The press decided to pivot to Old Brandon
Dan Pfeiffer in his newsletter today takes it to the media for their coverage of Biden’s age. After watching Meet the Press today, I’m fed up:
Here’s how the self-proclaimed paper of record decided to report on President Biden’s grueling 5-day trip to Asia. Nearly every line of the story is rage-inducing, but this might be the most annoying part:
In three days of diplomacy in Asia, President Biden rallied world leaders to help finance poor nations, fortified the coalition backing Ukraine and struck a deal with Vietnam to counter Chinese aggression.
But even before he left Vietnam on Sunday night, the president was hammered with a very different narrative. By Monday morning, as the 80-year-old president was flying home on Air Force One, conservative media outlets had seized on his end-of-trip news conference as the latest evidence that he is too old to perform on the world stage.
I promise you that the apparatchiks at the Trump campaign are high-fiving over the fact that they got the New York Times to push their chosen narrative about Biden even though the entire trip undermined that narrative.
It’s not just the New York Times, the Associated Press recently headlined a story on their new poll with this atrocity:
“Trump has problems of his own.” Hmm, I wonder what those could possibly be. Do people not like his policy platform? Are they concerned about his position on Social Security? Or maybe Trump’s problems have something to do with the fact that HE HAS BEEN CHARGED WITH 91 FELONIES IN FOUR CASES IN FOUR JURISDICTIONS!
And then a few days later, NBC’s First Read newsletter landed in my inbox with the following subject line: “Biden’s age v. Trump’s alleged crimes: Poll finds liabilities for both frontrunners.”
WTF are we doing here?
Not to pick on the New York Times, Associated Press, and NBC, but these headlines (and the stories themselves) are emblematic of a very concerning trend in how the bulk of the political press is covering the 2024 election. In a desperate attempt at balance, the media is equating Biden’s age with Donald Trump’s criminal behavior emanating from stealing classified documents and trying to overturn an election. In any scenario, this would be ridiculous, but it’s particularly absurd because Donald Trump is a grand total of three years younger than Joe Biden.
But.. I fear the political press is headed towards a repeat of its grievous errors in the 2016 election when Hillary Clinton’s email usage was given equal or greater weight than the sum total of Trump’s crimes, corruption, racism, and rank incompetence. Poll-driven coverage, focused on the horserace, is once again creating a dangerous false equivalency.
The President’s age is a significant political challenge. There is no disputing that fact. The press is not solely responsible for that challenge, but they are inflaming the issue.
Legit Questions v. Irresponsible Speculation
Joe Biden is the oldest President in U.S. history. He will be 82 on Election Day 2024. By seeking reelection, he is asking the American people to do something unprecedented. The media — and the voters — should not simply take Biden at his word when he says he is up to the job. Of course, they should closely cover the White House and ensure that he is capable of performing the awesome responsibilities his position entails. I am not objecting to that coverage.
What I am objecting to is the constant coverage of Biden’s age, the regurgitation of a Republican narrative fabricated by Trump about Biden’s mental competence, and looping through moments of a man who overcame a stutter misspeaking.
For all of the scrutiny, there has never been a suggestion that President Biden’s age is materially affecting his performance as President. His first term saw him ably manage a cascading array of crises, from a pandemic to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to a once-in-a-generation spike in inflation. Biden has passed a historic amount of legislation — much of it with a Republican Party that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of his presidency. Perhaps the best and most telling piece of evidence that Biden can perform is that he meets and speaks with Republican members of Congress and governors all of the time. These partisan actors have every incentive to tell a tale of Biden falling asleep in a meeting or getting confused, and you never hear anything like that. Washington, D.C. is a town that runs on rumors, and if Biden was showing his age, everyone would be talking about it. And I promise you the reporters would be writing about it, but they’re not, and that should tell you everything you need to know.
This is not to say that voters are wrong to be concerned about Biden’s age. He is asking for four more years and will be 86 years old at the end of his presidency. It will be incumbent on the President and his campaign to answer those questions on the trail, but the current coverage of Biden’s age makes that task much more difficult.
2016 Redux
The way the political press is covering Biden’s age mirrors the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails. The political press was obsessed with the politics of Clinton’s emails as opposed to the substance of her potential wrongdoings.
In this hyperkinetic, highly confusing media environment, this sort of reporting creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Media reports on concerns about X among the electorate → the electorate reads about those concerns → the electorate becomes more concerned → rinse and repeat.
