Washington Post media critic admits failure in scrutinizing Biden coverage after 'Where's Jackie' gaffe

Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple reflected on his own "failure" Monday in scrutinizing press coverage of Joe Biden and his cognitive decline, particularly after the infamous "Where's Jackie?" gaffe.

As the legacy media continues to face a reckoning over how it handled covering the former president's mental acuity before his disastrous 2024 debate performance, Wemple wrote a scathing piece calling out news organizations for not admitting any errors with the headline, "Did legacy media fail in its Biden coverage? Not if you ask them!" 

In his lengthy critique, Wemple revisited an episode from a September 2022 event where Biden called for Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., who had died just weeks earlier in a car accident. Biden previously released a statement acknowledging her death after it happened and the event he attended similarly honored her memory.

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"Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?" Biden said in the viral moment. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended the president at the time, insisting Walorski was simply "top of mind." 

"It’s time to turn this exercise on my own byline," Wemple wrote Monday. "The ‘Where’s Jackie’ episode was my cue to start hammering mainstream outlets for not pushing on this story. Never happened — that was a failure."

Wemple noted, as Fox News Digital did at the time, that neither CNN nor MSNBC offered any coverage of the "Where's Jackie" comment. 

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Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., died in a tragic car accident, which Biden acknowledged weeks before he called for her at an event that also honored her memory. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

While acknowledging some in the press, like Axios' Alex Thompson and The Wall Street Journal's Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes for their pre-debate reporting that shed light on Biden's cognitive decline, Wemple knocked the media for broadly lacking the vigor to get to the bottom of it sooner.

"White House coverage must involve more than observing the president in action and writing up analysis pieces about his comings and goings," Wemple wrote. "It needs to include a muckraking component detailing behind-the-scenes strategies, conflicts and debates over all manner of issues, particularly those relating to the president’s mental acuity. An adjacent question relates to whether Biden himself was fully abreast of and in charge of day-to-day decisions."

"And it’s on these fronts that major media organizations fell short: Though Biden’s declining faculties were clear to all, they never ignited one of those glorious mainstream-media investigative frenzies that colonizes television and radio broadcasts," he added.

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The media has been facing a reckoning following bombshell revelations of the scale of former President Joe Biden's in-office cognitive decline.  (Chris Kleponis/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Thompson's "Original Sin" co-author, CNN anchor Jake Tapper, said there should be "soul-searching" in the legacy media for how Biden's clearly apparent issues were covered.

"Few souls are undergoing a pat-down," Wemple wrote.

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