The media stops being polite to Biden and starts getting real

It has been two weeks since President Biden malfunctioned live on a CNN debate stage, causing panic and meltdown among the political and media elite. The 90-minute exercise in radical honesty has caused a legitimately shocking intellectual whiplash among the establishment press, which went from covering for Biden’s cognitive decline to actually covering it.

And it’s gotten me thinking about the old MTV hit “The Real World.”

For those who aren’t familiar, the original reality television show ran from 1992 to 2019. Rewatching early seasons now feels like an different universe from current reality TV, which has essentially become scripted and centered around celebrities and influencers.

But “The Real World” was different. It involved “seven strangers,” young and with no thought for their personal brands. The show’s slogan became iconic: “What happens when people stop being polite and start getting real?”

What we’re seeing post-debate from the Acela media is what it looks like when journalists stop being polite and start getting real — what happens when they are no longer burdened by the potential social penalty of covering the truth about Biden.

From the New York Times to Politico to CNN, mainstream outlets have opened the floodgates and gotten real about Biden’s mental fitness.

Perhaps the most consequential and jarring piece of “start getting real” journalism since the debate debacle was Olivia Nuzzi’s epic piece for New York Magazine, with the headline, “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.”

“When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified,” Nuzzi wrote, detailing what certain prominent people in Biden’s orbit told her. And later: “Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine.”

Not anymore. And that went for Nuzzi, who detailed interacting with Biden at the White House Correspondents Dinner in April. “Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth,” she wrote. “I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. … He took my hand in his, and I was startled by how it felt. Not cold but cool. … I said ‘hello.’ His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. ‘And what’s your name?’ he asked.”

I talked to Nuzzi this week about the backstory to the piece. “I went to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner reception in April for the express purpose of seeing the president face to face for this story,” Nuzzi told me. “I didn’t know what I would find and I couldn’t have predicted how exactly he would appear or how exactly the First Lady would seem. But I anticipated that, no matter what I found, it would be useful to be able to see him at close range and assess his face and gaze.…There are just not that many opportunities to see him [in real life], outside of elbowing your way into the pool, and they keep the pool pretty far away from him perhaps by design.”

Nuzzi’s perch at New York Mag allows her to write in this “real world” way. “I have unique freedom in form and content, being in my position at my publication. I’m not bound by the same rules and concerns that make it hard to publish the truth at a paper or wire service or network. That’s always the case regardless of topic. It just matters a lot right now at this moment,” Nuzzi told me.

“I’ve earned the trust of my editors and my readers in the years since I began as Washington correspondent for the magazine in 2017, and I felt it was worth going out on a limb with this story and effectively telling people they would need to trust me. And broadly they have, criticism aside,” she said. “And by the way, I’m happy to take the criticism. As I see it, if I’m not being yelled at by people on all sides of the political divide, I’m not doing my job, you know?”

There have been others too. I found Mark Halperin’s deep dive for Fox on how the “Trump-hating White House media betrayed voters,” contextualizing it by looking back to the Clinton coverage, particularly incisive.

There was an incredible Jake Tapper rant at the top of Monday’s “The Lead,” reading the nearly-incomprehensible transcript of Biden’s “Morning Joe” and ABC interviews. Suddenly we got to see what it would look like for Tapper to take his legitimate talent and turn it in the direction of anyone other than Trump — suddenly free to stop being polite, and start getting real.

Some in the media have attempted to maintain a level of defensiveness, however. Derek Thompson of the Atlantic posted a thread on X last week of past mainstream media articles about Biden’s age. He cited a series of stories, like one by prominent D.C. chronicler Mark Leibovich in June 2022, who wrote in the Atlantic about “Why Biden’s Shouldn’t Run in 2024.”

But that piece was simply about Biden being too old, and the narrative around Biden’s literal age is a red herring. Age is an ultimately irrelevant characteristic. Asking “is Biden too old” has always been the wrong question. The issue is cognitive decline and mental fitness. And the press had been scared out of covering the truth — until now.

It’s not cynical to point out that some of the coverage we’re seeing now is based around the simple fact that some in the press who are terrified of a second Trump term no longer believe Biden can win. But we’ll see if the “real world” moment lasts — because it certainly seems like Biden is going to attempt to stick around.

But decades from now, the journalists who got real in this moment will be remembered fondly, for doing their jobs and serving the public.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.