Biden’s frustration with the media boils over

Months after November’s high-stakes election, the White House and the Biden campaign are publicly expressing growing frustration with how the president is portrayed in the media.

Biden’s camp is taking steps in media coverage of the outgoing president as his re-election bid pushes back against lingering concerns about whether the 81-year-old is fit to stay another four years in the Oval Office.

Democrats have been sensitive to media coverage of former President Trump compared to that of their own candidates since the 2016 campaign, when critics claimed the press exaggerated the controversy surrounding the candidate’s private email server then-Democrat Hillary Clinton while giving Trump significant, unfiltered airtime. .

Today, some Biden allies are seeing a similar pattern: Reporters focusing on the president’s periodic verbal slips and questions about his age, while his likely November opponent faces dozens of crimes and suggests he would undermine international alliances and repression of immigrants and access to abortion.

The President’s Personal Lawyer This Week wrote an opinion article 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 reports about Biden’s age.

“The more this campaign and the more this White House takes off the gloves and gets aggressive, the better off they are,” Democratic strategist Jon Reinish said.

“There have been many instances, on many difficult issues, where they have been late and have not been as sharp or as compelling or as aggressive as they could have been.”

In front of bad approval numbers and concerns about whether Biden could serve another term, a more direct pushback from the president’s camp against media coverage and criticism could help bolster Biden’s sense of strength, Reinish said, adding that he hopes ” “It’s not too late” to take action.

Special counsel Robert Hur released a lengthy report earlier this month that concluded Biden would face no charges for his handling of classified documents dating back to his tenure as vice president and senator. The report also clarified distinctions between Biden’s case and that of Trump, who faces charges in Florida for his withholding and refusal to return classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021.

But, much to the dismay of the White House, a significant amount of media coverage was devoted to passages that questioned Biden’s ability to remember his son’s death or his time as vice-president. president. Several media outlets also directly cited Hur’s summary, which said Biden had “deliberately withheld” classified documents — a point the White House took issue with, as Hur also determined there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against the president.

Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House counsel’s office, wrote to the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association — which has no control over media coverage — criticizing reporting on the prosecutor’s findings. special.

“Your tasks are not easy. But they are important,” Sams wrote in a Feb. 13 letter. “When significant errors occur in media coverage, such as misinterpretation of the results and conclusions of a federal investigation into the sitting president, it is essential that they be corrected.”

Kelly O’Donnell, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association and an NBC News correspondent, called Sams’ letter “poorly addressed” and called the use of internal channels to distribute the letter “inappropriate “.

In a February 12 statement, TJ Ducklo, a senior adviser to the Biden campaign, criticized the media for “gratuitous and sensationalist attacks on the president’s age” after Trump suggested he would let Russia invade Russia’s allies. NATO who had not contributed sufficiently to the campaign. defense spending. Americans deserve “a press that covers his candidacy, his comments and his policy positions with the seriousness and ferocity that this moment demands,” Ducklo said.

The criticisms of the press, however, continued beyond the Hur report.

The campaign sent out a press release criticizing the New York Times for “quibbling” Biden’s statements on the economy, and several Democrats rolled their eyes at a Times headline about Biden’s efforts to cancel the debt student who described the president as “beleaguered.” only for it to be changed hours later.

“Besieged Biden wins a second term, fortunately saved by the greatest labor market in history and by the coincidence of the strongest legislative economic record in 70 years, which has nothing to do with this market work. But how long can this lucky streak last? Jesse Lee, a former Biden White House adviser, wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

After the Hur Report’s scathing assessment that the outgoing president was an “older, well-meaning man with a poor memory,” Biden appeared before reporters in a fiery press conference to defend his age and his recall.

“I mean well, I’m an old man and I know what I’m doing,” Biden said.

But Biden, during the press conference, also falsely referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as “president of Mexico”, an error that drew scrutiny as he sharply criticized the report.

“I think the president sometimes overestimates his ability to handle the press,” said Todd Belt, director of the graduate program in political management at George Washington University.

Biden appeared before the press less frequently than his predecessor, According to research of the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Biden averaged 11 press conferences per year, while Trump averaged 22. Before him, President Obama averaged 20 per year.

But the Biden administration has worked to establish a relationship with the press in stark contrast to Trump’s, characterized by confrontations and attacks on “fake news” media outlets, Belt said – and the outgoing president’s camp has likely avoided aggressive criticism of the White House’s media coverage for this reason, hoping to avoid comparisons.

“They want to be able to say: Biden is normal government, Trump is chaos,” Belt said.

But the president and his allies may now consider the stakes too high to stand idly by, with Trump poised to secure the Republican nomination and set up the 2024 race for a Trump-Biden rematch.

“No president likes to be criticized, criticized or criticized,” said Leonard Steinhorn, a professor of public communications at American University.

Steinhorn noted that Trump and his camp were try to paint Biden was too old in 2020 — but Trump, who at 77 is his rival’s junior by only a few years, is now as old as Biden was during the last cycle. Trump has faced scrutiny for some of his own recent gaffes, most notably when he confused former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her primary GOP rival, Nikki Haley.

Biden has also been open about his speech impediment and has long made gaffes that may be more a result of his stutter than his age. Trump’s speech, by comparison, may appear more “smooth,” Steinhorn said, putting Biden at a disadvantage in an arena where “optics tell a story, regardless of the words we communicate or what the White House wants to do to us believe “.

“Every president has to face it, but that doesn’t mean he should stay silent and complain if he feels he has been unfairly slandered or criticized.”