Media Criticism

The Lie of the Year Was Joe Biden's Decline

It was the greatest cover up of presidential ability since FDR.

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Joe Biden | Credit: Erin Scott / Avalon
(Credit: Erin Scott / Avalon)

About last year: PolitiFact, the independent fact-checking website run by the Poynter Institute, bestowed another odious distinction on President-elect Donald Trump. The organization dubbed a statement uttered by Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance the "Lie of the Year."

PolitiFact has christened a Lie of the Year every year since 2009, and in only two of those years did statements made by Democrats earn the top prize. In 2011, PolitiFact slammed Democrats for claiming that Republicans would vote to end Medicare, and in 2013, the organization concluded that President Barack Obama's solemn promise—"If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan"—was plainly untrue. But in every other year, PolitiFact has singled out right-leaning purveyors of mistruths.

This year is no different. In 2024, PolitiFact's Lie of the Year is the claim by Trump that Haitian migrants in an Ohio town were "eating people's pets."

"With a brazen disregard for facts, Donald Trump and his running mate repeatedly peddled a created story that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants were eating pet dogs and cats," observes the organization.

The Republican ticket's disregard for the facts in this case was indeed brazen. It was completely untrue that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people's pet dogs and cats. What happened was that various concerns about migrants supposedly hunting birds in public parks in Springfield, Ohio, got lumped together with an unrelated story of someone killing a pet cat in a completely different town. It's a textbook example of why you shouldn't automatically believe everything you see on social media. Trump and Vance did real harm here, and it's absolutely fair to call them out for smearing the immigrant population of Springfield, Ohio.

But was this really the Lie of the Year?

 

Liar, Liar

Given recent revelations about the extent to which President Joe Biden's cognitive decline was well-known to his staff—and covered up by them—at the very onset of his presidency, one might think that repeated statements to the contrary might be worthy of "Lie of the Year."

The lie, peddled at the behest of Biden's aides and advisers, and sold by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to a gullible and incurious mainstream media, was that President Biden remained fit for office—and that mounting public concerns about his age-related decline were based on misinformation. Well before Biden's historic collapse at the June presidential debate, a majority of Americans expressed serious reservations about Biden's ability to serve. When reporters pressed Biden's media surrogates about these polls, they insisted that the supposed evidence of the president's decline was being fabricated by his political enemies. Jean-Pierre thunderously attacked conservative media, and Fox News in particular, for circulating what she described as misleading videos that appeared to show Biden out of sorts.

At the highest levels of the Biden administration, the official word was: Don't believe your lying eyes. And for the most part, the mainstream media bought it.

A recent report by The Wall Street Journal—which stands apart from other legacy outlets in having exhaustively investigated the lie—makes clear that Biden's aides were privately concerned about his age-related decline, not just in the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, but as far back as 2020. The Journal describes Biden being kept away from his Cabinet, and shielded from the American public, because he had both good days and bad, even at the start of his presidency. Aides realized he was often confused in the mornings, so they pushed meetings to later in the day. They also noticed he would lose focus if things went on for too long, so they instructed officials to keep briefings short.

This had real-world consequences. Rep. Adam Smith (D–Wash.) had concerns about Biden's planned withdrawal from Afghanistan, but couldn't get on the phone with him; the president was simply unavailable. It was a bad day, rather than a good day. The botched Afghanistan withdrawal would subsequently be considered one of the most damaging failures of Biden's presidency.

In hindsight, many news commentators now agree that Biden's cognitive decline was hideously underscrutinized. CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford admitted as much during a revealing panel on that network:

 

If anything, describing the story as "under-reported" is a considerable understatement. This was the greatest cover-up of a president's limitations since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's reliance on a wheelchair. On the one hand, the media's complicity in that lie would seem almost impossible by today's standards of adversarial coverage; on the other hand, Biden proved that it's possible to keep them in the dark and keep them quiet.

For this reason, the fiction that Biden was capable of running for re-election and serving as president for four more years is undoubtedly deserving of Lie of the Year. No questions asked.

 

This Week on Free Media

I am joined by Amber Duke to discuss the MAGA movement feud over H-1B visas, the media's dawning realization that Team Biden lied about his fitness for office, and our top media misfires of 2024.

Speaking of Free Media, we are launching our own YouTube channel! The show will remain a part of the Reason family, and is still produced by the talented staff of Reason TV—so nothing else is changing. But please visit the new YouTube channel and click the subscribe button. We appreciate it!

And be on the lookout for an expansion of Free Media in 2025. We plan to deliver even more content with Amber Duke and other media friends from all across the political spectrum: left, right, center, and elsewhere.

 

Worth Watching

It's taken more than a year, but I have finally finished Agatha Christie's entire Hercule Poirot catalog. I've listened to every single Poirot detective story, from The Mysterious Affair at Styles to Curtain: Poirot's Last Case, as audiobooks during my daily gym sessions. Having completed the collection, what I am experiencing is mostly a sense of loss: I feel as if a beloved friend has passed away.

I have come to treasure Poirot very dearly: his fastidiousness, his boastfulness, his disdain for other detectives who run about gathering clues. Poirot is in many ways the anti–Sherlock Holmes. He carries no magnifying glass and seldom examines footprints. His modus operandi is to interrogate suspects and use the "little gray cells" to deduce characters' motivations. This usually means that the solution to the mystery—typically revealed by Poirot, in grandiose fashion, during an assembly of all the major suspects—is likely to have been missed by the reader, though I did manage to guess the killer's identity in a handful of cases.

The three most famous Poirot novels are Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Orient is somewhat overrated, but the other two deserve their reputations. If you only read one Poirot novel, Death on the Nile is an excellent choice. (I solved it, to boot.) Ackroyd is a fan favorite, but is best consumed after having gained some familiarity with Christie's style; this makes the infamous plot twist in Ackroyd (don't Google it!) much more enjoyable.

A few others I really enjoyed were: Peril at End House, Murder in Mesopotamia, Appointment With Death, and After the Funeral.

As a new year begins, I have made it my 2025 resolution to be more like Poirot—to treat others with outstanding courtesy and kindness, to take pride in a job well done, and to better organize my life using order and method. I invite readers to do the same.