Approximately 70 hours of audio recordings from Joe Biden's ghostwriter interviews were released late last week over the former president's objections. In one clip from April 24, 2017, Biden tells his ghostwriter, "I just found all the classified stuff downstairs." In another, he warns, "Some of this may be classified, so be careful."
ABC, NBC, and PBS didn't air a single second of it.
The same weekend brought newly released diary entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci, obtained by Senator Rand Paul, showing the former NIAID director privately acknowledged scientists believed COVID may have originated in a lab — while publicly calling anyone who said so a conspiracy theorist. Two of the biggest stories to break in weeks, sitting right there on the table.
ABC devoted airtime to a segment on "Punch the Monkey's birthday" instead. NBC Nightly News covered an aviation incident. PBS News Hour went with the resignation of a Cracker Barrel CEO. All perfectly fine stories. None of them involve a former president on tape knowingly disclosing classified documents to a civilian, or a former public health official whose own handwriting contradicts three years of public testimony.
The Biden recordings are damning not because they reveal something we didn't suspect, but because they capture it in his own voice. "I'll think of his name," Biden says at one point during the 2017 interviews for his memoir. "I should write the names down because I keep forgetting them." This was years before Special Counsel Robert Hur investigated Biden's handling of classified materials and described his memory as significantly limited — a conclusion Democrats spent months attacking as partisan overreach.
The tapes also reference a 2014 Situation Room meeting and include Biden murmuring, "it's confusing me" while reviewing his own papers. These are not ambiguous moments cherry-picked from thousands of hours. They are the former president, on the record, handling classified material casually and struggling to recall basic details.
Some will argue that the networks simply had limited time and made editorial choices. Which is an interesting defense to mount when one of the stories involves the former president caught on tape with classified documents and the other involves the architect of America's pandemic response privately contradicting his public position. If those aren't newsworthy enough for a 90-second segment, the editorial bar isn't high — it's fictional.
This is the same press corps that ran wall-to-wall coverage of every Trump document story for months. The same networks that treated every courtroom sketch and procedural filing as breaking news. The contrast doesn't require commentary. It requires a calendar and a search bar.
