Apparently, the White House is very upset that The New York Times has to report on an obvious fact staring every American voter smack in the face:
President Joe Biden is old. And acts that way.
In an interview with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published on Monday, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said the Biden administration is “extremely upset” with the paper’s coverage of the president’s age — specifically over a special counsel report that deemed the president’s memory and cognition to be too unreliable to charge him with a criminal offense for willful retention of classified documents.
A jury, special counsel Robert Hur wrote, would be unwilling to convict Biden, likely to view him “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Sulzberger was responding to a question regarding 2024 being “a year of elections.”
“Not just in the U.S. but also in Mexico, India and the European Union,” the Reuters Institute’s Eduardo Suárez asked. “Is there anything journalists should do differently when covering an authoritarian candidate?”
Nudge nudge, wink wink. Wonder who that “authoritarian candidate” might be in the United States?
Sulzberger danced around the question, saying that his “answer is going to be independent journalism” and then defining it as anything but “independent journalism,” decrying “the risk of the old sort of the-truth-is-in-the-middle model” while adding there was “a risk in the media leaning into becoming the opposition to these candidates and becoming emotionally invested and trying to undermine them rather than to help the public understand their policies, their backgrounds and the potential concerns those may raise.”
This includes challenging “how they defy long-standing norms, how they challenge democratic conventions” — you know, pretty much the definition of getting “emotionally invested” in opposing certain candidates, which is precisely how the New York Times acts. Thanks for coming, I guess?
Do you read The New York Times?
However, Sulzberger insisted he was being “independent” because the White House was furious his publication was noting what John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty character would have referred to as the “bleeding obvious.”
“We are going to continue to report fully and fairly, not just on Donald Trump but also on President Joe Biden,” Sulzberger said. “He is a historically unpopular incumbent and the oldest man to ever hold this office. We’ve reported on both of those realities extensively, and the White House has been extremely upset about it.”
Not that they’re going to emphasize the fact we have a doddering president over the fact that the Times views Donald Trump as a threat to the Republic: “We are not saying that this is the same as Trump’s five court cases or that they are even,” Sulzberger said.
“They are different. But they are both true, and the public needs to know both those things. And if you are hyping up one side or downplaying the other, no side has a reason to trust you in the long run.”
Right. Well, where to begin?
Let’s take the Times’ coverage of Hur’s voluminous report, which said that a jury would perceive Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and that he showed signs of that poor memory as early as recorded interviews in 2017.
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” the report said. “He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’),” the report stated.
“He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.
“In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall.”
That report was published on Feb. 8. On Feb. 10, this was one Times headline/subheadline combination: “Other 80-Somethings Have Thoughts About Age and the Presidency; President Biden’s age has once again become a talking point in national politics. Many older Americans agree that it’s an issue; others feel it’s insulting.”
The special counsel just said the nominal leader of the free world can’t even remember enough to get himself convicted of a crime, and the Times’ approach to that story? What the left likes to call “bothsidesism” — some elderly people who are presumably in compos mentis think our president also should be, others think worrying about that is ageist. See? Journalistic independence.
Also Feb. 10: “Why the Age Issue Is Hurting Biden So Much More Than Trump.” Conclusion: Not because Biden is senile and Trump is not!
“Donald J. Trump has praised Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, for his leadership of Turkey, and confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. President Biden has named dead former European leaders when describing his contemporary peers, and referred to Egypt as Mexico,” the lede to the story read.
“The episodes might have raised parallel concerns about age and mental acuity. Instead, while Mr. Biden, 81, has been increasingly dogged by doubts and concerns about his advancing years from voters, Mr. Trump, who is 77, has not felt the same political blowback.”
Not only does that downplay the fact that gaffes from Trump happen from time to time whereas the gaffes are so constant with Biden that we’re shocked when he gets something right, the “experts” the Times consulted for answers on this conundrum — a hard-left Democrat representative and “a speaker and coach on leadership presence” — didn’t seem to grasp the implications of the special counsel report.
First, the speaker and coach, Carol Kinsey Goman: “It is the perception of how you communicate,” she said. “When Trump makes those kinds of faux pas, he just brushes it off, and people don’t say, ‘Oh, he’s aging.’ He makes at least as many mistakes as Joe Biden, but because he does it with this bravado, it doesn’t seem like senility. It seems like passion.”
Oh, that’s it. If only Biden would start forgetting stuff with bravado. That’s the ticket!
Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin provided more cover for the president: “Donald Trump is more of an entertainer than a politician in many ways,” Pocan said. “And I think there’s just a different set of expectations and that’s why he gets away with it.”
Well, he’s actually not getting away with anything, considering special counsel Jack Smith found Trump competent to stand trial, whereas Hur thinks a jury wouldn’t consider Biden competent enough to convict of a crime. So there goes that theory.
And, as for poll numbers — what is the Times supposed to do, just make those up? I’m guessing that’s Karine Jean-Pierre’s solution to the problem. I don’t think it’ll make it go away, however, and noticing the fact that Biden is “historically unpopular” isn’t exactly journalistic bravery on the part of the New York Times.
This is “independent journalism” that gets the White House “extremely upset.” It’s little wonder that the Biden administration thinks it can push the establishment media around when it comes to coverage of the president.
In September, when House Republicans formalized an impeachment inquiry into the president over his business dealings and how they overlapped with those of his son Hunter and brother James, the White House Special Counsel’s Office wrote to news organizations demanding that “the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies.”
“Covering impeachment as a process story — Republicans say X, but the White House says Y — is a disservice to the American public who relies on the independent press to hold those in power accountable,” spokesman Ian Sams wrote, according to CNN.
“And in the modern media environment, where every day liars and hucksters peddle disinformation and lies everywhere from Facebook to Fox, process stories that fail to unpack the illegitimacy of the claims on which House Republicans are basing all their actions only serve to generate confusion, put false premises in people’s feeds, and obscure the truth.”
When the White House believes — not wrongly, may I add — that it can shove around the establishment media at its whim, this is what you get. You have the publisher of the New York Times touting the paper’s trustworthiness because the newspaper has eventually come around to saying what Americans can already see with their own eyes.
And that makes the Biden administration “extremely upset.”
Watch him win the Pulitzer for that act of bravery.
Bravo, Mr. Sulzberger. You really went above and beyond there.
