It was the most watched US TV broadcast since the 1969 moon landing, an unrivaled platform for any politician – let alone one down in the polls and battling against an implacable foe like Donald Trump.
Yet, last Sunday, Joe Biden turned down an interview ahead of American football’s showpiece, the Super Bowl, missing out on an audience of 123.4 million people. Instead the 81-year-old president joined TikTok, the social media platform of choice for teenagers, and posted a lighthearted video that praised the mother of player Travis Kelce – boyfriend of singer Taylor Swift – for her “great chocolate chip cookies”.
It was a swerve that fueled criticism of Biden as the most media shy president of modern times. Since taking office he has done just 86 interviews, compared with 300 by Trump and 422 by Barack Obama at the same point in their presidencies, according to data collected by the nonpartisan White House Transition Project.
Biden has also given fewer formal press conferences, abandoning the tradition of an end-of-year question and answer session and only inconsistently holding joint media events with visiting foreign leaders. Even German chancellor Olaf Scholz was not afforded a press conference during his recent visit to the White House.
Although he does take off the cuff questions, the president’s bashfulness is naturally a source of frustration for the Washington press corps. But it is also causing alarm among Democrats heading into a tough reelection contest with polls showing that a majority of Americans think Biden is too old to serve another term.
“It’s a bad mistake,” said Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, who at 77, is younger than Biden despite being president in the 1990s. “If he continues to recuse himself from interviews and other public media appearances that will only feed the public suspicion or fear that he’s ducking them because he’s no longer up to doing them.”
He added: “My consistent public advice is that the only way of blocking the charges of superannuation and its attendant incapacities is to be very public and very active on an almost daily basis from now until the general election. Making jokes doesn’t work. Angry denials won’t work. Surrogates will help but they’re no substitute. Joe Biden has to get out and show the American people he’s up to another term.”
Age has become a major issue in this election, especially for Biden, the oldest person ever to occupy the Oval Office. Some 78% of respondents in a Reuters/Ipsos poll – including 71% of Democrats – think he is too old to work in government. Trump, 77, suffers less from voter skepticism over his age; 53% of respondents consider him to be too old for government work. His last rival for the Republican nomination, 52-year-old Nikki Haley, has said both men are too old to be president and should be subjected to cognitive tests.
Biden’s age was thrust front and centre again after special counsel Robert Hur, a Republican former US attorney in Maryland during Trump’s administration, said in a report on the president’s handling of classified documents that Biden was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who was not able to recall to investigators when his son, Beau Biden, died.
Biden angrily denied Hur’s allegations about his memory, insisting in a White House appearance that “my memory’s fine”. However, in the same speech, he confused the presidents of Mexico and Egypt.
The White House took the extraordinary step of sending a letter to the White House Correspondents’ Association accusing the media of “significant errors” in its coverage of the report. Kelly O’Donnell, president of the association, described the letter as “misdirected” and “inappropriate”.
Biden’s allies also accused the media of a double standard, claiming that Trump’s comments at a rally in South Carolina threatening to abandon America’s Nato allies in the event of a Russian attack – and saying he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” – received less coverage than the president’s age.
Biden’s campaign team detailed in a press release that Sunday politics shows on the major TV networks devoted 5min 52sec to Trump’s Nato comments, compared with 21min 14sec on Biden’s age. Over the weekend the New York Times and Washington Post published 11 and 10 stories respectively about Trump/ Nato but wrote 30 and 33 stories about Biden’s age.
The Politico website reported the Biden campaign wrote to surrogates that Trump’s own gaffes and outrageous comments “happen so much, they hardly get covered” because “political reporters have become numb to Trump’s wild gaffes and dangerous rhetoric”.
Trump, who has recently made some verbal slip-ups of his own, is selective when it comes to media. He regularly gives interviews to unchallenging rightwing outlets – a town hall in Iowa last month was his first live interview with Fox News in nearly two years – and holds freewheeling press conferences after his many courtroom appearances. But the former president is deliberate in avoiding mainstream networks and newspapers who could test his lies and subject him to a grilling.
