Many, many moons ago, the mainstream press was so eager to print any negative story about a sitting United States president that they ended up publishing several stories that were partially or totally false.

Most famous among these was a 2017 CNN story of a Russian bank with close ties to President Trump, who was being investigated over it. The story was so poorly sourced and incorrect that not only was it retracted, but three reporters resigned in disgrace.

In 2019, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell "said that a source had told him that Deutsche Bank documents showed that Russian oligarchs had co-signed a loan application for Trump." It was a story he later retracted. That same year, BuzzFeed reported that Robert Mueller was interviewing Michael Cohen, and BuzzFeed somehow knew what they were talking about. Several media outlets quickly countered that report, saying they had heard nothing about this. Eventually, Mueller himself came out to deny the report.

From 2015 to 2020, the press was so curious about every aspect of Donald Trump's personal and political life that they were reporting on every rumor and every whisper they could get their hands on. The same cannot be said for the Biden administration.

On Thursday, New York Magazine released a bombshell story about all the folks who have been concerned for months about Biden's declining mental state. The reporter, Olivia Nuzzi, insists that it is only coming out now because she has been working on it for months and sources weren't comfortable going on the record until after the debate.

READ MORE: Bombshell Report Reveals Extent of Biden's Mental Collapse, Including Terrifying Quotes From Friends

However, we have been able to observe Biden's decline since well before January of this year, when she began working on the story. 

The media has been able to observe it, too. They, like all of us, have eyes and ears. They have seen the same interviews, press conferences, and public appearances we have. They have they actual tapes of them. But what they don't have, what they haven't had since 2020 - when Biden was running a basement campaign that minimized his public appearances under the pretense of "COVID mitigation" - is any sort of curiosity into how bad the situation is.

Journalists in the mainstream press today will insist that the White House was lying and gaslighting and that they were caught just as unawares as the rest of the country. But it's impossible to look at the evidence and think that there were really no signs a curious and aggressive press could have picked up on. For God's sake, they turned "covfefe" into a news cycle complete with medical professionals and armchair diagnoses.

They spent years using every mistake, trip up, and random thing Trump said as a sign of his mental decline. But we have literally hours of video of Biden verbally flailing, wandering off stages, tripping, falling, and every other manner of really bad sign and there was little more than a tacit acknowledgment that it happened and a quick moving on to the next subject.

In the weeks leading up to the debate, they unquestioningly bought into the White House spin that these videos were "cheap fakes" and Republican propaganda.

The media was not fooled. They were complicit in their silence, and they chose not to engage with the possibility that Biden was rapidly in decline. They chose to look away from it and ignore it, just hoping Biden could make it through this year, beat Trump, and then everyone could worry about Biden's health afterward.

But it's impossible to ignore now, and they deserve all the scorn they get for allowing it to get this far.