Cameron Smith: A honest news media could have prevented Biden’s campaign

This is an opinion column

The popular media narrative is coming together even as the body of President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign is still warm. Unlike his predecessor, Biden put his country over his party and personal ambitions. History will remember the kid from Scranton as an accomplished president whose only fault was loving his country too much. He has fulfilled his promise to be a bridge to the future by endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris who will save democracy from its greatest threat in generations.

Unfortunately for Democrats, these are the same people who told us that concerns about Biden’s physical and mental capacities were Republican misinformation.

I’ve been around both politics and media long enough to know there’s no centralized conspiracy to provide political cover for Democrats. If there were, myriad journalists and commentators would be forced to admit the truth we already know. To be honest, I’d hoped that there were more honest brokers of information left in America.

For decades, political bias has hidden nicely behind journalistic codes of ethics. As long as journalists never publicly admit their political leanings, then they don’t exist. It’s a convenient convention that is increasingly exposed as former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House seems more likely than ever.

No where has this been more apparent than the immediate fallout from the assassination attempt on Trump. No sooner had the bleeding stopped from Trump’s ear than pundits were citing him as the root cause of his own attempted murder. Voices who have roundly and rightly refused to cast victims as deserving of the crimes against them had a funny way of showing it when applied to Trump.

We can’t deny that Trump has both engaged and escalated political rhetoric in America, but protected speech and criminal violence aren’t in the same family. Fiery campaign rhetoric isn’t an invitation to murder any more than provocative dress is an invitation for sexual assault. The inability of the mainstream press to make such an important distinction without equivocation was the latest erosion of trust with American voters.

Biden’s resignation from the 2024 campaign only affirms that Trump and Biden weren’t given the same treatment by the press. Forget Fox News and MSNBC for a moment. Toss out Vox and Newsmax. Their biases are so obvious and apparent that most Americans take their offerings with a grain of salt.

But what about those outlets still claiming to be politically neutral?

The same outlets blaming Trump for his own assassination attempt categorically missed Biden’s mental and physical capacities failing in plain sight. It was only after Biden’s devastatingly awful debate against Trump that the “objective” media feigned surprise and began scrutinizing Biden with the same lens as they’ve applied to Trump.

As I’ve mentioned previously, we’re only talking about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 because the Biden campaign asked media outlets to do so more than a year after the conservative think tank published the same type of presidential transition guide it has for administrations since the 1980s.

To be fair, Trump attacks any media outlet which dares criticize him. He wasn’t worried about media which bought ink by the barrel in the early part of his career, and now he’s not batting an eye at organizations that push content by the petabyte. Even the typically-aligned Fox News has fallen from grace with Trump.

But that’s actually the problem. Any credible news organization attempting to keep the American population informed must treat a friendly Biden campaign with the same level of scrutiny as an offensive candidate like Trump. That is an incredibly difficult task, but it has historically been one of the most important tools for holding American political power accountable.

Perfect informational neutrality has always been a myth, but the sheer volume of information available to voters prioritizes quick production over thorough investigation. News journalism should take more time and effort than opinion pieces with a few quotes from unnamed sources or social media posts. The fact that most news organizations now report on publicly available tweets shows how the constitutionally protected press has fallen.

Less than a third of Americans trust the mass media to report the news in a fair and accurate way. This isn’t simply a product of Trump’s consistent attacks; it’s a matter of failed accountability because of bias as well. We need news outlets to regain the trust of the American people if we’re to keep our political class on its toes. They can start by holding the eventual Democratic nominee for president to the same standard as Trump. Only then will we find out what can be unburdened by what has been.

Smith is a recovering political attorney with four boys, two dogs, a bearded dragon, and an extremely patient wife. He’s a partner in a media company, a business strategy wonk, and a regular on talk radio. Please direct outrage or agreement to csmith@al.com or @DCameronSmith on X or @davidcameronsmith on Threads.