Media figures seem to have settled on two big excuses for how they “missed” the Biden senility “story.” The first reason is that a small group of highly placed White House sources kept telling them that Biden was just fine, and the second is that “groupthink” blinded them to what was right before their eyes.
Everybody said the same thing, and hence everybody started seeing the same thing.
Alex is a genuinely good human and probably doesn’t want to be the one to throw his profession under the bus. But the reckoning that needs to happen from the Biden cover-up is those that helped facilitate the cover-up need to look inward and see that the driver was partisanship.
— Brittany (@bccover) May 29, 2025
Groupthink is a real phenomenon. Once you have a few people say something is so, the tendency for others to follow even when it doesn’t accord with their senses or experience gets greater and greater.
The groupthink thesis for why people in the media all congregated around the same “Biden is sharp as a tack” line fails the smell test for several reasons, the first of which should be obvious: what defined the “group” and why did the people in that group identify with each other?
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson use the groupthink excuse to argue that reporters weren’t ideologically motivated–they were just following the crowd. While this doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the people who present themselves as trustworthy reporters and “fact checkers,” it at least lets them off the hook from criticism that they are just liberal hacks.
Except…it’s not true that all journalists were on the same page at all. Groupthink occurs most around closed groups, and you can usually break the spell of social conformity by introducing even one or two dissenters in a group. And there were plenty of dissenters among journalists, ordinary citizens, and of course conservative commentators.
Yet the Pravda Media folks didn’t reconsider or examine their “beliefts”–the worked tirelessly to “debunk” any claims that Biden was anything but perfect, ruminated on “cheap fakes,” “ableism,” stutters, and accused anyone who claimed Biden’s brain was mush of being motivated by animus.
That is not groupthink. That is coordinated action, and served as propaganda. They chose a narrative they had ample reason to believe was wrong–it was obvious to almost anybody who really looked and they were told the truth many, many times–and chose to not only report a lie but attack anybody who dissented.
There could be many reasons they would do this other than pure partisanship, of course. It could be, as Thompson said, fear of punishment from their peers or the White House, upon whom they depend, wanting to please their bosses, or even a love of cocktail parties with bigwigs.
But practically speaking, it amounts to the same: they had every reason to know that they were not reporting the truth for some reason or another and they chose to perpetrate a hoax. It really doesn’t matter what the reason is. They are more loyal to their own interests or their class than to the people who depend on them to tell the truth.
That the reason was ideological for many is obvious too: Fox News and many independent journalists reported on Biden’s decline, and the reason why they are not part of the “group” in the groupthink is clearly ideological. It was on that basis that Jake Tapper dismissed The Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Biden: they were owned by News Corporation, which is Rupert Murdoch’s company, so should be dismissed.
I didn’t know human beings were capable of the level of audacity and fraud that drives Jake Tapper’s book tour: pretending he’s the angry victim of the WH which prevented him from knowing about Biden’s cognitive decline.
Here’s what he did the day the WSJ article came out: pic.twitter.com/ODSoSxnozb
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 14, 2025
In other words, the “group” to which the loyalty is given is not “journalists,” but “liberals” or at best “liberal journalists.”
The Pravda Media is flailing around, looking for plausible excuses for why they lied so much and so long about Biden, and they have settle on the “we were lied to” and “groupthink” excuses as their best shot at avoiding accountability.
“I don’t know what more we could have done”
Here’s a suggestion in the negative (ie, what you could have AVOIDED doing): you could have NOT browbeaten every person questioning @JoeBiden‘s competency on @CNN w/the certainty of someone suggesting the sky was purple instead of blue https://t.co/IkcSzEfYmQ
— Ken Cuccinelli II (@KenCuccinelli) May 29, 2025
Neither of these excuses should persuade. If you believe the first, then all these journalists are worthless–they are merely stenographers for powerful people, although you have to explain why they then are so willing to call Donald Trump a liar but not any Democrat. If you believe the second, you have to ask: what group are your part of, and why? Why are you so loyal to that group that you cede all your power of reason–the one asset you are selling, after all–to them?
It’s all hogwash, of course. Certainly there was some groupthink, but the overwhelming majority of the problem was that Pravda folks are liberal hacks. No doubt there are a few reporters of less-than-ordinary intelligence who just followed the crowd, but most of these people knew what they were doing.
Certainly Jake Tapper did.