His candidacy also presents a challenge to the media itself. In 2016 there was much hand wringing over how constant coverage of Trump’s rallies and tweets gave him $5bn in free advertising, according to the media tracking firm mediaQuant.
Kristen Welker, a host on NBC’s Meet the Press program, argues there have been some important changes since then. “For example, in 2016 you’d be standing in front of the camera, a tweet would come in, you would read it five seconds after it came on to your phone,” she said during a panel discussion hosted by the News Literacy Project in Washington.
“We no longer do that. We take a beat, whether it’s a tweet, whether it’s a speech, do we carry it live, do we carry it on tape and do playback and do fact checking along the way? I think there have been a number of changes in that regard.”
But now there is concern that the media are over-correcting by hardly covering Trump’s rallies at all, an approach designed to deny his lies a platform but which carries its own risks. Some journalists warn that it could mean voters miss the extremism and dangers of Trump’s second term agenda.
Chris Hayes, a host on MSNBC, argued last month that Trump has perversely benefited from major networks no longer taking his speeches live and from being banned by social networks. “The more voters hear from him, the less like him,” he said. Paying attention to Trump “sucks”, Hayes acknowledged, but reminding Americans who he is “may be crucial to saving American democracy from his current campaign to destroy it”.
Galston, however, warned that more coverage of Trump is a double-edged sword. “The problem is that what people on MSNBC regard as crazy and off putting is all the more attractive to people who are inclined in that direction. The idea that to see Trump is not to like Trump reflects a somewhat blinkered view.”
Some analysts have urged the media to focus less on the traditional “horse race” between candidates and more on the potential consequences for American democracy. Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University, summed up: “Not the odds, but the stakes.”
Donna Brazile, former interim chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, notes that the media closely followed polling for elections in 2022 and 2023 only to be surprised by Democrats’ success at the ballot box. Concerns over Biden’s age, approval rating and media strategy are therefore overblown, she contends.
“It’s one thing if Joe Biden had Donald Trump’s record as head of the party and losing so much, I could understand why we are constantly second guessing the strategy. But the truth is that the media is playing the old school game, which is let’s follow the horse race numbers and see what that produces,” Brazile said.
“Then every time we see a New York 3[rd congressional district], Pennsylvania special election or Wisconsin special election, we seem surprised. No, it’s because the media coverage has undermined the media, not the candidate. I suspect that the media have never really travelled, much outside of their newsroom, their living rooms, wherever they get to do their work. But the good news is the American people understand what’s at stake.”
Many Democrats remained bewildered by polls that show Biden struggling despite a strong economy, historic legislation and rallying of the west against Russia. The president has become increasingly focused on drawing a contrast with Trump while commentators warn him against shooting the messenger.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Sometimes blaming the media is just looking for a scapegoat. After all, Biden came out after that horrible report … and he’s the one who confused the presidents of Egypt and Mexico. That wasn’t the media.
“I’m not that sympathetic to the blame-all-the-media. That’s just, frankly, a cover up for the failure of the White House to come up with a strategy that fits their candidate. They keep putting him out and Biden keeps demonstrating that there’s an age issue.”
The debate is playing out against the backdrop of a brutal year for the American media. The Washington Post newspaper projected a loss of $100m. The Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and digital news site Business Insider have all made sweeping job cuts. The online news site The Messenger abruptly shut down after only eight months in operation, firing roughly 300 people without health insurance or severance.
Many local and regional newspapers are ailing or dying. The public’s faith in the media has fallen to a historic low with a record share (39%) saying they do not trust the media at all, according to a Gallup poll last year.
Jacobs added: “There is a series of things that make American democracy vulnerable at a precarious moment. One of the most important is that at the moment, we need the media and its scrutiny and watchdog function most, it is under threat and may not be viable based on its current structure.
“The media we rely on most is the least economically viable and the media that is most economically profitable is the media that tends to be most inaccurate and sensational.”
