President Joe Biden donned his press critic cap at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner to lecture the reporters and editors who cover him on how to cover the 2024 presidential campaign.
Hewing to WHCD tradition, Biden delivered a jokey, self-effacing talk that speared his main opponent — former President Donald Trump — with gags and exaggerations. “Yes, age is an issue. I’m a grown man running against a six-year-old,” Biden said to guffaws and applause. But then, at the three-quarters mark in his 10-minute address, Biden modulated to a more serious tone. He accurately cited Trump’s ambitions to become a “dictator” and serve as his supporters’ “retribution” and “revenge.”
“We have to take this seriously. Eight years ago, you could have written off it as just Trump talk. But no longer. Not after January 6th,” Biden said. He continued.
“I’m sincerely not asking of you to take sides but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment; move past the horserace numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions, the sideshows that have come to dominate and sensationalize our politics; and focus on what’s actually at stake. I think, in your hearts, you know what’s at stake. The stakes couldn’t be higher.”
It was a discordant note. Was there anybody in the audience who hasn’t been taking Trump seriously? Which mainstream publication represented in the crowd has failed to smother Trump’s resurrection and authoritarian bluster with seriousness? (No, Fox News doesn’t count.)
As described by the president, either you’re covering the campaign seriously — meaning reporting out how dangerous Trump is — or you’re covering it frivolously by publishing and analyzing poll data, or revealing the Biden administration’s mistakes, or publishing stories that embarrass the administration. What rankles is the way he presented this false choice as an either-or proposition.
To cut Biden some slack, perhaps his declaration was rhetorical, crafted to elicit more and more “seriousness” from the press corps during the campaign, and what’s the harm in that even if the seriousness tank is already filled to brimming?
What doesn’t deserve slack is the jawboning contained in Biden’s speech, asking the press to eschew “horserace numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions” and “the sideshows” and to “focus on what’s actually at stake.”
For a politician to ask the press to downplay the horserace when politicians rank among the most dedicated clients of pollsters oozes hypocrisy. To disdain gotcha moments when every campaign deploys them against opponents is more of the same. As for distractions and sideshows, every political campaign known to mankind — including Biden’s — exploits distractions and sideshows to its advantage.
Again, you can’t fault Biden too much for urging the press to choose broccoli over Pop-Tarts this year. But what can a journalist, serious or otherwise, say except, “Why not both?” As long as the press covers how violently Trump has broken with normal politicking and governance — and it has — that shouldn’t bar the same newsrooms from reporting polls, mistakes, scandals and other worthy stories that politicians like to erase by labeling them as “distractions” from what’s important.
Biden’s jawboning, and that’s what it is, shares a lot with that of other presidents. Lyndon Johnson used to call network news executives and yell at them about the way they covered the news. Richard Nixon assigned Spiro Agnew to school the press on how to cover the presidency. George W. Bush sandbagged the press. Barack Obama’s administration engaged in “day-to-day intimidation of sources,” said Washington Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee when she was the Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press. Trump, well, no hyperlinks are required to make the case against him. His administration set jawboning and harassment records. And Biden is so press averse that members of his own party have begged him to spend more time with reporters.
At the risk of misinterpreting Biden’s either-or commandment, he seems to be saying two things. The first is, Get off my back. Don’t pester me about my physical frailty … leave my son, Hunter, alone … explain to voters how good the economy is and how they shouldn’t be so unappreciative of me … because all of these topics are gotchas and sideshows. For seconds, Biden appears to be asking the journalists at the WHCD, “Which side are you on?” If you’re not covering the campaign according to my playbook, which will amplify my virtues, then you’re somehow enabling Trump. Do even Biden’s speechwriters believe this formula?
No president seems able to accept that the press, in all its variety and nonpartisan and partisan forms, strives to remain independent from the tidal forces of politics. A politically damaging news story about Politician A is not ordinarily designed as a political favor to Politician B, even if Politician B has announced his dictatorial ambitions. Nor does such a story automatically convey a measure of “equivalence” between Pols A and B. You would think that after a lifetime-and-a-half in politics, Biden would intuit this and would have hardened his glass jaw.
Biden’s call for the press to pay more attention to the “stakes” — a concept popularized by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen — seems anodyne. Like seriousness, who is against covering the stakes when one of the two candidates promises deportation camps, monitoring of women’s pregnancies, possible pardons for January 6th rioters and criminal prosecutions ordered from the Oval Office, as Trump did in Time magazine this week. As much as the stakes matter, they aren’t the only thing worth reporting.
Furthermore, Biden’s sweeping accusation that stakes-neutering sensationalism has blinded the press from what a second Trump term might become can’t be supported by the facts. In addition to the Time piece, the New York Times reported what a second Trump administration would look like in December and just began a podcast series highlighting it. The Atlantic magazine published a special issue on the topic in January. POLITICO filed such a piece in February. New York got there, too. And so on.
There’s been no shortage of stakes reporting, something the president would know if he talked to more reporters, rather than deploying only the usual surplus of press bashing. The president has no case.
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In 2015, I dissected Hillary Clinton’s career-long use of the “distraction” accusation to blunt criticism of her. Send distractions to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter and Threads accounts crave sensationalism. My defunct RSS feed says this election should be about the steaks.