COLUMN |
FOURTH ESTATE
No, the New York Times Is Not Overcooking Its
Biden Coverage
Exploring the president’s fitness for office is a
crucial duty for journalists.
By JACK
SHAFER
02/13/2024
12:37 PM EST
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/13/joe-biden-media-coverage-00141176
Jack Shafer
is Politico’s senior media writer. He has written commentary about the media
industry and politics for decades and was previously a columnist for Reuters
and Slate.
That
President Joe Biden now presents as “an elderly man with a poor memory,” as
special counsel Robert Hur put it in his recent report, is something quite
obvious to anyone watching the president on those rare occasions when White
House handlers unleash him from his script. That Biden’s gears no longer
perfectly mesh would seem to matter, given his campaign for another four years
in office. The findings, from Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified
documents, would also seem to be newsworthy.
But many
critics of the press, both the professionals and the partisans, have denounced
the stream of stories exploring this episode. Former New York Times public
editor Margaret Sullivan found the coverage of this news, specifically in her
old Times haunt, completely overcooked.
At the risk
of staging an intramural wrestling match of one press critic against another,
allow me to respectfully explain why Sullivan is wrong. If the Times is guilty
of anything, it is of being late to the subject of Biden’s marbles. Instead of
brickbatting the paper for its coverage, the paper deserves a small bouquet and
an attaboy for scrutinizing the president’s underscrutinized capabilities.
Sullivan
surrenders a pawn in her Substack piece by conceding that Biden’s age makes him
less than an ideal candidate for a second presidential term, and another one
when she acknowledges that he’s “never” been “a gifted public speaker” (talk
about understatement), and still another when she says he “makes
cringe-inducing mistakes.” She observes that his age “really is a legitimate
concern for many voters.”
But having
noted her presentation against Biden, she shifts to explain that the press
should lighten up on the president because “Trump is poised to take down
American democracy, starting on Day One.” Because Trump faces multiple criminal
charges, including attempting to overturn the 2020 election. And because Trump
is “old and gaffe-prone himself.”
For the
media to make Biden’s mental state “the overarching issue of the campaign is
nothing short of journalistic malpractice,” Sullivan writes.
There are
so many assumptions knotted into that statement you’ll never untangle them —
but let’s try. The idea that the Times or the general press is making Biden’s
brain the overarching issue of the campaign is preposterous. The ink is still
wet on the Hur report. The Times news and opinion journalists approached
Biden’s deficiencies from a number of angles because that what’s news outlets
do with important news like the special counsel’s investigation. They, to use a
phrase once popular at the Times, “ flood the zone.”
To have
downplayed the Hur report would have been the ultimate act of journalistic
malpractice. If anything, the slow-walking the press has done up until this
point on Biden’s brain comes closer to journalistic malpractice than do the
welter of stories the Times has placed on Page One, on the editorial page, in
columns by Maureen Dowd, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens, Nick Fox and elsewhere.
Sullivan
compares the Times’ recent Biden coverage with what she and others consider the
over-reporting on what she calls “the supposed scandal over Hillary Clinton’s
email practices.” Nice try, but the Clinton emails were a story, deserving new
reporting at every juncture between May 2015 — when the first emails were
released by the State Department — until November 2016, when the 19th drop
arrived.
Why has the
press not better covered Biden’s mental haziness? It seemed to have no problem
conjecturing that Donald Trump was going mad during his term in office.
The answer
could be that his people conceal him from reporters, holding a skimpy number of
press conferences where he can be observed. Biden’s aversion to exposure has
become so extreme that for the second year in a row, he declined the
traditional sit-down interview with the network telecasting the Super Bowl. An
odd choice for a president running for reelection. The reflexive answer might
be that the press adores Democrats and pulls for them at select opportunities.
Such a thesis would require an investigation beyond the scope of this column,
but for what it’s worth, I’ve now worked in two newsrooms covering national
political news and I’ve never heard such sentiments voiced out loud or peddled
covertly. That said, I remain open to the idea that bias plays a role, but
require evidence beyond anecdote. And finally, our culture still practices a
“respect your elders” ethic, with many considering it unseemly to criticize the
old when they do the things old people do. Perhaps what the Hur report did was
give the press the permission structure it was looking for to finally talk
about Biden’s purported decline. It’s always easier to be the second guy saying
the emperor is naked.
Some may
think it inconvenient for democracy that the long-suppressed discussion of
Biden’s mental vigor has arrived now as the campaign shifts to a higher gear
and that it might hinder Biden’s ambitions for another term while benefiting
another candidate who is toting more baggage than a luggage car.
While
journalism can be useful in contributing to democracies, it should never allow
itself to be enlisted by a candidate or a party to spike or bury truthful
stories that some people think might wound democracy. If Biden’s batteries are
as low as they seem to be — he did himself no favor at the defensive press
conference he held last week about the Hur report — then muffling the story
about his condition is among the worst wounds the press could inflict on
democracy.
Taking a
dive for an impaired candidate because his opponent is considered a monster —
or even appearing to take a dive — will do nothing to restore the “trust” in
the media that so many polls have measured as lacking. If you can’t trust the
public with the absolute truth about a candidate, what’s the point of
democracy?
Sullivan
writes that she wishes that Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger would instruct his
opinion editor and the top news editor to cease “going overboard with both
coverage and commentary about Biden’s age” and “tone it down.” We can only hope
that Sulzberger will stay in his office playing Wordle instead. The Times has
gone at a real story the way a great newspaper should. And if anything, the
paper is following, not leading, public interest in Biden’s age and abilities.
In an NBC News poll published days before the Hur report’s release, 76 percent
of all voters and 54 percent of Democratic Party voters said they had major or
moderate concerns with Biden possessing the mental and physical health
necessary for a second term.
A landslide
of democratic interest in the president’s mental state appears to endorse the
Times’ coverage. We can only hope the paper continues to go “overboard.” If
anything, Hur appears to have finally begun the vetting of Biden’s mental
acuity that the press and his party should have done long ago.
******
Why do we
need a sportscaster to tell us the truth about Biden? On a recent Bill Maher
episode, Bob Costas said this: “If Biden’s hubris is such that he doesn’t
understand the best interest of his party, and more important his country, then
he has to be shown the door. Period. Because if Trump is a threat to democracy,
and in many ways he is, so too are the Dems, who are in danger of being as
feckless as the Republicans have long been shameless.” Send Valentines and love
notes to democracy to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert
subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter and Threads accounts
hope that when they grow up they will be email accounts. My
dead RSS feed craves anarchy.
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