The corporate media is more depressed than ever, as evidenced by the saddest and most pathetic White House Correspondents’ Dinner ever. And that is really saying something.
I didn’t go. I had zero desire to go. But I did speak with Maureen Callahan, who went for the sake of research for her new podcast The Nerve (go subscribe if you haven’t already!) I don’t want to steal her thunder, but she described that virtually every guest she talked to was craning their neck to see who else was around. And it is not just Maureen – they do this to everybody. They are always looking for someone more important. It is so rude.
But that is how they are because it is a bunch of glommors who want to climb some corporate ladder in the Washington, D.C., press corps. What is the apex of that in today’s day and age? I don’t really know, but this thing has been dwindled down to the smallest, most pathetic version of itself.
The ‘Misfires’
For starters, there were no stars. I mean, none. We used to have celebrities like Scarlett Johansson there. I mocked George Clooney, but he showed up at this thing at the height of his fame. This year, it was some C-lister from some cop show I have never heard of. With all due respect to the actors and actresses, I don’t know who these people are. They used to have the crème de la crème of the Hollywood crowd; Supreme Court justices used to be all over the place. But they can’t get anybody to go anymore.
And then there were a the misfires. Unbelievably, the “WHCA Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage by Visual Journalists” went to Doug Mills of The New York Times – not for his iconic photograph of a bloodied Donald Trump standing defiantly in Butler, Pennsylvania, after being shot at, but for his picture of a “somber” Joe Biden walking away from a podium in the White House in April 2024. It is absurd.
And then they gave the “Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage” to Alex Thompson of Axios for his “aggressive reporting on Biden, especially leading up to and after the Trump-Biden debate” that “revealed that the president’s cognitive decline was impacting his ability to do his job.”
Here is how Thompson sounded when he accepted that award:
THOMPSON: …President Biden’s decline and its cover up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception. But being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows [applause]. I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust and being defensive about them further erodes it…
This guy is being universally praised for saying this, but, I’m sorry, that is a joke. “We missed a lot of this story”? The problem with the Biden cognitive decline story is that the press “missed” it? It was kept from them by this deceitful cabal around the president, and they just happened to “miss” the biggest story of the decade? What a lie.
The Farce
That is not what happened, and the mere fact that Alex Thompson is getting an award for his coverage of this story is comical. I can name 10 so-called ‘right-leaning’ or ‘conservative’ podcasters who were all over the Biden mental decline story years before Alex Thompson was even mentioning it. Yes, he is in the mainstream and was one who dared to touch it with a 10-foot pole. But what a jump that he gets an award for it. Are you kidding me?
Alex Thompson was not the person who blew open the Biden mental decline story, and the media did not innocently “miss” covering it. They actively worked to cover it up for years. We are being gaslit here. They have ignored the entire right-wing ecosystem that reported on Joe Biden for the four years of his presidency. We were jumping up and down.
The Megyn Kelly Show alone did an in-depth episode on this back in June 2022 (episode 339). I don’t need an award from the White House Correspondents’ Association, but it is a joke to single out this guy at Axios as the leader. That is bullsh-t, and he perpetuated more bullsh-t by getting up there saying “we, the Washington press corps, missed the story.” That is not the right verb. They didn’t want to cover it.
These Johnny-come-latelies in the mainstream media – who, just as we were going into the next presidential election, were like, ‘Gee, he seems infirm’ – can f-ck off. Where were you when we were out there doing in-depth pieces on this and being dismissed as nasty, cheap fakery, thugs against the poor president?
James Rosen got sidelined by the White House press office for eight months when he was at Fox News because he dared to ask President Biden a question about his mental acuity directly, unsparingly, but politely. Here is what James has said about it:
Where is James Rosen’s award? Where is his recognition? I don’t remember Alex Thompson or these other guys standing up for James Rosen. This is a farce.
The Cover Up
There was no interest in reporting on anything that would compromise President Biden. None whatsoever. This was taken out of the interview I gave to The New York Times recently, but I asked Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Where was Peter Baker on the fact that a neurologist had visited the White House 10 times in the past year? How was that missed? Why aren’t they looking at the White House visitor logs the way they would during a Trump administration?
It was barely a month ago that The New York Times claimed we were all “misled” on the origins of COVID, and now the line on Biden’s cognitive decline is “we missed it.”
I am not going to let any of these people – whether it is Alex Thompson at Axios or George Clooney or The New York Times – claim that this was a good faith mistake that people “missed” despite their best efforts. It is a lie. It was an intentional cover up and desire not to know.
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 1,059 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.