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“Most consequential tweet in history?” Yesterday, NBC’s Sahil Kapur posed that question just minutes after President Biden told the world that he had decided not to run for reelection after all. Biden made the announcement in a letter posted to X, but Kapur was actually referring to the tweet that Biden posted in May accepting an unusually early presidential debate against Donald Trump on CNN—a debate, of course, that Biden would fumble horribly, sharply intensifying concerns about his age and setting in motion the chain of events that led to yesterday’s announcement. It’s curious to think, now, that the smart money earlier in the year was that the debates might not happen at all—just one more sign of the traditional media’s declining gatekeeper role. And yet here we are.
History will surely remember Biden dropping out as a direct consequence of the debate; indeed, its first draft is already talking in such terms. In doing so, it might gloss over an intervening moment that has been fascinating in its own right—a frantic, three-and-a-bit-week window in which a presidential race that journalists had widely written off as soporific suddenly became a seat-of-your-pants drama. It is a moment that has been telling, too, of the proclivities of those journalists, even if its lessons, at least for now, remain a matter of conjecture.
The day after the debate, Time magazine previewed a cover for a forthcoming August issue that showed Biden walking away, stalked by the word “Panic.” In the coming weeks, plenty of this would filter through into news coverage: from reporters’ anxious Democratic sources (sometimes talking on the record, often not) as well as from a class of liberal columnists and cable pundits who called (often with sorrow, sometimes not) for Biden to drop out. Among the press corps, a feeding frenzy got underway; there was plenty of real news to feed on, to be sure, but at times the coverage was snide, overblown, and angry (as I wrote ten days ago). After a brief lull following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last weekend, the wind whipped back up, with more disorientation than before—some journalists reported that Biden was finally considering dropping out; others, the opposite, amid blunt denials from Biden’s press aides—as well as more takes from screenwriters. The West Wing of it all was made literal when Aaron Sorkin wrote for the New York Times that, if he were calling the shots, the Democrats would nominate Mitt Romney instead of Biden. Politico reported that The Death of Stalin was suddenly resonating with White House aides, and asked its director, Armando Iannucci, to weigh in.
The coverage, carried along by the steady drip of Democratic votes of no confidence, increasingly read like the prelude to a dam bursting—and yet, when that finally happened yesterday, it still seemed to take the media and political worlds by surprise. Some reporters initially speculated that Biden’s account may have been hacked, or that some other deepfake trickery was afoot; TV news channels took a few minutes to scramble out of their Sunday-afternoon doldrums; Wolf Blitzer, who had seemingly been enjoying a “Wolf Spritzer” (Aperol, Montelobos mezcal, lemon, Cava; fifteen dollars), was soon on duty. (“Joe Biden is so mad at the media that he dropped out on a Sunday afternoon to fuck with their weekend plans,” one writer speculated.) Some journalists noted all the recent blunt denials from Biden’s press aides, and even accused them of a lack of credibility. But it seems that Biden took them by surprise as well. According to the Times, even senior advisers only learned of his decision one minute before he posted it on X. Per Politico, Biden himself seems to have changed his mind over the weekend.
Amid the scrambling came a sudden change of tone toward Biden—at least from the liberal pundit class (which was always a key part of this media story thanks, in no small part, to Biden’s old-school mainstream media diet). As his biographer Evan Osnos wrote in The New Yorker, Biden had seemed to be risking “a grave verdict of history, a creeping reputation for selfish resistance that would forever adorn his life story and overshadow his political career”—a case that various commentators seemed determined to make in the present. Yesterday, however, pundits who had called on him to drop out praised him as an avatar of selflessness; Ezra Klein, who concluded that Biden shouldn’t run again even before the debate, called him “an actual hero.” (On my timeline, the tweet in which Klein said this was immediately followed by another reporter posting a meme of Klein’s face: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”) If Biden was a hero, Adam Gopnik, also writing in The New Yorker, concluded that he was a tragic Shakespearean one. “Let us go there,” he wrote. “Of all the Shakespearean figures whom Biden’s fall recalls, it is Lear.”
Lear, of course, did not have to contend with the White House press corps or the Times editorial board—and in the hours following Biden’s exit, at least one prominent journalism professor blamed the Times, in particular, for hounding Biden out of the race with its coverage these past few weeks. This rhymes with a broader theory that elites—both in the Democratic Party and the media, and, sometimes, in both—conspired to bully Biden off the ticket. There was, doubtless, a pressure campaign, one that the world of straight journalism amplified, even if it did not endorse it per se. And yet the reality is much less neat; as Klein and others pointed out yesterday, elites reached the conclusion that Biden was too old to run long after most voters had already done so. In the course of the post-debate reckoning, the elite media (with some exceptions) have been criticized for missing this story or accused of actively covering it up, which sets up an interesting thought experiment: Can the press both have missed the story and forced Biden from the race as a result of it? It’s theoretically possible. (The word “overcorrection” comes to mind.) But if the reality is messier than the idea that the press forced Biden out, the same is true of the idea that it missed the story in the first place, as I wrote recently.
