Fox News media reporter Joseph Wulfsohn found a confessional tone among liberal national reporters at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin as they assessed how they under-covered President Biden’s age and cognitive decline. [Photo by Wulfsohn]
The September 7 panel included Peter Baker of The New York Times, Laura Barron-Lopez of PBS, Jonathan Lemire of Politico and MSNBC, and David Smith of The Guardian (U.K.).
Baker called Biden's age a "hard issue" to cover, but suggested journalists broadly need to do some "soul-searching" on how they handled it after the election. He claimed the Times had presented this issue, but when they did, “The editors, our writers got massive complaints from the White House about it. The campaign took after the reporters who did focus on this. And yet it was our responsibility to do so."
Team Biden’s “massive complaints” surely worked for quite a while, even after special counsel Robert Hur said he wouldn’t indict Biden for possessing classified documents because a jury would find him to be “an elderly man with a poor memory.”
Baker added: "I can sit down and make the case that we did too little about it. I can make the case we did too much. I can play it either way. But the truth is, it's an important issue. And President Biden himself said it was a legitimate issue. And when he was asked about this, his answer was, ‘Well, watch me.’ Well, people did ultimately. And that, of course, came back to haunt him in a severe way in June," at the disastrous CNN debate.
Smith conceded the possibility of bias: "There was perhaps, even on an unconscious level, the notion that if you focus so much on Joe Biden's age, you are somehow helping Donald Trump."
"We weren't relentlessly covering, the way some of my peers were, Biden's age necessarily, even all the way up until the debate," Barrón-López said. "It is and was a valid question. Many times when I was on the trail, even before the debate, voters would bring it up. Almost every single voter I spoke to would bring it up, even if they were planning to vote for President Biden. Compared to now, I definitely think that Donald Trump's age could be covered more by the press."
Smith asserted, "the further you were away from Washington… the clearer you can see the problem," telling the panel how his fellow British colleagues at The Guardian were saying "What on earth are the Democrats playing at here? The nominee is too old! Why is he the nominee?"
"And then the closer you got to Washington, the White House in particular, the more caveats, the more ambiguous it became," Smith said. "You had all sorts of people - Democratic insiders and White House officials playing this down… It took a while for Washington to catch up and in a sense, the media as well."
Lemire called the issue of Biden's age a "persistent story line" and suggested Biden brought it upon himself after he previously suggested during the 2020 campaign that he would be a transitional one-term president," saying it "couldn't be avoided."
"I think that even though that led to the, shall we say, unhappiness of some of the MSNBC's viewing public who felt like, ‘Hey, why are you focusing on this? It shouldn’t matter. He's doing a great job.' And I think our job is to simply call it like we see it," Lemire said.
Wulfsohn didn't mention that Lemire was sitting there at the table when his morning bro Joe Scarborough responded to the age questions jn March with a profane tirade: "I'm about to tell you the truth. And F-you if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever."
