even in recordings from 2017 of conversations between Biden and his ghostwriter, Mark Zwontizer, Biden was “often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries,” the report says.
In the special counsel’s interviews last October, investigators found Biden’s memory to be even worse. In one interview, he did not remember when his term as vice president ended; in another interview, he did not remember when it began.
Investigators thus found it “would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
To make matters worse, moments after he defended his memory in televised remarks last week, Biden appeared to refer to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico while answering a question about hostage negotiations in Gaza.
But no need to worry. NBC News reports, “Forgetting the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past doesn’t affect decision-making or judgment, brain experts say.”
And over at the New York Times, a neuroscientist tells readers, “Many of the special counsel’s observations about Mr Biden’s memory seem to fall in the category of forgetting, meaning that they are more indicative of a problem with finding the right information from memory than actual Forgetting [sic].”
“Public perception of a person’s cognitive state is often determined by superficial factors, such as physical presence, confidence, and verbal fluency, but these aren’t necessarily relevant to one’s capacity to make consequential decisions about the fate of this country,” writes Dr. Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Davis. “Memory is surely relevant, but other characteristics, such as knowledge of the relevant facts and emotion regulation — both of which are relatively preserved and might even improve with age — are likely to be of equal of greater importance.”
No need for concern, then, that Hur said Biden could not recall when his son Beau had died, even within several years.
Apparently only a neurologist can make observations about a person’s memory:
MSNBC's @MollyJongFast: "I would say, I don’t think that Hur is a good faith actor. And I think that 345 pages of that show that. He’s not a neurologist, right?" pic.twitter.com/5WHjHFsJmK
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 12, 2024
(Not when it comes to Trump, though.)
New Republic writer Greg Sargent claimed that any news organization that puts Biden’s memory in the headline of its reporting on the special counsel’s report is “actively rewarding Hur’s bad faith and giving the Trump campaign what they want, when that bad faith and the Trump camp’s glee over it should *itself* be the story.”
Former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood said Hur’s report was similar to FBI director James Comey’s handling of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. “Hur did his version of Comey’s ‘I have no case but need to slap ‘em around a little’ routine. As for Biden’s mental fitness, I talked to him one-on-one at the White House 10 days before Hur did. Here’s the video; judge for yourself.”
Harwood also defended Biden’s less-than-reassuring press conference, claiming it “showed the same thing his performance in office has shown for 3 years: he can do the job.”
“Mexico for Egypt meant nothing, but the GOP political apparatus is a bad-faith enterprise and mainstream press has been knocked silly by financial/political pressure,” he added.
New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait similarly claimed the press conference was “a pretty effective performance by Biden.”
“I share the concern about Biden’s age, but IMO the Mexico comment is a who-cares. Non-old people make mistakes like that off the cuff all the time,” Chait said.
Former White House correspondent Brian Karem also celebrated Biden’s press conference and suggested Biden should speak in front of the camera more often.
“He stood. He took questions. He took responsibility. He pushed back. He defended himself without belittling anyone,” Karem posted on X. “Tonight showed us the greatest weakness and strengths of the Biden presidency: He’s good in front of the camera. He needs to show up more often.”
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Toobin appeared on CNN to criticize Hur for making “unnecessary points” about Biden’s age.
“Part of that report was an outrage, it was a disgrace. I mean, the idea that they that he would make such a big point of Biden being elderly is not something a prosecutor needed to do,” Toobin said.
Over on MSNBC, anchors were falling over themselves to defend Biden. Ari Melber accused Hur of being ageist.
“Do you want to get into the age thing? Let’s call it what it is. This is ageism snuck into a report clearing the person of any wrongdoing,” Melber said. “If you want to get the ageism, young people are told all the time by their lawyers, ‘Hey, you’re way better off leaning into I don’t recall than possibly misstating something to a federal officer or under oath in this case.’ So, it’s a lot of derogatory stuff.”
Chris Hayes claimed Hur was “frustrated and angry” that his investigation didn’t yield more damaging results.
“In terms of its political repercussions, the way the news happened today, the questions being asked [of] him by multiple figures there. And in the end, what makes it such a useful political tool for people that want Donald Trump to be elected or want [Biden] not to be re-elected is that the fact that his age is not something you can rebut,” Hayes said. “If someone says you’re too far left, you can tack to the center. The man is 80 years old!”
