OPINION:
The mass cover-up of President Biden’s cognitive decline was one of the biggest scandals in world history, perpetrated by senior White House staff and facilitated by the national news media. It’s at the top of the list, as it was an attempt to conceal the advancing decrepitude of the most powerful person on earth and because it was done with astonishing shamelessness, since we could all see the truth for ourselves.
Not one of the clubby Washington reporters will ever acknowledge that they tried to protect Mr. Biden because, as a Democrat, he was one of them, but we all know that was what happened. Just as we know that their current concern for President Trump’s health is not driven by an altruistic interest in the health of our nation’s leaders.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it best in a forum moderated this week by New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, when he blasted the media’s lack of curiosity about vigor during the Biden years. “Where was The New York Times?” Mr. Bessent demanded. “We just had a three-hour Cabinet meeting yesterday. For 10 months, the Biden administration did not have a Cabinet meeting.”
This kind of obvious bias, which Republicans have endured from the media for decades, has only worsened and accelerated in the Trump era. Certainly, Mr. Trump himself is no stranger to pointing out errors in the press, and he has successfully sued outlets — ABC and CBS have already settled — and is publicly musing about suing some more.
For the first time, a section of the official White House website is dedicated to holding the media accountable for their one-sidedness.
“Misleading. Biased. Exposed.”
Those are the words at the top of the page that present the “Media Offender of the Week,” which can be found by navigating from the White House homepage through the media menu.
At this writing, there are three outlets in the spotlight — The Boston Globe, The Independent and CBS News — for misrepresenting Mr. Trump’s criticism of members of Congress who tried to incite insubordination in the U.S. military by releasing a video in which they encouraged troops to disobey orders from their chains of command. The lawmakers recklessly implied that Mr. Trump had issued illegal orders, which he had not done and which they could not specify.
For their erroneous and deceptive reporting on the shameful video, these news organizations (and the reporters who filed the stories) will now forever be noted as official members of the Fake News Media, as recognized by the White House. They join a rogue’s gallery of publications and broadcasters, and the White House has helpfully memorialized them all in the “Offender Hall of Shame,” also located in this section of the website. Here, users can look up fake news stories based on subject matter, publication, reporter or category of journalistic malfeasance.
Yes, that’s right. You can identify bad reporting based on the specific offense that has been committed: bias, circular reporting, failure to report, false claim, left-wing lunacy, lie, malpractice, mischaracterization, misrepresentation or omission of context.
Amusingly, some mainstream news outlets reported on the new webpage and felt obligated to make lame “we stand by our reporting” statements, which made them look even more complicit.
The Society of Professional Journalists has written a letter to express its concerns. Still, the White House team has already notched at least one victory: getting a publication to change a story that was categorized as a lie and misrepresentation.
The Hill ran an op-ed that was bitingly critical of Mr. Trump’s use of the National Guard to fight crime in the District of Columbia. It heavily implied that Mr. Trump sent troops into the city only because he is racist and loves “strongman authoritarianism” and “military mobilizations.” Hilariously, at the top of this piece, the headline of which also referred to the president as “autocratic,” they used a picture that showed National Guard troops on patrol during the Biden presidency.
The Hill has since changed the image to one that was taken during Mr. Trump’s term, but that embarrassing error somewhat undermined the point of the piece, which was to isolate Mr. Trump as a singular threat.
If you want to illustrate something about Mr. Trump but you use a picture from when he wasn’t in office, what point have you made?
Here’s another question: If the White House had not forced them to change it, would there have been a correction? Color me skeptical, because I checked The Hill’s website before I filed this column, and there was no editor’s note explaining that a picture had been swapped out.
The media often claim to hold the powerful accountable, but as the Trump White House might say, the press needs a dose of that too.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and founder of Line Drive Public Affairs. He served as a senior adviser on the 2024 Trump campaign and as communications director on the 2020 Trump campaign.
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