Tanking in the Polls, Team Biden Blames the New York Times

In late April, Eli Stokols’ extensive piece in Politico set pundit tongues a-wagging by laying bare the long-simmering “petty feud” waged by the Biden White House and re-election team against the New York Times. Based on in-depth interviews with two dozen people “on both sides,” Stokols describes the relationship between the titans as “remarkably tense, beset by misunderstandings, grudges and a general lack of trust.” Exacerbating the stress is the campaign’s ratcheted public airing of its imperious grievances.

Biden’s team has accused the paper of record of acting with “entitlement,” and displaying what it sees as a cavalier attitude towards the high stakes of the 2024 presidential contest. It also faults the Times for its “elitist” treatment of a president “with a working-class sense of himself” – a ridiculous claim for Biden, a fifty-year establishment fixture, to make.

Kate Berner, a veteran of the 2020 campaign and former White House deputy communications director, levied the summary charge, accusing the Times of “failing at its important responsibility” of defending democracy with coverage that the president’s team deems inappropriate or insufficient. Biden’s people have even leveled the risible charge that the Times reports more favorably on Donald Trump – an accusation that will strike anyone who has paid attention as ludicrous.

Watching the controversy erupt into the open last week, Matt Taibbi said in conversation with Walter Kirn on Racket News, “This is such a self-inflicted wound. They were getting basically everything they wanted from the New York Times.”

Their appetite is apparently insatiable.

Stokols’ revelation that the Biden campaign has conducted a series of off-the-record “retreats” with journalists in Wilmington stunned Taibbi. Not only did Biden operatives hand out detailed spreadsheets that critiqued each outlet’s coverage of the president, but directed reporters where to focus coverage going forward.

In blatant violation of the off-the-record protocol under which these meetings were held, someone in the Biden campaign then leaked to Semafor their displeasure with the New York Times as the only participant that failed to win what Taibbi derisively called “a star for obedience.”

According to Stokols, Biden’s gripe with the Times goes back to the contentious Democratic primaries of 2019-2020 and his belief that the paper favored Elizabeth Warren. He writes that the president has never forgiven the Times for its depiction of him as “a relic, out of step with younger, more liberal primary voters,” and his campaign as “poorly organized.”

But Taibbi pinpoints the root cause of Biden’s contempt to be the Times’s reporting in 2019 that Hunter Biden had received several million dollars from Burisma, a since-dissolved Ukrainian energy holding company, in what looked suspiciously like influence peddling.

The paper then ignored the growing controversy surrounding the president’s son. When the New York Post broke the story weeks before the 2020 election about incriminating files stored on the younger Biden’s laptop that he left unclaimed in a Wilmington repair shop, the Times characterized it as “an effort to damage the Biden campaign” rather than news worth covering.

Bolstering Taibbi’s point about the kid-glove treatment the Times has extended to Biden, the Wall Street Journal ran a mocking headline in March 2022, “Hunter Biden’s Laptop is Finally News Fit to Print,” with the subhead, “The press that ignored the story in 2020 admits that it’s real.” (The motto of the New York Times is, “All the news that’s fit to print.”)

On its side, the Times has harbored deep frustration with Biden’s lack of access and his refusal to grant an interview to its publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, upending a tradition that goes back to FDR.

The day after the Stokols piece appeared, former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer weighed in on Substack with a typically snarky rebuttal aimed at ridiculing the Times’s gripes as reported by Stokols. He wrote, “Honestly, the story reads more like a recap of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” Pfeiffer then poured gasoline on its smoldering embers by claiming, “[The Times] do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.”

Some two weeks later, Ben Smith of Semafor released the transcript of an interview he conducted with Joe Kahn, the Times’ executive editor, that started by asking for a reaction to Pfeiffer’s comments. Kahn answered with a lengthy discussion about the role of a democratic press, which, he said, is not to “skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates.”

Kahn then offered an opinion that is confirmed by a Times-Sienna poll released on Monday, saying that Trump has a “very good chance” of winning the popular vote in November. And then he lowered the boom: “It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.”

Proceeding to call Pfeiffer out personally, he continued, “I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories of the other side?”

Kahn’s question is one that interests Honest Media. In the coming days, we will publish a critique of two pieces written by a Times investigative reporter, Susanne Craig, that delve into the income and health of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Instead of reporting these topics in a straightforward manner, Craig made use of innuendo to suggest that Kennedy is prone to unethical practices and deception. This method spins her, and the paper’s, coverage of Kennedy’s candidacy.

Given Mr. Kahn’s frank pushback to the president and refreshing reassertion of the principles that undergird the Fourth Estate, we hope to see improvement in its treatment of Kennedy in the days and months ahead.