The White House and the Biden campaign are growing increasingly frustrated over how the President is being portrayed in the media, and the anger is starting to show.
Biden’s camp appears to be livid and is taking swings over press coverage of the incumbent as his reelection bid fends off persistent concerns about whether the 81-year-old is fit for another four years in the Oval Office.
Democrats have been sensitive to media coverage of former President Donald Trump compared to their own candidates dating back to the 2016 campaign when critics argued the press overhyped the controversy around then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s private email server while giving Trump significant, unfiltered airtime.
Now, Biden and his closest allies are seeing a similar pattern playing out where they say that reporters fixate on the President’s periodic verbal slips and questions about his age while his likely November opponent faces dozens of felonies and suggests he would undermine international alliances, crackdown on immigrants and abortion access.
The President’s personal attorney this week penned an op-ed criticizing coverage of a special counsel report that commented on Biden’s recall, and The New York Times publisher said in a recent interview that the White House is “extremely upset” about reporting on Biden’s age.
“The more this campaign and the more this White House takes the gloves off and gets aggressive, the better off they are,” said Democratic strategist Jon Reinish.
“There have been many instances on many tough issues where they’ve been behind the ball and have not been nearly as sharp, nearly as persuasive, or nearly as aggressive as they could have been.”
In the face of devastatingly low approval numbers and worries about whether Biden could serve another term, more direct pushback from the President’s camp against coverage and critiques could help build up a sense of Biden’s strength, Reinish said, adding that he hopes “it’s not too late” to make more of those kinds of moves.
Special counsel Robert Hur released a lengthy report earlier this month that concluded Biden would not face any charges for his handling of classified documents from his time as vice president and senator. But, much to the White House’s chagrin, a significant amount of coverage was devoted to passages that called into question Biden’s ability to remember when his son died or when he served as vice president. Several media outlets also directly quoted Hur’s executive summary, which said Biden “willfully retained” classified documents — a point the White House took issue with, as Hur also determined there wasn’t enough evidence to bring any charges against the President.
In a Feb. 12 statement, TJ Ducklo, a senior adviser for the Biden campaign, knocked the media for “gratuitous and sensationalist attacks on the President’s age” after Trump suggested he’d let Russia invade NATO allies who hadn’t contributed enough to defense spending. Americans deserve “a press corps who cover his candidacy, his comments, and his policy positions with the seriousness and ferocity this moment requires,” Ducklo said.
The gripes with the press have continued beyond the Hur report, though.
The campaign sent out a press release criticizing The New York Times for “quibbling over” Biden’s statements about the economy, and several Democrats rolled their eyes at a Times headline on Biden’s efforts to forgive student loan debt that described the President as “beleaguered,” only for it to be changed hours later.
The Biden campaign has sent letters and made statements all in attempts to get the press to treat the President more kindly, but the simple fact is that Biden’s age is his own worst enemy, and as the days inch closer to Election Day, Biden only gets older, and there is nothing the campaign nor Biden himself can do about that.