On May 29, as jurors in Donald Trump’s hush-money case began their deliberations, Biden campaign senior adviser T.J. Ducklo took to Twitter to plead with news organizations: Please stop covering the trial of Biden’s main political rival—a trial that reveals him to be a liar and a fraud, and one in which he has repeatedly attacked the presiding judge and his family—so much.
“The President just spoke to approx 1,000 mostly black voters in Philly about the massive stakes in this election,” Ducklo tweeted. “MSNBC, CNN, and others did not show it. Instead, more coverage about a trial that impacts one person: Trump. Then they’ll ask, why isn’t your message getting out?”
This is, to put it mildly, a strange thing to complain about. For one thing, the criminal trial of a former president is a legitimate news event in obvious ways that a campaign speech is not. Campaign events like the one Biden was holding in Philadelphia rarely receive wall-to-wall news coverage—and shouldn’t. (Democrats were right to complain of the insane amount of coverage Trump rallies received in 2016, for instance.) For another, it’s hard to think of a bigger gift to a stumbling presidential campaign than the criminal trial of its opponent. For weeks, the media’s attention wasn’t on Biden’s struggles to convince voters that he deserves a second term: Instead it was on Donald Trump’s status as a criminal, a huckster, and a fraud.
With less than six months to go in the election—and with Biden running as a historically unpopular incumbent—the best path for reelection seems to be a referendum about his historically unpopular incumbent, who is now a convicted felon.
But Ducklo’s tweet was also in keeping with the Biden administration’s increasingly whiny approach to the media. As the president’s reelection campaign remains mired with problems—particularly surrounding concerns about the president’s age or the state of the economy—he and his advisers have increasingly hit out at the media with desperate and incoherent critiques.
Most of the Biden administration’s criticism of the media feels like blaming the press for the president’s own messaging failures. For months, the administration has been in a petty feud with The New York Times over what it sees as unfair criticism of the president’s age. Biden has refused to grant an interview with the paper—even though it could help ease concerns about his mental faculties and push his message—in retaliation for its supposedly negative coverage of him. While emotions are undoubtedly very high, it’s not entirely clear what exactly Biden and his team want from the Times or the media more broadly, beyond jubilant headlines about every minor success the administration trumpets. Indeed, Biden’s recent decision to grant a lengthy interview with Time magazine could be seen as a shot at the Times, which has been seeking a sitdown for months—the president snubbing the country’s most prominent print news outlet for a glossy alternative.
The weirdest part of the administration’s obsession with coverage of the president’s age is that the Times—like other mainstream outlets—largely left the president’s advanced age undercovered until relatively recently, even though voters have long been concerned about it. Voters do not think that Biden is old because the media started covering concerns over his age over the last six months. They think he’s old because he is, at 81, by far the oldest person to ever occupy the White House and because he, unsurprisingly, moves and speaks like an 81-year-old.
Some criticisms of media coverage have been fair, if also whiny and misdirected. In February, the spokesperson for the White House Counsel’s office sent a letter to the White House Press Corps blasting the media’s coverage of the Hur report, which ostensibly cleared the president of misconduct in his handling of classified information but also included a number of exaggerated (and unrelated) criticisms of his mental acuity.
Similarly, there has been a great deal of hand-wringing from the administration over coverage of the economy: Unemployment is low, wages are up—but voters are still unhappy about price increases that have remained stubbornly high after the pandemic. The administration can make a reasonable argument that it has managed the shocks of the post-Covid economy with extraordinary deftness—and that it’s done a far better job than other comparable governments. But the idea that people are worried about the state of the economy because of press coverage is ridiculous. People are upset because prices have risen dramatically over Biden’s presidency. Blaming the media here feels like a classic bit of misdirected anger: They can’t exactly blame voters for not being grateful for the so-so economy, so they blame the media.
Biden does, to be fair, have a critique of the media that is compelling. Speaking at last month’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Biden made a plea for the press to focus on the “stakes” of the election—not just on minor shifts in polling or inconsequential gaffes. Speaking about Trump’s increasingly overt authoritarianism, Biden made the case that things were different now. “Eight years ago, you could have written [it off] as just Trump talk. But no longer. Not after January 6,” he said.
“I’m sincerely not asking of you to take sides but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment,” he continued. “Move past the horse-race 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 mean, sure. The stakes of this election are high. Donald Trump is threatening to deport millions of people, to criminalize dissent, to end democracy as we know it. But the media is covering those aspects of Trump’s candidacy—just as they covered the trial, they have covered his pledge to “be a dictator” and other aspects of his nascent agenda.
But an argument for covering the “stakes” of the election doesn’t mean that the media get to be a propagandistic arm of the administration. That is, unfortunately, what Biden and many of his advisers seem to want. It means covering the complexity of the economy. It also means covering the oldest president in American history as ... the oldest president in American history. (It also fairly covers Trump as the most dangerous political figure in recent American history.) It certainly doesn’t mean turning their cameras and column inches to whatever bridge Joe Biden is opening that day. Yes, Donald Trump represents a unique threat to American democracy. But the idea that that should preclude negative (or even just complex) coverage of the current administration is absurd.
To be fair, the Biden administration has struggled to trumpet its successes. It has struggled to sell significant but multifaceted legislation to the public. It has struggled to convince voters that the economy is better than it could be. It has struggled to explain why the president has embraced parts of Trump’s draconian immigration program. It has struggled to sell the fact that American bombs are being used to kill children in Gaza. None of that is the media’s fault, however. The problem isn’t with the message—it’s with the messenger, in this case an octogenarian president who only has himself to blame for his current woes.