Either way, the Biden feeding frenzy already seems to have moved on to what might happen next. After Biden dropped out, Time updated its previous cover; now Biden is almost entirely out of the frame, only a trailing leg and jacket flap still visible, followed this time not by Panic but by his vice president, Kamala Harris. “Look how fast politics moves,” ABC’s Terry Moran told the Associated Press. “Joseph Biden, after 50 years in politics in which he reached the highest level, is now yesterday’s news.” In a separate news alert, the AP noted that Biden had not endorsed Harris in his withdrawal letter, and that the Democrats had been thrown “into chaos” as a result; not half an hour later, Biden did endorse Harris, and was quickly followed in doing so by a range of Democratic luminaries. If Harris now looks favored to be the candidate, it is still not clear how or even whether this will happen. “Our minds should be open to the possibility that everything just changed,” the media reporter Brian Stelter advised pundits—and that we don’t know what will happen next.
Broadly, this was sound advice (not that all pundits seemed inclined to take it). But reporters and pundits alike should remember that not everything will change: while some of the commentary on Biden yesterday had a valedictory, eye-on-history flavor—the talk of “codas”; the talk of Shakespeare; the (goalpost moving) conclusion that he struggled to unify America as he once promised—he is not stepping down as president. Indeed, he still has around an eighth of his term yet to serve, and the millions of people who will continue to be affected by his decisions—at home and overseas—deserve better than a brief moment of political elegy followed by moving on. (Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who continues to lead a brutal war in Gaza, departed for Washington this morning.) Questions about Biden’s age have, presumably, not gone away, even if setting a departure date of January 2025 is significantly different from trying to postpone it until 2029. If the coverage of Biden’s age was rooted primarily in concern for his governance of the country, the press corps surely won’t just drop it now. Right?
Even if historians might gloss over it, media critics will continue to debate the coverage of Biden in this post-debate period. For now, my biggest takeaway is not that the media failed to cover his age before the debate, or covered it too much afterward—again, both these narratives are complicated, even if they contain seeds of truth—but that either way, the coverage has felt reactive and jumpy and short-termist. To some extent, this is the media’s lot. But it also reflects something that Bill Grueskin, my Columbia colleague, wrote yesterday after the AP prematurely concluded that Biden had pitched the Democrats into chaos: that “the press is not so much biased toward one candidate or another these days as it is biased toward drama.” The race is now dramatic, unquestionably so. But it’s no more consequential now than when it was soporific, back in May 2024 BD, Before the Debate. The rest of Biden’s term was always going to be important too. Let’s not jump past it.
Other notable stories:
- On Friday, a court in Russia sentenced Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter was who jailed in the country last year on espionage charges that have widely been decried as bogus, to sixteen years in a high-security penal colony following a behind-closed-doors trial that involved only three days of hearings. As the New York Times reports, “the expedited nature of the case” (it was also moved forward by several weeks) suggests that the Russian government may be ready to trade Gershkovich for another prisoner, though the Kremlin declined to answer questions on a possible swap on Friday. The Journal’s parent company denounced the verdict as a “disgraceful, sham conviction” and pledged to continue supporting Gershkovich’s family.
- Last week, Selina Cheng, a Journal reporter in Hong Kong, alleged that she was fired after putting herself forward to lead a local journalists’ group that has recently attracted official ire for defending press freedom. Cheng said that a Journal editor described such advocacy as incompatible with her journalistic work; she also pointed out the apparent double standard with the Journal’s defense of Gershkovich. (The Journal insisted that it remains committed to press freedom in Hong Kong.) Now Cheng writes for CJR that her experience was “not unique,” with other journalists on the group’s board having resigned under “similar pressure from their employers.” Semafor also reported on that trend.
- Over the weekend, the LA Times reported that the local sheriff’s department secretly investigated—and recommended criminal charges against—Maya Lau, a former staffer at the paper who reported on a leaked list of problem deputies. (Lau was not charged.) In other news about the press and the law, a judge in Florida declined to throw out a defamation case that Donald Trump brought against the board of the Pulitzer Prizes over a statement it made defending past awards for coverage of Trump and Russia. And Hunter Biden dropped a lawsuit that he filed over a “mock trial” series on Fox Nation.
- For the newsletter Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends, Caitlin Dewey reports on the rise of “news hustlers”: an “umbrella term for the various independent influencers, streamers, ‘intelligence monitors,’ researchers, commentators and alt media shops…who seek to make clout or money off digital news without contributing reporting or analysis to it.” On Elon Musk’s X, this “varied group of anonymous middlemen have fast-become the platform’s go-to breaking news sources,” Dewey writes.
- And the veteran political journalist Walter Shapiro has died. Shapiro “wrote with clarity about what he did know at the time tempering it with what he did not, and with an alacrity of style that belied the sometimes heavy topics,” Jason Dick writes for Roll Call, where Shapiro had a column. When Dick heard the news, “the first thought I had was: Man, Walter is really going to be bummed about not covering the rest of this election.”
ICYMI: Joe Biden and the semiotics of old age
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