White House Press briefings are gradually becoming a breaking point between reporters and White House officials with journalists talking about denial and non-disclosure around the health of the American President, Joe Biden.
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According to the British Guardian: "It was the moment when long-simmering media resentment at a seemingly opaque White House broke through the surface with startling intensity.
With Joe Biden’s candidacy teetering in the wake of last month’s alarming debate showing, journalists who had covered his presidency full-time for years suddenly asserted that it lacked that most basic political element: credibility.
The trigger was the revelation – disclosed in several news outlets – that a specialist in Parkinson’s disease had visited the White House eight times in as many months. The press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, was forced in a live televised briefing on to the defensive over a supposed lack of transparency.
“My first [question] to you is on the credibility of this White House when it comes to talking about the president’s health,” the Associated Press correspondent, Zeke Miller, asked Jean-Pierre, who, taken aback, responded by calling for “a little respect”.
The exchange quickly devolved into an angry back-and-forth over whether Jean-Pierre had given an accurate picture about the president’s health and her continuing refusal to confirm the name of the visiting specialist, despite it already being in the public domain. The White House ultimately clarified matters in a subsequent news release that confirmed the specialist as Kevin Cannard and explained that he had visited the White House in January to carry out the neurological part of Biden’s annual medical check-up.
Yet the flare-up went beyond one narrow episode.
Many journalists increasingly feel they have been bamboozled by a White House culture of denial and non-disclosure. People who pride themselves in holding power to account in the world’s leading democracy have been asking how they could have been so blinded to Biden’s diminishing state before it burst into the open so vividly on the debate stage in Atlanta."
Earlier this week, Joe Biden delivered a defiant speech, on Friday evening, in the battleground state of Michigan, firmly dismissing the doubt swirling around his survival as the Democratic presidential nominee.
Biden held a rally at a high school gymnasium in Detroit as part of his visit to the critical swing state that chose Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. He walked on stage to audience chants of “don’t you quit” and addressed the speculation head on: “I am running, and we’re gonna win,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
