‘We Were Trying To Crack This’: NYT’s Ezra Klein Blames Sources For Media’s Failure To Cover Biden’s Decline

New York Times (NYT) columnist Ezra Klein claimed during a Wednesday podcast that mainstream media outlets could not get sources to verify whether former President Joe Biden’s health was in decline during his presidency.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson published “Original Sin” on Tuesday, which asserts that Biden’s inner circle hid the former president’s decline. Tapper, on “The Ezra Klein Show,” criticized the media’s failure to cover Biden’s deterioration, but Klein defended the press, saying sources’ reluctance to speak out prevented coverage.

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“There are a lot of failures in this book, and certainly the news media, it’s hard to argue that we were on top of this,” Tapper said. “Even people like you and me who were questioning this publicly, it’s hard to argue that any of us, in retrospect, covered this sufficiently.”

“Although there was — I do — I want to give credit to a bunch of my newsroom colleagues here and Alex and others,” Klein replied. “There were a bunch of stories, there were great Times stories, great Wall Street Journal stories, Axios stories. It was harder to get people to say anything. And it’s hard to get — I mean, you need evidence for stories. But we were trying to crack this.”

While corporate media spent years downplaying Biden’s decline ahead of his calamitous June 2024 debate