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Saving Private Biden
The press standard for 2020: No tough questions for the former vice president.
By William McGurn
October 26, 2020
In the thick of the 2016 presidential campaign, the front page of the New York Times handed down the word from on high: In the era of Donald Trump, press objectivity was a luxury America could not afford.
It turned out that biased press coverage wasn’t enough to keep Mr. Trump from winning. So for 2020 the press introduced a new corollary: Joe Biden must never be asked a tough question.
In the past the media’s competitive juices, plus a presidential candidate’s interactions with the American people along the campaign trail, would have rendered this impossible. But Covid-19 gave Mr. Biden the excuse to stay in his basement, and the press corps has run interference for Mr. Biden rather than tackle the story.
At the moment, the hard questions Mr. Biden is avoiding are about the lucrative deals his son made with politically connected Chinese and Ukrainian businesses, sometimes while riding alongside his father in Air Force 2. This past week, one of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, Anthony Bobulinski, accused the former vice president of lying when he said he never discussed his son’s overseas business dealings—and the Hunter Biden story became a Joe Biden story.
The elder Mr. Biden dismisses it all as Russian disinformation, though both the director of National Intelligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation say there’s no evidence for that. Specifically, Mr. Biden has yet to say that the emails are phony and the laptop isn’t his son’s. Then again, he has never had to say that because the media won’t press him on it.
And not only the press. When the New York Post published texts and emails from the laptop, along with an explanation of how they came into the Post’s possession, Twitter and Facebook ran interference by suppressing the story—and the Post—on their platforms. The rationale appears to be that Mr. Biden can’t handle the questions and the American people can’t be trusted to handle the answers.
This see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil approach to Mr. Biden started with Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer who accused the candidate of having sexually harassed her in 1993, when she’d worked for him. When Julie Swetnick asserted in 2018—without any corroboration—that she witnessed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh participating in gang rapes at high-school parties, the Times ran the story the same day. But when Ms. Reade accused Mr. Biden of sexual assault, the previous believe-the-woman standard was given the heave-ho, and the Times waited 19 days to report it.
Meanwhile, Mr. Biden’s press conferences sometimes become a contest between reporters and the candidate to see who can hate Mr. Trump most. In August, after an anonymously sourced story in the Atlantic accused Mr. Trump of disparaging dead American soldiers from a World War I cemetery, the magazine’s Edward-Isaac Dovere asked Mr. Biden, “When you hear these remarks—‘suckers,’ ‘losers,’ ‘recoiling from amputees,’ what does that tell you about President Trump’s soul and the life he leads?”
Ed O’Keefe of CBS News noted Mr. Biden had said he was trying to restrain himself about Mr. Trump and then served up this hardball: “Aren’t there a lot of people out there who are supporting you or inclined to not vote for the president who would say, ‘Why isn’t Joe Biden angrier about all of this?’ ”
Or what about the Associated Press? In September it revised its stylebook to say reporters should use the term “unrest” instead of “riots” to describe the criminal violence in cities from Portland, Ore., to Kenosha, Wis. The AP now frowns on “looting” as well, urging greater sensitivity because President Trump has used the term.
It’s the job of the press to ask the hard questions and insist on answers, even at the risk of looking obnoxious. It isn’t biased, for example, to ask President Trump why, with polls showing more than half of the American people saying they are better off today than before he was elected, so many will still vote against him because they don’t like his personality and temperament.
But the toughness should apply equally. And no honest observer could say that, for example, of the recent and dueling town halls, where on ABC Mr. Biden had a leisurely chat with George Stephanopoulos while on NBC Savannah Guthrie savaged Mr. Trump. Not to mention the constant calls from reporters for the president to denounce white supremacists while studiously avoiding asking Mr. Biden about his condescending remark that anyone who doesn’t support him can’t be black.
The best summary of the new standard in election coverage was given by Mark Hemingway of RealClearInvestigations. After a particularly fawning news conference, he relayed the assessment of a friend: Watching the press handle Joe Biden is “like watching someone make sure a 3 year old wins Candyland.”
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Appeared in the October 27, 2020, print edition.
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