Rachel Maddow jumped in to note 81-year-old Biden “rides a bike!”
“He is the age he is!” Hayes added. “And so it’s a very useful political attack for them.”
Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann argued Hur “should be fired immediately” for giving his “amateur medical opinion.”
And Biden White House press secretary–turned-MSNBC host Jen Psaki lamented the attention being paid to Biden’s memory despite all the other news in the world.
“If you’re sitting in the White House and on the campaign right now, you’re absolutely banging your head against the wall at the way that the Thursday report has been covered,” Psaki told NBC’s Kristen Welker.
Psaki questioned why the report has been given so much coverage “given all of the things that have happened this week,” including Trump saying he would not protect NATO countries from hypothetical Russian attacks if they fail to spend enough on their defense pact.
“And what do we see when we wake up this morning? Wall-to-wall coverage of whether a guy who’s four years older than his opponent is too old to be president,” she said.
And if you ask American environmentalist and journalist Bill McKibben, age is actually Biden’s “superpower.”
“Joe Biden is old. Like each of us, he comes from a particular place in history, in his case the LBJ years. And that’s one big reason why his first term has been so full of accomplishments: His age, often cited as the greatest obstacle to his reelection, is actually his superpower,” he wrote in a column for the Los Angeles Times last week.
“Age matters. My cohort agrees. Why did Biden believe he could do what he did in his first term? Because he’d seen it done. Let’s hope the politicians of the future are watching his successes closely,” McKibben added.
The View co-host Joy Behar said Biden answered questions “quite clearly” in his press conference last week and claimed the president has still “got it.”
Co-host Ana Navarro dismissed Biden’s recent confusion in public saying, “We all make gaffes.”
“The difference is that he is under this level of scrutiny that whenever he makes a gaffe like this it becomes national news,” she added. “You get panicky over Joe Biden making a gaffe, but Republicans don’t care. They don’t care that Donald Trump says stupid things every single day!”
Behar said supporting Biden over Trump is a matter of choosing between a “fascist government versus some memory lapses.”
But foreign news outlets took a less charitable approach to covering the report.
“Joe Biden’s confusion-in-chief: rage of ‘elderly man with poor memory’ who leads free world,” the Australian reported.
“FORGET IT Joe Biden, 81, dodges trial over keeping secret documents due to ‘poor memory,'” the Sun wrote.
Headline Fail of the Week
“‘Free Palestine’ written on gun in shooting at Lakewood Church, but motive a mystery: Sources,” reads a laughably bad headline from ABC News.
Genesse Ivonne Moreno allegedly opened fire at Joel Osteen’s megachurch in Houston on Sunday. Moreno, who was accompanied by a young child, opened fire with the rifle and two off-duty police officers fired back, killing her.
The child was also shot, though it was not clear who shot the child. A parishioner was shot in the leg.
Media Misses
• Al-Jazeera journalist Mohammed Wishah worked as a commander in Hamas’ anti-tank missile units until 2022, the IDF said Sunday.
It was impossible for anyone to suspect this. I mean it’s not like he was posting public pictures with the leader of Hamas on Instagram… https://t.co/NSt2EqrcqW pic.twitter.com/EXyjXRieWZ
— AG (@AGHamilton29) February 11, 2024
• CNN staffers are reportedly incensed by the outlet’s coverage of the Israel–Hamas war, according to the Guardian. Journalists are upset that editors have prohibited reporters from quoting Hamas but allow writers to quote the Israeli government. “How else are editors going to read that other than as an instruction that no matter what the Israelis do, Hamas is ultimately to blame? Every action by Israel — dropping massive bombs that wipe out entire streets, its obliteration of whole families — the coverage ends up massaged to create a ‘they had it coming’ narrative,” one staffer told the Guardian.
• The Associated Press’s report on Israel rescuing two hostages sounds a lot like a Hamas press release: “Israeli forces rescue 2 hostages in dramatic Gaza raid that killed at least 67 Palestinians.”
“BREAKING: Health officials say more than 12,300 Palestinian minors have been killed in Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza,” the outlet added in a tweet.
BREAKING: Health officials say more than 12,300 Palestinian minors have been killed in Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza https://t.co/9Oz503QkBy
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 12, 2024