Top news outlets acknowledge Hur’s characterization of Biden’s mental state didn’t match reality

Analysis by Oliver Darcy, CNN

New York (CNN) — Oops?

After spending weeks breathlessly questioning President Joe Biden’s mental faculties in the wake of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s explosive report, some of America’s top news organizations on Tuesday effectively stated that Hur’s characterization of the commander-in-chief was off base.

The Wall Street Journal declared that the transcripts of Biden’s deposition with Hur released on Tuesday painted “a more nuanced picture” than the report indicated. The New York Times found that Biden appeared “clearheaded,” despite having fumbled some dates. And The Washington Post concluded Biden “doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.”

In other words, the Hur report offered a misleading view of the president’s mental state. That’s a significant problem for news organizations, given that much of their recent coverage about Biden’s age was derived from that very report where Hur offered a wince-inducing depiction of the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

The acknowledgement from some, but not all, news outlets on Tuesday about the true nature of Biden’s deposition marked another embarrassing moment for the national press, which has floundered at pivotal moments in the lead up to the crucial 2024 presidential election.

The deposition transcripts not only indicated that Biden appeared fairly sharp during his testimony, joking with investigators and retelling stories with granular detail, but that Hur was misleading in how he presented some of the information included in his report.

As The NYT’s Charlie Savage noted on X, in one instance, “Based on a garbled moment, Hur claimed Biden forgot that the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan was an ally who shared his opposition to the surge. Hur omitted that a few minutes later, Biden brought up the ambassador again in a way that made clear he knew that.”

Particularly jarring, was that at another point during the depositions, Hur actually went out of his way to praise Biden’s memory. “You have — appear to have a photographic understanding and, and recall of the house,” Hur told Biden, referencing the president’s Wilmington home.

Strangely, that characterization of Biden didn’t find its way into his report — and, thus, the crush of ensuing news stories. Instead, Hur chose to portray the president as a mentally diminished elderly man who struggled to recall basic information during his deposition, raising alarm bells about whether he had the fitness to serve in the nation’s highest office.

Hur’s characterization of Biden played directly into a years-long campaign waged by Biden’s political opponents and the powerful right-wing media machine to depict the president as a senile, aloof man.

The special counsel’s report was something of a gift to outlets like Fox News, which used the special counsel’s characterization to validate its years of ugly attacks on Biden. Such outlets then pointed to the fact that Biden’s mental fitness was being covered by prominent news organizations, contending that the issue had grown so serious the supposed “liberal media” could no longer ignore it.

To be fair to news organizations, they were faced with a thorny, difficult decision after the Hur report dropped. If they chose to dial back coverage, it could have looked like they were covering for Biden. On the other hand, leaning hard into the report, producing scores of stories and television segments about Hur’s characterization of Biden’s age, proved ultimately to be unwise as well.

What news organizations can do now, however, is forcefully acknowledge that the deposition transcript poured cold water on Hur’s over-the-top characterization of Biden’s mental fitness. Given the extensive coverage in the prior weeks, which seeped into the national consciousness, it is not sufficient to only tacitly acknowledge the reality of the situation.

But don’t hold your breath that the news media will shout its findings from the mountain tops at the same volume and with the same vigor as it did after Hur’s report was released. While The NYT, The WaPo, The WSJ, and a few others commendably acknowledged that the deposition transcripts rendered a more nuanced picture of Biden than Hur offered in his report, other outlets did not.

As Bill Grueskin, a renowned professor of professional practice at the Columbia Journalism School noted to me, “It’s very hard for someone who was involved in the coverage to critique their own methods. Because these things don’t always lend themselves to straightforward corrections, like misspelling a name. It has to do more with how a news story is framed so readers understand the incompleteness of it.”

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