Five years too late, the Wall Street Journal finally reports – when it no longer matters – what journalists knew all along but covered up: Joe Biden was not mentally fit to be president.

The mainstream media’s disservice to the public ranks right up there with Walter Duranty’s New York Times reporting, in which he fed Soviet Union propaganda to the U.S. as news and helped cover up the hellscape that was Stalin’s Russia. (The New York Times never returned the Pulitzer Prize that Duranty won for his lies.)

Except in this case, it wasn’t one reporter halfway around the world in a closed society. It was a legion of reporters inside the White House.

The Journal report reads as though it’s the result of hard investigative work. “This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations,” it says.

Bullsh-t.

The Journal’s story is just a catalog of what reporters knew – or must have known – all along but refused to tell the public.

Remember, these are reporters who are as close to a president as you can get. They hear all the White House gossip. They see the president up close every day. They knew how bad he was. They knew he was being protected by a close-knit group of advisers. They knew that the staff was frustrated, and lawmakers concerned. They just covered it up on Biden’s behalf. And the party’s.

Not only did they refuse to cover these things, they attacked anyone who dared suggest that Biden was incapable of carrying out his duties. When Biden slurred, stumbled, tripped, mumbled, or did something that so obviously showed his frailty, the mainstream press, including the reporters at the Wall Street Journal, would rush out stories about how he was full of vim and vigor.

The Journal also pretends that the White House efforts to insulate Biden were so effective that reporters had no idea what was going on.

“The strategies to protect Biden largely worked — until June 27, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump, searching for words and unable to complete his thoughts on live television.”

Also, bullsh-t.

A more accurate way to state this is that the combined effort of the White House and a corrupt news media “largely worked” — until Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump.

As we noted in the aftermath of that debate (see “The Nation Finally Got To See The Real Biden — The One The Press Has Been Hiding All These Years”):

For three and half years, the press has been telling the public that Biden is doing fine. That all the talk of his age and infirmity was misinformation. Just last week, the media tried to convince voters that Biden’s incredibly odd behavior at recent events was all ‘cheap fakes’ by Republicans. They said Donald Trump made verbal mistakes and was old, too.

The media’s coverage of Biden for the past four years has been nothing short of criminal.

The sudden willingness of the media to report the truth about Biden – The New York Times recently admitted that Biden’s border policies are to blame for the unprecedented invasion of illegal immigrants (after denying it for four years) – is nothing more than an attempt to cover their collective behinds.

No one should buy it. This was journalistic malpractice, pure and simple.

It’s time to scrap the Pulitzer Prize and start issuing the more appropriate Duranty Prize for flagrant attempts to lie to and mislead the public to push a leftist agenda.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board