Early in Donald Trump's news conference Tuesday, Fox News' Peter Doocy asked a question that surely baffled people who avoided social media for Labor Day.
"How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?" Doocy said to the president.
Doocy was referring to speculation about Trump's health that spread online during the long Labor Day weekend, fueled in part by the president's relative absence from the public for several days. The incident has renewed -- for a different president -- questions about how journalists should handle the sensitive issue of how healthy an aging leader of the free world actually is.
Trump said he was more active than had been apparent publicly and criticized the media. "It's fake news -- it's so fake," he said. "That's why the media has so little credibility."
A year ago, President Joe Biden, now 82, abandoned his reelection effort after a halting, confused performance in a debate with Trump provoked concerns about his ability to serve another four-year term. Journalists who covered the White House faced attacks for not doing enough to investigate Biden's health and condition.
Trump, who turned 79 in June, is the oldest person to be inaugurated as president. Pictures showing him with bruises on his hands and apparent swelling in his legs circulated online recently, as did clips of misstatements in public, such as mistakenly referring to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last month as "Kristi."
None of these is evidence of serious illness.
The White House has said Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, which means veins in the legs can't properly carry blood back to the heart, causing it to pool in the lower legs. It's a fairly common condition for older adults.
As far as the bruising, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it's from "frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin," which Trump takes regularly to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. Easy bruising in general could have several relatively benign causes, including old age or side effects from medications like blood thinners.
Besides creating spikes in online activity through sites like X, Facebook and TikTok, stories speculating about Trump's health appeared in outlets like The Hill, the New York Post, People, Rolling Stone, Raw Story and Breitbart in recent days, according to NewsWhip.
But outlets like The New York Times, The Associated Press, MSNBC and Fox News Channel did not write about it or discuss it, at least prior to the issue being brought up at Trump's news conference.
On CNN Tuesday morning, anchor Audie Cornish had a short discussion about the topic. "At one point the term 'Trump is dead' was trending on social media," Cornish said. "Not true." She noted one of Trump's social media posts from Labor Day, when he wrote, "NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE."
On the conservative outlet Newsmax, anchor Rick Leventhal read a series of social media messages about the issue. "The left did not hesitate to take to social media sending ill will the president's way," he said.
After Trump's 50-minute Oval Office appearance, televised in full on Fox News, network anchor Martha MacCallum laughed at a reference to the issue. "Biden was missing in action for days or weeks," she said.
Trump sought to make his predecessor's condition an issue both before and after voters returned him to the presidency. In June, Trump ordered an investigation into Biden's use of the autopen for presidential signatures and whether his aides purposely shielded the public from evidence of Biden's physical and mental decline.
In part because of that, former NBC "Meet the Press" anchor Chuck Todd said in a podcast Tuesday that Trump and his team had only themselves to blame for the way the president's health became an issue. "I do think they're susceptible to a feeding frenzy," he said.
Beyond punditry, however, news outlets face serious questions about how to handle the story, much like they did with Biden. The physical signs that have been pointed out online should trigger serious probes into the president's health. Some critics, like historian Garrett Graff, said it was puzzling that many in the media hadn't treated it like a news story -- although the timing over a holiday weekend surely made it more challenging.
"Evidence-based assessments of a president's health are absolutely fair game," said Bill Grueskin, a Columbia University journalism professor. That could include observations like the president's bruising or falling asleep at meetings, and analyses of what drugs the president is taking and why.
"Similarly, radio silence from a prominent office holder, especially one who appears on media frequently, is a valuable thing for journalists to report," Grueskin said. "I don't think that news organizations need to publish those 'everyone is talking about XYZ on social media, so we need to repeat it' stories."
The issue of press coverage of Biden's health was widely discussed last year, and renewed again this spring with the publication of "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again" by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
Given all that, Graff wrote in a Substack post that "you'd think reporters would be falling all over themselves to dig deeper right now. Clearly, there's enough smoke to warrant at least a major story in a major outlet investigating whether there is fire."
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David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.