What makes all of this more pernicious is that the media is carrying Donald Trump’s water. The fallacious idea that Joe Biden is too old or senile to do the job was created by Trump and relentlessly pushed by the Right Wing media into mainstream political conversation.
The New York Times’s Charles Blow perfectly summarized this dynamic in a column from earlier this year:
Campaigns elevate an issue, pollsters and journalists ask whether the issue is having an effect on a race, stories are written about that effect, and as a result of the coverage, the effect is often intensified. That is the chain of custody for a political attack, but far too often, that connection and context aren’t made clear. It’s often presented as if these types of concerns just spring forth in voters’ minds and aren’t influenced by campaigns and news coverage
Useful journalism doesn’t report that other people are “concerned.” It helps people decide whether they should be “concerned” by reporting facts and providing context. Reminiscent of 2016, there has been too much of the former and not enough of the latter.
Both Sides-ism Rears its Ugly Head (Again)
Just looking at the coverage, one would assume that Donald Trump was much younger and healthier than Joe Biden. Donald Trump is 77 years old. If he wins in 2024, Trump will be the oldest person elected President in the history of the United States. Yet, Trump’s age is bizarrely absent from the media coverage despite Trump regularly demonstrating behavior that raises questions about his mental competence, let alone have access to the nuclear codes.
Joe Biden trips on a sandbag, and the entire world freaks out. Donald Trump spells the word “rumor” in a way that flunks a third-grader, and no one blinks an eye.
The same could be said of this truly bizarre statement from Trump during his recent interview with Tucker Carlson.
Let’s be honest: if your uncle said some of the things that Donald Trump says, your mom would call a family meeting about whether to send him to a neurologist. Yet, the press never once connects Trump’s delusional ramblings to his age. Every Biden misstatement is treated as a red flag, even though anyone who has observed Biden for years knows that he periodically misspeaks due to his stutter. This is not a new behavior. It was present during Biden’s 2008 — and 1988 — presidential campaigns.
Media Matters did a study around Biden’s presidential announcement earlier this year to look at how often Biden’s age was mentioned in the coverage vs. Trump’s age. The results are quite telling — 588 mentions of Biden’s compared to 72 mentions of Trump’s age.
There is simply no justification for this discrepancy. Just like Biden, Trump is asking the public to do something unprecedented by electing a person of his age to the Oval Office. Yet, the political press refuses to explore the concept.
The reason is depressingly simple. For the bulk of the traditional media, balance is more important than accuracy. For largely honorable reasons, the press wants to ensure their readers see them as objective as opposed to pushing an agenda. Therefore, journalists will swerve out of their lane to appear to cover both sides equally. It is impossible to provide “balanced” coverage of a campaign between a twice-impeached former President who led a violent insurrection, is charged with 91 felonies, spreads dangerous conspiracy theories, and is guilty of sexual assault, and a decent, ethical, empathetic incumbent with a record of success. The obsession around Biden’s age is a way to balance the scales with Trump’s criminality.
Man, that sounds dumb when you say it out loud — but it’s reality.
The Pushback Comes From Us
Biden’s age is still a big obstacle to his reelection. And I am not arguing that all the concern showing up in polls is a product of biased press coverage. I wish I could tell you that the dynamic will change as the campaign goes on. It won’t. Nothing in my two decades in politics suggests that political reporters will pivot from optics and polls to nuance and policy. In that sense, this whole piece may feel like this meme:
There is, however, some value (other than catharsis) in understanding that this campaign will be played with a stacked deck. Ultimately, the traditional political media will be an ineffective and counterproductive vehicle to distribute our message. It will be up to all of us to defuse the age question and make the case for Biden to the skeptics in our networks. It’s not the press’s job to assuage voters about Biden’s age, but it shouldn’t enflame those legitimate concerns for clicks either.
There are literally thousands of examples of Trump’s extremely disordered mind, not to mention his insanely bizarre actions.
Donald Trump is warning America that “Cognitively impaired” Biden will lead us into “World War Two” if re-elected.
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) September 16, 2023
You can’t make this shit up. 😂pic.twitter.com/zbRKNj5u6h
The media just accepts this as Trump being Trump and while they often will call out his lies, which are pathological to be sure, they don’t call out the fact that he simply doesn’t make any sense a good part of the time. To use a clinical term, he’s fucked up in the head. And it’s outrageous to project that on to Biden when the evidence is that he looks old and his voice sounds old but he’s mentally sharp. The proof is in the pudding.