Biden bows out: why the BBC wasn’t up to it
In September 2021 I wrote a piece for TheArticle about President Biden’s age. I pointed out that “he was born less than a year after Pearl Harbor. FDR was still president. He graduated from high school when Kennedy was president. He was elected to the Senate the year of the Watergate break-in. He may soon become the first modern US president to turn eighty while still in office.”
I continued, “Reagan was not yet seventy when he was elected for the first time, almost a decade younger than Biden. FDR looks old in the history books. But he was barely fifty when he was elected for the first time and was much younger than Biden is now when he died during his third term of office. The black-and-white newsreel makes him look older than he actually was. His successor Harry Truman was not yet sixty when he succeeded Roosevelt in 1945. There’s something else about FDR and Reagan. They were both hugely popular, perhaps the most popular American presidents of the 20 th century. Americans don’t mind older presidents. Within limits. FDR and Reagan were both a lot younger than Biden is now.”
The problem with Biden is not that he is old. Of course, America likes youthful presidents. The most popular Democrat presidents since Truman were all young and much was made of their youth. Kennedy was barely forty when he was elected, and it felt like a new start after the Eisenhower years (Eisenhower was 70 when he left office and he had been president from 1953-61). Bill Clinton was elected at 46 and made much of the famous photo of him as a youngster with JFK and playing the sax on Saturday Night Live . Obama was only a year older when he was first elected. In 2008 he ran against John McCain, white-haired and in his seventies; in 2012 Obama ran against Mitt Romney, then 65.
Perhaps the most famous image of the 2020 presidential campaign was Obama playing basketball, lean, athletic, full of youthful vigour. Even LBJ was 55 when he succeeded Kennedy and was only 61 when he left office. He looked older, but that’s what Vietnam did to him.
The problem with Biden was not that he was old. He was a terrific orator in 2016, when he was overlooked in favour of Hilary Clinton, and in the 2020 campaign he was a completely different man from today. Lively, passionate, on top of his brief. And that’s the point. Not that he’s in his Eighties, but that he is visibly losing his faculties. He finds walking difficult but, worse still, his memory has seriously worsened. We all know about the gaffes and the memory lapses, muddling up Mitterrand and Macron, Zelensky and Putin, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, wandering off during the D-Day celebrations, to the evident puzzlement of his fellow heads of state. He seems to have declined very suddenly and very visibly. This is not unusual. Anyone with experience of dementia in their family will know that it can set in with terrifying speed. A dear one can become unrecognisable in no time.
But what is really puzzling about the TV coverage of Boden’s announcement is not that the TV news networks didn’t call in any specialists in gerontology, it’s that neither the presenters or reporters on BBC News, on Radio 4’s flagship news programmes or Sky News mentioned the one crucial word: senility. That’s why Biden was forced to resign because sadly one of the most articulate and formidable American politicians of the past fifty years could no longer think clearly. And yet no one would say this out loud. Not the Obamas, not the Clintons, not all the pundits and commentators wheeled out by British network news channels. I haven’t heard a single person use the word dementia or indeed any other clinical term.
This raises a second key question. When did people in the White House know? When did the Vice President know? And why has no one, including Biden himself, said anything at all? Of course, Republicans are making much of this. But that doesn’t mean they are wrong to do so. The way Trump reacted to Biden’s announcement was despicable and typical of the man. All those TV commentators who said that Trump would be a changed man after the assassination attempt could not have been more hopelessly wrong. He’s as vile as ever, perhaps even more so. For Trump to talk of an American president suffering from a serious cognitive disorder with such a lack of empathy should make any decent voter refuse to support Trump, but that clearly won’t happen.
But there is an important question about when the people around Biden knew that all was not well. Biden’s circle, in election year of all years, seem to have concealed his decline from American voters. Some have compared this with people in the Clinton White House not speaking out about his affairs. It’s not a helpful comparison. In Biden’s case we are talking about serious cognitive problems affecting someone who is supposed to be dealing with growing crises in Ukraine, Israel and Iran. We could just shrug and say: well, who was in charge of the White House during the end of Reagan’s presidency or of the Labour Government before Harold Wilson resigned? But what was wrong then is just as wrong now and arguably we knew much less then about dementia and cognitive impairment.
The Democrats will hope that the media’s endless fascination with process will distract them during the run-up to the election. All those pundits to predict who Kamala Harris’s choice of VP will be, all those hours of coverage to fill with news of the latest polls… And so far, true to form, the Today programme and The World at One have done just that.
There is another way in which we were badly let down by the rolling news Channels straight after Biden’s announcement. The BBC has a dedicated News Channel offering 24-hour news. But there is news coverage and there is news coverage. Sundays are a terrible day for a major news story to break. All the top presenters and reporters were apparently unavailable. No one running the BBC News Channel seemed to think that when one of the biggest news stories in years broke they should call in their A team. So there was no Christian Fraser, no Justin Webb, barely a glimpse of the BBC’s North America editor, Sarah Smith. Or even presenters who are not specialists in American politics but are experienced news presenters, such as Clive Myrie, Jane Hill or Matthew Amroliwala. And where were the top commentators or reporters? Sky News had their US correspondent James Matthews and excellent interviews with top journalists like Kate Andrews from The Spectator and Stephen Bush, Associate Editor of the FT. The BBC failed to call in experts like Brian Klaas from UCL, the American historian Rick Perlstein or John Gray, formerly at Oxford and then the LSE. It couldn’t be that BBC News was caught on the hop. Most people expected such an announcement from Biden any day as the pressure on him mounted.
The only explanation is that BBC News is increasingly unfit for purpose. They had a bad election night, losing two million viewers compared to 2019. Their coverage of Israel and the Middle East has been widely attacked for bias and inaccuracy. They still insist that it is wrong to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. They have been constantly losing experienced broadcasters like Nick Bryant, Mark Urban, Jon Sopel and, worst of all, Andrew Neil. The Washington bureau has traditionally been a plum assignment, but it now seems to be full of inexperienced American reporters. They get basic decisions wrong. They had a reporter live from Milwaukee during the Republican Convention conducting interviews, but because of the ridiculous background noise you couldn’t hear her or her interviewees.
As their top news programmes constantly lose viewers they throw diminishing resources into podcasts, such as Americast, which increasingly overstretch presenters like Nick Robinson, Justin Webb and Amol Rajan, but it seems impossible to call them in for a once in a decade news story like Joe Biden’s exit announcement.
What this means is that the level of reporting on such a big news story was poor. No one on the programme had the background knowledge to make useful comparisons between Biden’s decision and LBJ’s decision not to run in 1968, to point out when it first became clear that Biden was becoming so forgetful or to compare recent clips of Biden with clips of the President when he was elected, or to ask why Obama pushed for Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic candidate instead of Biden in 2016.
Too often interviewees were either partisan Democrats or Republicans and were always minor figures, which is why they should have called in well-known commentators. Increasingly, the problem for BBC News is that if there are no dramatic pictures, such as a terrorist attack or the Trump assassination attempt, the riots in Leeds or a royal funeral, they need to provide some kind of insightful analysis and they don’t have the experienced personnel to provide it or anyone with a proper contacts book to know who you call in.
Worst of all, from the Director-General to the CEO of BBC News, the BBC has a crisis in leadership and that’s why these problems are all coming home to roost. Ever since the 1980s they have made a disastrous series of appointments at the top and that’s why now — faced with the kind of news story that news people can only dream of — they weren’t up to the job.
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