When they really want to tell a story...

Honestly it’s malpractice

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— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal.bsky.social) May 20, 2025 at 7:40 PM

I'm going to have to be disciplined when discussing this story. There are so many aspects intersecting with so many of our ongoing threads that I could easily fill a long-form New Yorker article—which would be fine, except that I would almost certainly never get around to posting anything. (Ironically, I can't recommend the actual New Yorker article on this.)

For now, we're just going to talk about what happens when the establishment press—in this case, particularly the NYT/Politico/Axios—decides that they really want to tell a story.

As we've discussed many times, The New York Times et al., since late in the 20th century, have implicitly—and often explicitly—narrowed their definition of bias down to saying mean things about conservatives and Republicans. Notably absent is any consideration of the biases that come from fear of criticism and, even more importantly, the desire to make oneself and one's organization look good.

Put bluntly, the leadership class of the establishment press is vain, petty, vindictive, and devoid of self-awareness. This led to a mild to moderate level of dysfunctional coverage, with such notable failures as Bush v. Gore, the Iraq War, Swift Boating, and the rise of the birther movement, but on the whole, the system was still functional. That changed in 2015.

From the moment that Trump announced his bid for the presidency to the day of the election, the press engaged in a massive campaign of selective reporting, motivated reasoning, wishful analytics, and anything else they could come up with to support the idea that this man would never become president. They used this belief to justify childish score-settling with the Clintons. We discussed this at great length in real time here at the blog, and I feel pretty goddamn confident saying that the large majority of our posts stand up better than almost all of what The New York Times was writing at the time.

We saw a similar pattern in the run-up to the 2024 election, with publications like The New York Times assuring us that Trump was circling the drain and there was no stopping Ron DeSantis.

After it became apparent that Trump was not just the front-runner but had the overwhelming support of his party, the establishment press corps—for reasons better left to psychologists than to journalism critics—decided to double down on false balance and sane-washing. (Actually, that's not quite true. The publishers, editors, and a few of their more toadyish reporters decided to go along. There is considerable evidence that the rank and file were, in large part, very unhappy with the final versions of the stories that were coming out under their bylines.)

This time, however, whatever goodwill and reputational standing the NYT/Politico/Axios had possessed eight years earlier was gone, and prominent commentators—including some of the most distinguished names in American journalism, such as Margaret Sullivan and James Fallows—were very vocal with their criticisms. This led to tremendous hurt feelings and whining on the part of the press corps, arguably culminating in Maggie Haberman's Fresh Air interview, in which she complained of an "industry" out to get her and her colleagues.

If anything, the 2024 election and the events that have followed have only heightened the reputational damage, and the editors of these publications have been fighting back. Possibly the first major salvo was at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where one of these editors gave a speech arguing that the press had failed not by ignoring Trump's cognitive decline, but by not having spent even more time discussing Biden's. This was a crude and spectacularly self-serving bit of rhetorical sleight of hand—the old "I'm sorry I didn't insist more strongly on doing things my way" argument.

Not long after that, we saw these organizations and their allies redoubling their efforts to push the narrative of Biden's decline. These stories were told in the most sensationalistic tone possible. There was a slew of stunningly dishonest "political analyses" framing this as an organic grassroots movement coming from the Democrats, rather than astroturf from the publications telling the story. Data points that undercut the narrative—such as Biden's personal negotiations of the incredibly complex hostage crisis while he was handing over the campaign to Harris—are nowhere to be seen.

This is also about conversations that the press corps really doesn't want to have. Perhaps one of the most notable things about this story is how tightly constrained the coverage has been. No historical context or discussions of how previous administrations (Wilson, FDR, JFK, Reagan) dealt with impaired presidents. No attempt to contrast these anecdotes with simultaneous cases where Biden was personally leading complex operations, such as the multinational hostage negotiations last summer. No comparisons with the cognitive state of Donald Trump. No explorations of how these anecdotes affected policy. All of these things would make for a better story, but it is not the story that the men (and we are overwhelmingly talking about men) who lead the establishment press want to talk about.

When the press wants to tell a story this badly—such as with Whitewater—ethical rules start to bend, and standards for things like sourcing start to lower. We are already seeing signs of that in this case.

Check out this extraordinary exchange:

Ummm- didn’t happen! 🤨 (Making ish up) “Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison later that fall met Biden at a Congressional Black Caucus event and the president kept shaking his hand without appearing to recognize him.” nypost.com/2025/05/13/us-…

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— Jaime Harrison (@jaimeharrison.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 11:36 AM

Continued on Twitter.

Screenshots here of an amazing exchange on X. Axios reporter Alex Thompson's new book on Biden claims (with no sources) that Biden shook DNC chair Jaime Harrison's hand without recognizing him. Harrison posts "it never happened". Then Axios editor Jake Wilkins - wow - tells Harrison he's wrong! 1/

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— capitolhunters (@capitolhunters.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 5:23 PM

Round 2: Wilkins tells Jaime Harrison that his OWN memory is wrong (or he's lying). He says the authors "didn't make anything up" and "Read the book, decide for yourself". To the actual person involved. Did Wilkins somehow not realize who he was talking to? 2/

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— capitolhunters (@capitolhunters.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 5:23 PM

Round 3: Harrison tells Wilkins of course he knows what happened to him. 3/

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— capitolhunters (@capitolhunters.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 5:23 PM

The exchange is still going - Wilkins is posting through it. Judging from the ratios, Harrison is winning. He's now spelling it out: "someone is making the shit up". 7/

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— capitolhunters (@capitolhunters.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 6:05 PM

Assuming CapitolHunters got the details right (and given that they're followed by some of the best journalists I know, I'm inclined to trust them), this is one hell of a tell.

Earlier, the authors had oddly said some of their sources would deny it - like they were prepping for pushback. Now a major public figure says "I wasn't your source and this didn't happen". Did they print rumor without verifying it? Whatever happened, it's not how journalism is supposed to work. 4/

— capitolhunters (@capitolhunters.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 5:23 PM

This is being treated as one of the biggest stories in the country. Under those circumstances, shouldn't "eyewitness says incident in bombshell book never happened. Questions veracity of its anonymous sources." be a bigger part of the story? I can't find a single major news outlet that's even mentioned it, but I'd be lying if I said I were surprised. 

The best way to understand the bizarre journalistic campaign to pressure Democrats to "confess" to a non-existent conspiracy to hide Biden's unproven dementia is as an effort to divert attention from the serial failures of prominent journalists to satisfy their responsibilities to the nation.

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— davidrlurie (@davidrlurie.bsky.social) May 16, 2025 at 2:23 PM