Are you seriously defending him on the basis of a showy public speech? That’s like basing your opinion of Trump on his last State of the Union. Every person in the audience knew exactly what he would say before he opened his mouth, not because they received an advance copy of the speech, but because every speech of that sort sounds the same.
The big article about the Times’ “petty grievance” came from Politico: The Petty Feud Between the NYT and the White House.
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.
Others in that article think the problems is more pervasive:
Aides in the White House press office and on the president’s campaign pointed to two recent examples of articles by the Times that presented Biden and Trump side by side, emphasizing broad similarities and obscuring the proportional differences. One piece by Michael Shear cast both Biden and Trump as restricting the information the public has about their physical health. Another in the paper’s On Politics newsletter by the newly hired Jess Bidgood reacted to Arizona’s reinstatement of a Civil War era law outlawing abortion by framing Biden and Trump as two “imperfect messengers” on the issue, a gross journalistic injustice, campaign officials said, given Trump’s outsized role in appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. …
In February, the campaign blasted the Times and other news organizations for focusing more on the president’s age than Trump’s comment encouraging Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country not meeting defense spending benchmarks. “If you read the New York Times this weekend, you might have missed it buried behind five separate opinion pieces about how the president is 81 year old — something that has been true since his birthday in November — and zero on this topic,” Ducklo wrote.
But one could see the signs earlier. Sulzberger fired editor James Bennett over a decision he made. Bennett wrote a long article for The Economist, which of course one can discount as the classic disgruntled employee piece, but contains this prescient statement:
The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.