The legacy media largely shielded Joe Biden from negative coverage of his health, age and cognitive decline during his presidency, but that all changed on June 27, 2024, when his disastrous debate performance changed the course of history.
Biden appeared frail and struggled with a weak voice, delivering rambling answers while frequently appearing to lose his train of thought during the first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign against President Donald Trump in Atlanta. Biden fumbled key answers and famously declared, "We finally beat Medicare," when he apparently meant to say that he beat big pharma.
At one point, as the two candidates traded fire over the issue of immigration, Trump pounced after another rambling answer from Biden.
"I really don’t know what he said on this, and I don’t think he knows what he said either," Trump said.
MEDIA FIGURES SHOCKED AT BIDEN'S 'BAD' DEBATE PERFORMANCE: ‘TOTAL AND COMPLETE DISASTER’
DePauw University professor and media critic Jeffrey McCall said the infamous on-stage debacle was one of the rare instances that a presidential debate truly impacted the trajectory of the election.
"Up until that debate, the establishment media were firmly in the Biden campaign camp, covering up evidence that was in plain sight that the president was cognitively and physically in decline. The media shamelessly repeated White House talking points about deep fakes and how vigorous and mentally sharp Biden was," he told Fox News Digital.
"These narratives were false, of course, but that didn't matter to the mainstream reporters as they felt compelled to cover for Biden, in spite of what citizens could see plainly on the rare occasions when Biden was allowed to speak in public," McCall said.
"The primary motive of the activist press, of course, was to try to deny Trump any traction in the election season," he continued. "The poor debate performance by Biden ripped the Band-Aid off, forcing the media to turn on a dime and begin the drumbeat to run Biden out of the race because he was too old and incapable."
The debate meltdown caused an earthquake across the media landscape, ranging from "dismal" reviews to vocal calls on the left for him to withdraw from the 2024 race. CNN's John King put a spotlight on the "very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party" that began in the early minutes of the debate.
"This was a game-changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party," King told viewers. "It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers. And they‘re having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket, and they‘re having conversations about what they should do about it."
King's CNN colleague Kasie Hunt similarly wrote on X, "The voice, open-mouthed look, and visual contrast between President Biden and former President Trump all have Democrats I'm talking to nearly beside themselves watching this debate."
Then-NBC News pundit Chuck Todd admitted that Biden looked like the "caricature" conservatives have painted of him, specifically over his mental acuity. Bloomberg Opinion editor Tim O'Brien wrote on X, "Biden simply comes across as a somewhat dazed punching bag."
"The View" co-host Joy Behar suggested the program was "in mourning" and urged Democrats to pivot away from Biden in order to keep Trump out of the White House.
"That was quite a turnaround from the reporting templates of previous weeks. But the media finally realized, based on the disastrous debate performance, that Biden's chances of winning the election were fading quickly," McCall said.
The debate, which came after a flood of liberal anger towards a Wall Street Journal report that raised questions about the president's viability, was essentially the beginning of the end for Biden’s time on the ticket.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a longtime Biden ally, wrote that the debate "made me weep" and realized Biden should step aside.
"I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime — precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election," Friedman wrote.
Fellow Times' columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote on X that he wished "Biden would reflect on this debate performance and then announce his decision to withdraw from the race."
CNN commentator Van Jones, who cried for joy when Biden won the 2020 presidential election, offered an emotional plea for the president to step aside.
The Atlantic's Mark Leibovich penned a piece titled "Time to go, Joe."
"Biden needs to step aside—for the sake of his own dignity, for the good of his party, for the future of the country," Leibovich told readers.
The aggregate website Drudge Report blared the headline "OPERATION: REPLACE BIDEN."
"DEMS SCRAMBLE WITH 130 DAYS TO GO! DEBATE CATASTROPHE," the Drudge Report wrote in all caps. It included a poll question over who would be the best Democrat to replace him out of Hillary Clinton, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Kamala Harris or "Other."
MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough suggested Biden might need to step down.
"If he were CEO, and he turned in a performance like that, would any corporation in America, any Fortune 500 corporation in America keep him on as CEO?" Scarborough asked.
BIDEN RIPPED FOR ‘OLD’ APPEARANCE, ‘WEAK’ VOICE DURING FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: ‘DEEPLY ALARMING’
Biden stepped aside the following month, suspending his re-election campaign and quickly offered his "full support and endorsement" for then-Vice President Kamala Harris to take over as the party's presidential nominee.
"The media then quickly got on the Harris bandwagon, with as little scrutiny as they had given Biden in previous months. The media promoted Harris as cool and energetic, and even helped label her as a pop culture ‘brat.’ The activist media virtually ignored that Harris didn't win any primary votes and was rushed through the nominative convention without having to deal with any opposition," McCall said.
"Overall, the media's poor performance in covering the Biden administration up to the debate and then the media's abrupt turnaround is perhaps the most shameful and egregious example of journalistic malpractice in American history," he added.
"This episode showed that the news industry was not interested in reporting reality to help a citizenry understand the situation. Instead, the mainstream media collectively engaged in activism, demonstrating a cynical attempt to herd public sentiment. That effort eventually failed, with the consequence for the media being a further decline in credibility," McCall concluded.
Fox News Digital’s Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.