The Atlantic Goes Full Animal House: You F’d Up, You Trusted Us!

Give The Atlantic high marks for chutzpah, along with several thousand demerits for integrity. At a time when the rest of the Protection Racket Media struggles to explain their propagandizing for the Bidens over the last several years, only The Atlantic has the courage to say, You saps got what you deserved if you couldn’t figure it out yourselves.

Or, perhaps better put, nearly 50 years ago … 

Set “trust” aside for a moment. The release of the Robert Hur tapes and the immediate announcement of a strange “sudden” diagnoses of Stage 4 metastasizing prostate cancer made it crystal clear that the Bidens and Democrats lied about his physical and cognitive health for years. All of the claims dutifully propagated by the establishment media — and enforced on dissenters — that Biden was Sharp As A Tack® and Running Rings Around Aides Half His Age turned out to be grotesque lies to cover up a presidential incapacity whose last precedent was Woodrow Wilson.

Eh, so what, shrugs Mark Leibovich in The Atlantic today in a piece entitled, “Biden’s Age Wasn’t a Cover-Up. It Was Observable Fact.” White House administrations lie, right?

The overriding objective of any White House is to make the principal look as good as possible. This is done through basic flackery, gobbledygook, selective disclosure, and rampant omission. We should not expect aides or congressional allies to run out and announce to the nation that the president—any president—seemed really out to lunch at his economic briefing, or was hurling ketchup against the wall, or was messing around with an intern.

Actually, yes, we should expect elected officials to reveal when a president has become significantly incapacitated. In fact, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution requires both an elected official (the VP) and high-ranking executive officials (the Cabinet) to act in such a situation. We should also expect members of Congress to put the safety and security of the country ahead of their partisan ambitions and be honest with the American public about the situation. Dean Phillips at least attempted to do that, and got buried by his party for his efforts.

We’d also expect news outlets to do more than stenography for their White House masters. Leibovich has a different view of journalism, however:

Yes, it’s a cynical business, politics, but here is why I think that the “cover-up” of Biden’s “true condition” is beside the point—and why I’m not really vibing with the umbrage-mongering: It’s pretty much impossible to “cover up” for something that is hiding in plain sight. Democrats could trot out as many White House officials as they wanted to claim I was with the president just this morning, and he was sharp as a tack and running circles around staffers less than half his age. But whenever Biden was allowed to go out in public—a rarity, which itself was a red flag—the public’s preexisting consensus about his infirmity was only reinforced. Biden was in no position to keep doing his job given his condition, which had been evident for years to most people paying even casual attention. Observable facts, people: They can be a real pain to cover up.

Politics is a cynical business? These days, it ain’t got nothin’ on journalism, and this is basically Exhibit One. Leibovich argues that the media didn’t need to ask questions, and that Biden’s incapacity was self-evident. He lets himself off the hook by claiming that four columns of his at The Atlantic raised the question of Biden’s age, only two of which preceded the June 27 debate. 

However, age wasn’t the issue — cognitive incapacity was the issue. How often did The Atlantic’s reporters and contributors demand answers to questions of Biden’s cognitive decline rather than just repackage the White House’s spin? If we are to expect spin and lies from the White House, shouldn’t we expect those who know that to seek answers elsewhere?

Not at The Atlantic, apparently. They’re not in the journalism business, at least not as it’s usually understood. They’re in the political business, in precisely the way Leibovich argues. If you want to know what’s really going on, don’t rely on The Atlantic to inform you. That’s actually pretty good advice from Leibovich.

The problem is that The Atlantic isn’t alone in that business. Practically every establishment media organization is in the political business, not the news business. And as such, we can’t expect them to run out and tell us when the president they support is incapacitated! We can’t even expect them to report on the numerous aphasiac episodes in public that their ally demonstrates. They’re too busy doing politics rather than reporting.

And if you fall for it, hey, that’s your fault for trusting them!

At least that much has stopped being news for most Americans:

GALLUP: Americans’ trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in more than five decades. pic.twitter.com/EBwH7h3Nd2

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) February 27, 2025

About two-thirds of Americans in the 1970s trusted the “mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio” either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to “[report] the news fully, accurately and fairly.” By the next measurement in 1997, confidence had fallen to 53%, and it has gradually trended downward since 2003. Americans are now divided into rough thirds, with 31% trusting the media a great deal or a fair amount, 33% saying they do “not [trust it] very much,” and 36%, up from 6% in 1972, saying they have no trust at all in it.

The media ranks only above Congress in their institutional list. Newspapers have a -30 net trust deficit (18/48), and TV news fares even worse at -44 (12/56) overall. What scores above media? Big business, the presidency, Big Tech (!), organized religion, the Supreme Court … pretty much everyone. Except Congress (-51, 9/60) as mentioned above, but is always worth mentioning again.

I’ll leave our friend Mary Katharine with the last word:

We did indeed lie to you about what was in front of your eyes, but you could see it clearly with your eyes, so that means everything was very transparent. https://t.co/QYVSpKQMgW

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) May 21, 2025