Why Does the Media Keep Missing These Huge, Career-Ending Stories?

That photo above is one of my favorites from the entire Biden administration. It was taken in August 2021 after the president tripped three times on his way up the stairs of Air Force One. Here it is from another angle.

What I like about the photo isn’t that it shows Joe Biden falling. It’s that it really sums up the biggest story of his administration. Right there, just a few months into his term, was the evidence that he was aging rapidly and maybe not up for this.

Just over a year after the trip up the stairs, Biden hosted a bill signing event. This was September 2022. “Where is Jackie?” he asked. But congresswoman Jackie Walorski was deceased. She’d died in a car accident weeks earlier. When the media asked the Press Secretary about this, she just lied.

Less than a year later in June 2023, Biden took another tumble.

The media and the Democratic Party just kept rolling along like this. They weren’t just ignoring the signs of trouble they were covering for Biden at every turn. By 2024, Biden was clearly having some senior moments, like this one at a meeting of the G9. He’s supposed to be part of a photo op and instead he sort of wanders away and is facing the wrong direction until the other leaders drag him back. This was June of 2024:

The White House went absolutely nuts over this, as did fact checkers around the media. It was a new form of political attack quickly dubbed, a “cheap fake,” which turned a supposedly innocent video into an unfair story about the president. Everyone agreed Republicans were out of line.

Two weeks later, this happened.

Joe Biden had a cold. At least that was the excuse circulated by the White House. But it was finally too much for the party to endure. Weeks later, George Clooney dropped the bomb that Biden didn’t even seem to remember him at a fundraiser held weeks earlier. He’d known Biden for 20 years and Biden didn’t know who Clooney was.

Of course Clooney could have revealed this when it happened but he sat on it until after the moment in the video above. In other words, after the whole world knew Biden had lost it, Clooney admitted they were right.

And it was really only after all of this and after Harris lost the race that we finally got the real story. Biden had been fading all along. As far back as the start of his term there were concerns and things got much worse by the midway point. Everyone around him knew and no one talked. This became the media’s excuse for why they missed the biggest story of the Biden term. Those darn Democrats had fooled them.

But the photo up top is the real story. It was always right there in front of them. It was there from the beginning, they just didn’t want to cover it. They wanted to be lied to by the White House.

So here we are just a little more than a year later and the big story is that Eric Swalwell is not fit for office. He got within seven months of becoming the next governor of California. Had he been able to sit on the secret a little longer, he’d probably have won. RCP was showing him in 2nd place before he dropped out (1st place was a Republican who could not have won against a Democrat in California’s general election).

And it turns out people have known about Swalwell for years. The allegation I wrote about earlier today is from 8 years ago. How did the media miss this one?

Beege had a good post making fun of Brian Stelter who was actually praising CNN for their good work on this story. Here was my response yesterday:

I realize you’re tying to take a victory lap here but why couldn’t anyone investigate this story before last week? Apparently lots of people knew for years. Echoes of Joe Biden coverage all over again.

— John Sexton (@verumserum) April 13, 2026

How does the media keep missing these huge, career ending stories? Meanwhile the Steele Dossier, which was complete garbage, was fully published within weeks of Trump taking office. They devoted two years to stoking that dumpster fire. It’s almost like the media is only interested in bringing some secrets to light. There’s an opinion piece about that in the NY Times today:

I don’t know the details of Mr. Swalwell’s admitted “mistakes in judgment,” or how the allegations against him will turn out. Nor is it clear, with all that concerned whispering, who in his party knew how much about his judgment or behavior before all of this became public.

What I do know is that #MeToo notwithstanding, too many in the congressional ecosystem continue to keep the chamber’s secrets under wraps until doing so becomes impossible — and a political liability. 

But it will take more than a few rabble-rousers to change the cost-benefit analysis that goes on in the heads of entitled lawmakers who misbehave. Only when more members and influential insiders demand better of one another as a matter of course, before things go sideways, will there be fewer political self-detonations and shattered lives.

As good as the article itself is this comment from a Capitol Hill insider is revealing:

Staffers in both Congress and State Legislators exchange gossip about “sexual conquests” regularly, at noon-time lunches, after-work cocktails, staff parties, campaign meetings, etc., etc. When everything is secret, nothing is secret. As a state and federal lobbyist for 25 years, I often heard about sex, drugs and voting intentions. Elected legislators and Congressman know all about this, but the ones engaging in this kind of behavior think “it will never become public” or “I can trust him or her” or “this is the only time I’ve ever done this”.

They all know. There are undoubtedly more stories like this floating around right now, but so long as the people involved are Democrats the media will never reveal them, not until it’s unavoidable. And when they finally get around to it, many years and many victims too late, they’ll expect a pat on the back for their excellent work.

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