Washington Post Reporter Hits Competition For Jumping On Biden Parkinson’s Story: We Checked If Was ‘Actually Newsworthy’

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Washington Post reporter Dan Diamond raised the curtain behind the dominant story in political circles Monday and his publication’s initial decision not to publish until they could fully assess if it was “actually newsworthy.”

The story in question first broke over the weekend from the New York Post: that a Parkinson’s expert, Dr. Kevin Cannard, had visited the White House and consulted with President Joe Biden’s physician. The New York Post story was headlined, “President Biden’s physician met with Parkinson’s disease specialist in White House,” and included several quotes from Republican lawmakers accusing the White House of a “cover-up” related to Biden’s health.

On Monday the New York Times expanded on the story and published a headline online that read, “Parkinson’s Expert Visited the White House Eight Times in Eight Months.” The Times story led to an explosive White House briefing as reporters tussled with Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre over exactly why Dr. Cannard was at the White House, which she refused to directly comment on citing both national security concerns and patient privacy issues – while making clear that Biden had passed all previous neurological exams.

After the angry feeding frenzy, the White House published a letter from Biden’s physician explaining Dr. Cannard’s long history of seeing patients in the White House and his role in examining Biden during his annual physicals, during which he repeatedly ruled out any neurological ailment. The Times story ran in print on Tuesday morning with the headline, “Parkinson’s Expert Visited White House 8 Times in 8 Months, but Why Is Unclear.”

“The media’s facing a lot of scrutiny on Biden-related stories — compounded by the challenges of reporting on presidential health — so I want to be extra-transparent,” Diamond wrote in a Tuesday substack about his story in the Post, which they only published following the White House offering additional information on Dr. Cannard. Diamond added:

Like other news outlets, The Post had looked into Dr. Cannard’s visits but we had held off on a story; we decided to wait until we knew why he was visiting the White House before determining if it was actually newsworthy. My colleagues and I had been making calls for a few days, trying to answer that question.

Then the White House announced last night that, yes, Dr. Cannard had seen the president, an announcement we chose to write up. Our story also has context that I haven’t seen in quick skims of other coverage, and I wanted to flag a couple points.

Diamond went on to explain the difficulties that surround covering a president’s health and the obvious interest both the national media and the public have in probing Biden’s mental fitness. He also noted that the White House is suffering a credibility crisis after years of “claiming that the president was always sharp behind closed doors — claims that haven’t held up the more we dig.”

“It’s also true that Dr. Cannard is an expert in diseases like Parkinson’s, and that he’s made frequent visits to the White House. I don’t know exactly what he did there or who he treated, beyond his exam with Biden. So I can understand why reporters’ antennae went up with the first inkling that Dr. Cannard was visiting the White House,” Diamond wrote, adding:

But I didn’t see this detail in other stories about Dr. Cannard: he has apparently gone to the White House dozens of times dating back to when he became the on-call neurologist over a decade ago.

Diamond added that he “went through old White House visitor logs and found that Dr. Cannard made numerous visits to the Obama White House in 2012, for instance.” He then argued that omitting this key context allowed for a kind of double standard for covering Biden that unfairly raised the specter of a scandal that the evidence so far does not point to:

Dr. Cannard met with then-President Obama’s physicians and helped with the president’s physical too. Is anyone suggesting that those visits were because President Obama secretly had Parkinson’s?

Diamond also explained that in his reporting he spoke to White House staff who told him Dr. Cannard offered a range of treatments while visiting the White House, including Botox shots for staffers suffering from migraines. “As the White House’s longtime neurology consultant, much of his work seemingly wasn’t focused on Parkinson’s at all,” Diamond concluded. Diamond concluded his substack by noting many questions still linger unanswered around Biden’s health, like why he has never been given a cognitive exam, and vowed to continue to offer transparency surrounding his work.

Read Diamond’s full substack here.

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