Because Zakaria is a bit of a hack.
Joe the President is not 80 years old. His age is 3.Times 3. Times 3. Times 3.
Not a “round” so much as a hyper-cube-shaped one.
Weirdly, the “Biden’s age” thing went away in dang near all media for several weeks after the State of the Union. Very recently, it’s been coming back from several outlets – starting with Russ Douthat’s piece in the staunchly liberal (?) New York Times last week.
Feels artificial and “it’s a horse race!” to me. We’re being gamed, I think.
I meant that one is over 80 and the other under.
If RFK Jr. gets 14% of the vote in any state I will eat my hat.
RFK may be able to arrange to have a brain worm eat that hat for you.
: ducks and runs :
I’ve noticed the same but hopefully it won’t take hold like it did before.
I’m at a loss as to why the NYT appears to be slagging on President Biden like they have. It’s very disappointing.
It would probably get more nourishment than it did in its other feeding grounds, where it apparently starved to death.
Has he done any interviews with them? Maybe they’re unhappy he chose Stern over them.
Isn’t it mainly just Douthat that’s the issue, here? Or are there others?
This article from Politico explains a lot of it - The Petty Feud Between the NYT and the White House.
Mostly bruised egos on both sides it seems.
Ah, thanks. Didn’t read entire article, but got a good idea.
This snippet halfway through contains the money passages.
The president’s press flacks might bemoan what they see as the entitlement of Times staffers, but they themselves put the newspaper on the highest of pedestals given its history, stature and unparalleled reach. And yet, they see the Times falling short in a make-or-break moment for American democracy, stubbornly refusing to adjust its coverage as it strives for the appearance of impartial neutrality, often blurring the asymmetries between former President Donald Trump and Biden when it comes to their perceived flaws and vastly different commitments to democratic principles.
“Democrats believe in the importance of a free press in upholding our democracy, and the NYT was for generations an important standard bearer for the fourth estate,” said Kate Berner, who worked on Biden’s 2020 campaign and then as deputy White House communications director before departing last year. “The frustration with the Times is sometimes so intense because the Times is failing at its important responsibility.”
Biden aides largely view the election as an existential choice for the country, high stakes that they believe justify tougher tactics toward the Times and the press as a whole. Some Times reporters have found themselves cut off by sources after publishing pieces the Bidens and top aides didn’t like. Columnist Maureen Dowd, for example, complained to colleagues that she stopped hearing from White House officials after a column on Hunter Biden. For many Times veterans, such actions suggest that the Trump era has warped many Democrats’ expectations of journalists.
“They’re not being realistic about what we do for a living,” [Elisabeth Bumiller, the NYT Washington bureau chief] told me. “You can be a force for democracy, liberal democracy. You don’t have to be a force for the Biden White House.”
EDIT: Also this:
But it was the paper’s willingness to legitimize rumors swirling around Hunter Biden’s past business dealings in Ukraine that left top campaign officials most incensed. In a letter to Baquet in October 2019, deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield blasted the Times for a story by reporter Ken Vogel and freelancer Iuliia Mendel focused on allegations by Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies that Joe Biden took actions toward Ukraine as vice president in order to boost his son Hunter Biden’s business interests there. The paper’s reporting, the letter claimed, legitimized a “debunked … conspiracy theory” that had been, to that point, “relegated to the likes of Breitbart, Russian propaganda … and regular Hannity guest John Solomon.”
One more, same Politico link:
In [NYT publisher A.G. 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.”
Great find, @Kolak_of_Twilo . Thanks for posting it.
On the one hand, Trump wants to deport American citizens, openly stated that he wants the oil industry to bribe him, and thinks Hannibal Lecter is a real person.
On the other hand, Biden old.
What’s a centrist to do?
Kolak’s Politico link has been an especially rich vein of info:
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 .
TJ Ducklo, a senior adviser on Biden’s campaign, blasted Shear’s story as part of an ongoing pattern of frustrating coverage by the Times . “With limited exceptions,” he wrote in a post on X, the Times “continues to fail the American people in covering the most important election for democracy in 150+ years.” It was not the first time Biden’s campaign team publicly went after the Times in a way the White House, for all its irritation, has not. 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.
Wow. Stunning, truly. What a tool.
Not sure who you see as the tool here.
The Biden camp has done a very poor job with reactions to their reporting. I find it disappointing the President won’t sit down with them for an interview.
At the same time I see Sulzberger and a number of the writers for the NYT as being petulant and arrogant that they are not given the due they feel the great NYT should be given. They have done a lot to keep the age issue alive and this piece makes it look as if it is because they are offended.
I’ve been a daily reader of the Times for 40 years and I find this deeply disappointing. And the Biden folks should get over any Dowd piece. She’s very good at times and at others is little more than a crank.
I don’t know about y’all, but I literally cannot think of a single President in my memory about whom the press hasn’t complained about not giving them enough time.
One example of hundreds:
I don’t read the Times, so I ask out of ignorance-are they still as well-read and influential as they used to be? Would as interview there swing enough weight to significantly help Biden?