It was promoted as President Joe Biden's "Big Boy" news conference, a no-holds-barred gathering of ink-stained wretches and broadcast/cable pretty faces finally freed to fire away with any question they wanted to ask the Chief Executive.
That's not how it happened. Here's how London's Daily Mail described the event:
This is what a "big boy" press conference looks like: Two teleprompter screens, a list of vetted journalists and press aides with microphones, ready to silence tricky questions.
The White House had leaned into the term, first used by a reporter, to signify that President Joe Biden would offer a no-holds-barred demonstration of his ability to parry tough questions.
Yet even with the guard rails of screens, fussing aides and an opening statement, Biden struggled at times with a raspy throat, botched lines and meandering answers.
In other words, the White House communications and political staffers stage-managed Thursday's news conference at the NATO Summit just as they have been doing for years with all of Biden's public events.
There were claims that no pre-arranged questions were asked. But don't think for a moment that Biden didn't know something about what each of the journalists' names on the prompt sheet he held up at the outset of the questions might ask.
Plus, Biden never said anything like "Okay, who wants to ask the next question," which he almost certainly would have had he been taking any and all questions from a roomful of aggressive journalistic truth-seekers determined to ask the tough questions and demand straight answers.
There were a few such journalists among the assembled scribes, but the vast majority of them sat there on their hands and let the fraudulent proceeding go forth without protest or any effort to force Biden to go off the script.
Whatever happened to journalists doing their constitutionally sanctioned and protected public service job of holding public officials accountable for their decisions and actions and doing so "without fear or favor"?
Biden's critics in both political parties had built up expectations about the crucial significance of the "Big Boy" news conference. This was going to be another make-or-break test of whether Biden is mentally fit to serve a second term as president. Is there any more important issue for the American people at this moment in time?
But the only way the event could have been a credible test was if Biden had to open himself to all questions, not just those pre-scripted for him to call on as he went down the staff-prepared list.
And even if he felt obligated to call on the listed names, he could have shown some genuine character by responding to the question from the last name on his list and then inviting any reporter present to ask him a question.
Frankly, nobody should have been surprised by the silence of the lambs in the MSM. Biden's sad debate performance was the raising of the curtain on the Wizards of Oz in the White House who have been stage-managing America's Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief for years.
That exposé prompted the explosion of absolutely legitimate doubts and demands concerning Biden's mental fitness for a second term. It also prompted in some quarters the obvious questions about why nobody in the MSM had done their jobs by reporting on the increasingly obvious signs of mental decline in the President, the paucity of his public appearances, and, especially, why Biden so rarely talks to the media compared to his immediate predecessors.
A revelation earlier this week from Chuck Todd, the former Democratic campaign staffer and more recently host of NBC's "Meet the Press," prompts reasonable people to wonder if journalists in the MSM have known all along about those issues but chose not to report them. On his podcast, Todd revealed this:
I'm not gonna out the cabinet secretary, right? But I had a cabinet secretary two years ago, all out of the blue ask me, "Do you really think he's gonna, he can't run again like this?"
And I said, "Well, you have more interaction with him than I do." And they said, "I don't have a lot of interaction with him."
Good for Todd in protecting his source. Journalists have to do that in order to do their job on behalf of the public. But that doesn't excuse the reality that, from roughly the mid-point of Biden's term, Todd concealed the fact he had credible evidence from a top Biden appointee that the President wasn't then up to a second term!
If I were Todd's editor, we would be having a serious conversation about the ground rules for his future employment. But I doubt that whoever is Todd's editor will have such a talk with him.
And neither will any of the editors of all the other MSM folks who have kept silent about something millions of Americans began seeing and wondering about within months of the Biden presidency's inauguration.
Want to talk about genuine threats to democracy? How about what happens when independent journalists stop being independent?
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