Why Biden Needs The New York Times
Last Friday, President Biden traveled to midtown Manhattan for an long sit-down interview. Given that he’s in a difficult reelection campaign and trailing Donald Trump in the polls, this was not especially surprising: A Rose Garden strategy doesn’t make sense when you’re losing. What was surprising, however, is whom Biden chose talk to: quasi-reformed shock jock Howard Stern. Not only that, but the president was mere blocks away from the offices of the country’s paper of record, The New York Times, to which he’s been giving the silent treatment.
A Politico story published two days earlier helps explain why, detailing mutual frustrations between Biden and the Times. The president’s aides, Eli Stokols wrote, “see the Times as arrogant, intent on setting its own rules and unwilling to give Biden his due.” The piece also contained a smoking gun of sorts: an anonymous Times staffer claiming that negative coverage of the Biden is retaliatory. “All these Biden people think that the problem is [the paper’s White House correspondent] Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day,” the journalist said. “It’s [Times publisher] A.G. [Sulzberger]. 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 an astonishing allegation—and one that would seem to justify the president’s refusal to give the paper an extended interview. And yet, even if it’s true, it would be a lousy excuse to stiff-arm the country’s most important newspaper. The president is struggling to articulate a second-term agenda, and voters are genuinely concerned about his age and mental acuity. One of the best ways to address these problems is to do long, unscripted interviews with the journalists who set the narrative agenda.
Biden and his team have good reason to be frustrated with some of the Times’s coverage. The paper is wedded to a “both sides” driven approach that often erases crucial distinctions between the two parties and ultimately downplays the growing extremism of the GOP. It has struggled to lay out the stakes of the upcoming presidential election, in which a moderate, establishment Democrat will face off against an authoritarian Republican.
And yet, there are good reasons to doubt the accuracy of the—vaguely Trumpian—claim that the publisher of the Times is directing its political reporters to put out hit pieces on the president. For one, the paper’s coverage of Biden’s age is a relatively recent phenomenon, largely dating to the publication in February of a report from Robert Hur, the independent counsel tasked with investigating Biden’s retention of classified documents after he left the White House as vice president in 2016. That summary of that report made a number of drive-by accusations about the president’s memory that were unrelated to the investigation itself—and many of which were later revealed to be misleading. Nevertheless, media coverage ran with Hur’s initial conclusions, kicking open a lengthy spate of coverage about the president’s age and memory.
The Times has indeed published several stories about Biden’s age in the wake of the Hur report—such as a piece in early March, “Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to Be Effective,” about a Times/Siena poll. Still, voters seem to have reached the conclusion that Biden is old (perhaps even too old!) without the help of the Times—or other comparable mainstream media organizations. Coverage of Biden’s advanced age well predates the Times’ coverage or even the Hur report; recall that this was a major topic in 2023, too. And it’s hardly out of bounds. A sizable majority of voters really do think that Biden’s too old to be president, which seems wholly reasonable given that he is the oldest person—by far—to occupy the White House.
Even if Sulzberger were directing Times journalists to do dastardly hit pieces, boycotting the paper is a foolish idea. Yes, the old media ecosystem is broken and it makes sense to pursue more nontraditional ways to reach voters. (Now that he’s appeared Stern’s show, Biden ought to wolf down wings on Hot Ones, the YouTube interview sensation.) These interviews can be effective at reaching voters who aren’t avid news consumers. But they’re also questionable venues for conveying one’s actual political agenda.
A Time magazine interview with Donald Trump published on Tuesday shows the power of long interviews with the establishment press. Yes, as my colleague Tim Noah has persuasively argued, Trump was very light on the specifics of his agenda. But in that interview you do see the outline of his authoritarian approach in a way you don’t from his rallies or tweets or courtroom scowls. In one lengthy document, Trump lays out (to the extent he’s capable) what he wants his second-term to look like: mass deportations, red states monitoring pregnancies, high tariffs, an abandonment of American allies. Whether the interview will actually help Trump’s electoral chances is unclear, but there’s no doubt that it drew more attention to his agenda in one day than Biden has drawn to his own over the first four months of the year.
What would a Biden second-term look like? What legislation would he pursue if Democrats somehow hold both chambers of Congress? How does his increasingly hardline immigration stance contrast with Trump’s? At this point in the election, if you’re not paying very close attention—and few voters are—it’s hard to say. With the possible exception of Biden’s acceptance speech at this August’s Democratic National Convention and the subsequent presidential debates (if they happen), it’s unlikely that there will be a better way to communicate his second-term priorities than with a lengthy Times interview.
At the same time, an endurance-testing interview would also be an effective way to combat concerns about his fitness for office. While Biden has avoided doing so with the press, he has given a major, extremely long interview lately: to Hur. The special counsel, of course, treated that sit-down like a right-wing journalist would, selectively editing and spinning his conclusions to help push the narrative that the president was a doddering Mr. Magoo. Biden’s team should not be so paranoid as to believe that the Times, its both-sides tendencies notwithstanding, would treat him anywhere near as unprofessionally.
Granted, an interview with the Times is not a miracle cure for all that ails Biden’s reelection campaign. The mainstream media’s ability to influence voters has never been weaker. Perhaps Biden is avoiding the paper of record simply because he can. After all, he’s got TikTok influencers pushing his message out! And yet, his second-term agenda remains largely a mystery. He could help clear that up with a couple hours of his time at 620 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan.