By: Becket Adams – nationalreview.com – April 13, 2025

Blaming ‘herd mentality’ elides the true culprit.

If you’re waiting for an apology from the press for its effort to conceal Joe Biden’s decrepitude from the public, don’t hold your breath.

You’ll likely never get one.

Axios co-founder Mike Allen last week blamed “groupthink” and “herd mentality” for the industry-wide campaign to downplay the former president’s physical and mental decline, the latest sign we’ll never get a genuine reckoning for the partisan media activism of the Biden years.

This isn’t to dog on Allen. Rather, this is to point out that if even he is making this argument — after one of his star reporters, Alex Thompson, spent months accurately reporting on Biden’s deterioration — imagine how much more reluctant the actual media perpetrators are to admit to what they did, which went well beyond casual negligence.

The media’s coverage of Biden’s health “was all the worst parts of reporter brain coming together,” Allen said in a recent interview with the Free Press’s Bari Weiss. “And there is the groupthink, the monothink [and] cluelessness . . . And this is where the American people see something, sense something, and they’re not seeing it reflected in news outlets that they used to trust.”

He added, “And so, specifically with the Biden health, people discounted what they saw with their own eyes, ignored it. And this is the reporter groupthink part of it, that there is an insecurity, a herd mentality, you don’t want to be separate — it’s like crazy, the typical reporter instinct.”

Fine, let’s assume for a moment it was mere “herd mentality.” If so, what did the “herd” want? The favor of and access to the Democratic White House, according to Allen.

That’s hardly a comforting excuse.

“The herd wanted the approval of the White House, connectivity of the White House. They didn’t want to look like they were being ideological on Twitter or on other social media when in fact they were being clinical,” he told Weiss.

Elsewhere, former Washington Post and CNN media critic Chris Cillizza echoed Allen’s sentiments, saying, “While I absolutely believe that the media — myself VERY much included — didn’t work hard enough to get around the smokescreen the Biden people were putting up around him — I do not think that it was ‘intentional activism.’”

He added, “We simply didn’t push hard enough.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is pure cope. It’s as if Allen and Cillizza are unwilling to face the unpleasant possibility that many in this industry are out-and-out partisans.

The corporate press’s mishandling of Biden’s health went beyond incuriosity or thoughtlessness. Many journalists, editors, and commentators behaved as active and willing participants in a broader conspiracy by the White House to shield the dotard chief executive.

Yet we were told that it was a “conspiracy” to suggest that Biden was struggling to keep up with the rigors of the job, even though we could all see this was plainly true. The New York Times told us it was a “conspiracy theory” to notice Biden’s tendencies to stumble verbally and physically. We were told Biden’s struggle to articulate his thoughts was merely a stutter, long dormant but resurfaced just in time as a convenient explanation. We were told that documented evidence of Biden’s general deterioration was “deceptive” or “misleading” at best and fake at worst. When the Biden White House launched a campaign to dispute video evidence of Biden’s frailties, labeling such evidence as “cheap fakes,” nearly every corporate newsroom got in line, echoing the exact phrase to cast doubt on photos and videos clearly showing the toll of Biden’s advanced age.

In June 2023, The Guardian asserted, “Although asking whether the nation’s oldest-ever president is fit for a grueling and mentally demanding job is a reasonable question, much of this narrative has relied on either specious allegations or outright deception.” Earlier in 2021, Bloomberg News reported, “Republicans – including, most notably, former President Donald Trump – have frequently criticized Biden’s acuity, including making unfounded claims about his mental competence.”

In August 2023, in a moment lacking any self-awareness, the Associated Press was stumped by polling data that showed voters believed Biden was too old for the job, but not Donald Trump, who is only three years younger.

“Americans actually agree on something in this time of raw discord: Joe Biden is too old to be an effective president in a second term,” the AP reported. “Only a few years his junior, Donald Trump raises strikingly less concern about his age.”

The report continued, noting the public is “oddly united in sizing up the one trait Biden cannot change.” Yes! That is because Americans have eyeballs. It was “odd” only to those who ignored or downplayed the obvious.

When Biden himself tore down the façade, revealing beyond a doubt in his June 2024 presidential debate that those voter concerns were well-founded, Politico sneered at the “conspiracy” seen by conservatives in those previous media-promoted assurances of his mental acuity and physical fitness.

You were lied to. You were told that the things you saw and heard were not as they seemed, that you were the mark in a political-propaganda plot.

It’d be one thing if the journalists who promoted the Biden administration’s lies didn’t know any better. Yet these folks had spent years covering Biden, from his time in the U.S. Senate to his time as vice president and then finally as president.

They, surely, could recognize the decline. Anyone who covered Biden as recently as 2012 — as this author did — was confident in saying the Biden of 2020 onward was absolutely not the same Biden who skillfully challenged Paul Ryan during the 2012 vice-presidential debate. Everyone could see that.

Until there is a forthright industry-wide reckoning for one of the most significant media scandals of the past 50 years, these people cannot be forgiven for the trust they squandered.

Trust must be rebuilt — but that starts first with a genuine admission of guilt.

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Source: There’s More to the Media’s Biden Cover-Up Than ‘Groupthink’ | National Review