NYT Comes Off Looking Bad in its Beef with the Biden WH

The data show that they focus on his age more than other papers.

The Present Age is reader-supported. Please consider subscribing to the free or paid versions. Thanks!

---

Hey, all. Parker here.

Last week, Politico’s Eli Stokols published a lengthy piece about the “petty feud” between the Biden White House and the New York Times.

See, to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s great irritation, Biden has so far avoided the paper’s efforts to get him to sit for a long-form interview. That has, according to Stokols’s report, affected how the paper has covered Biden’s reelection campaign. According to a source quoted in the Politico report, Sulzberger is “pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.”

(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Uh oh.

“The Petty Feud Between the NYT and the White House” (Politico, Eli Stokols, 4/25/24)

In Sulzberger’s view, according to two people familiar with his private comments on the subject, only an interview with a paper like the Times can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency. Beyond that, he has voiced concerns that Biden doing so few expansive interviews with experienced reporters could set a dangerous precedent for future administrations, according to a third person familiar with the publisher’s thinking. Sulzberger himself was part of a group from the Times that sat down with Trump, who gave the paper several interviews despite his rantings about its coverage. If Trump could do it, Sulzberger believes, so can Biden.

“All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day,” one Times journalist said. “It’s A.G. He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.”

This is pretty damning, and it’s even worse when you look at how the Times has laser-focused on Biden’s age — not reporting anything necessarily new that would be valuable for the public to know, but just general… hey, remember… this guy is old… warnings — compared to other papers. For instance…

In October 2023, Media Matters for America published a study that found that the Times mentioned Biden’s age in 98 of its articles over a five-month span, more than any of the other top U.S. newspapers. Additionally, that study found that of the articles that mentioned Biden’s age, the Times only mentioned Trump’s age in 29% of them, putting them on par with Rupert Muroch’s conservative Wall Street Journal, which mentioned Trump’s age in 28% of its 78 “Biden’s age” articles during that span.