There’s only one path that can prevent another failure.

Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinions

If Trump had slipped as visibly and publicly as President Biden, it’s possible we would have covered that more aggressively. But there was a paradox — the reporters watching him most closely were seeing tiny, incremental changes, without necessarily being struck, as were people who infrequently tuned in, with the cumulative magnitude of the decline. Also, Biden’s White House was simply more skilled at deflecting journalists who did notice: masters of killing stories with kindness and punishing reporters who wrote things they didn’t like.

I’m told that journalists who starting asking about Biden’s age would suddenly be given access to normally unavailable senior staffers for denials, then deluged by allies insisting he was at the top of his game in private. It was genuinely hard to know how to balance those testimonials against reports of possibly isolated lapses.

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“But the videos!” my conservative readers are sputtering, and fair enough — yet video clips can mislead unless you know the context. (Remember the Covington Catholic fiasco?) The White House made it hard to get that context; staff rarely leaked, and anyway, few people outside Biden’s inner circle saw him enough to form a complete picture of his condition. The inner circle, meanwhile, is dominated by people who have been with the president for years.

A few phenomenally dogged reporters persisted anyway. But they weren’t rewarded for it because there seemed to be no audience for coverage of Biden. Articles languished unread, and Biden books weren’t selling.

Not good enough, I can hear my conservative readers saying. Okay, the White House made it difficult to get the story — but if Trump were president, reporters would have been more skeptical of White House spin, more motivated to crack the wall of silence to meet audience demand. And all I can say to that is: Yeah, you’re right.

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The media’s treatment of Biden wasn’t a conspiracy to protect a Democratic president, but it looks like one because that was its practical effect. None of our decisions were entirely driven by partisanship. But if we’re honest, many of them were unduly influenced by it.

Because there are 10 times as many Democrats as Republicans in mainstream newsrooms, journalists tended, with a few noble exceptions, to give a Democratic administration trust it didn’t deserve.........

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