3 Takeaways - Hear, Here. A Fresh Take on the News Media’s Flawed Coverage of Joe Biden with a Former NY Times Executive Editor (#206)

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

The news media’s coverage of Joe Biden’s mental fitness is itself a major news story. Here, Jill Abramson, a former Executive Editor of the NY Times, provides fresh insight on the failures of the media, the White House’s aggressive cover-up, what it all means for journalism in general, and more. Don’t miss one of our most important conversations ever. 

To quote my guest today, it's clear the best news reporters in Washington have failed in the first duty of journalism to hold power accountable. It is our duty to poke through White House smokescreens and find out the truth. The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover up of the degree of the president's feebleness and his serious physical decline, unquote. Why did the best news reporters fail to report on President Biden's decline? And how can we all get objective news? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways.

On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times. As a former Washington Bureau chief for both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and as the former executive editor of the New York Times, she is the perfect person to ask about the failure of reporters to report on President Biden's decline and how we can all get objective news. Welcome, Jill, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. Thanks for having me, Lauren. It is my pleasure. Were the top White House reporters really as shocked as everyone else by the painful reality of President Biden's debate performance?

I actually do think that they were shocked and surprised, which tells you something important, which is how cosseted and hidden away the president has been from the White House press corps. He's done fewer interviews. He has not done a sit down interview in the Oval Office with the New York Times, which is customary for all presidents to do. President Trump stiffed the Times too, but I'm not counting that. But I sat through both when I was at the Wall Street Journal and the Times, many Oval Office interviews with presidents. We used to do one a year. And it was a great opportunity to sit down with the president and have a conversation

and ask important questions on behalf of the public. And Biden hasn't done that. He hasn't had news conferences. He hasn't really been actively campaigning that much. So the White House press corps has had a very limited view of him. And that was a strategic decision made by his advisors to keep the press away from him. And I'm not offering that as an excuse for the lack of really good investigative reporting on the state of his health. But it's an honest answer to your question about whether the reporters themselves were surprised.

And I think most of them were. Do you think that the Biden White House betrayed the public by hiding his decline? I absolutely do. I think their lack of transparency about whatever is ailing President Biden and causing him to be a generous description would be very foggy in his thinking is a real disservice to voters, especially with, you know, an election just a few months away. In retrospect, there were repeated stories on Fox News about Biden's mental competence and acuity, including stories about his incomplete sentences, incoherent paragraphs, his mixing up names of country presidents, his naming of dead people instead of living ones, and his freezing on stage. And there

was even one recent incident when he was with President Obama at a fundraiser, and he reportedly froze on stage, and President Obama literally grabbed his arm and guided him off stage. Now, these stories were all dismissed by most as either Fox News or fake news. Do you think they were fake news? And why weren't they more widely reported? Well, they weren't. I hate the expression fake news to begin with. But what was pervasive were clips that were strung together on social media that kind

of were the greatest hits, essentially, of Biden's slip-ups. And I don't think those were of any value to the public because they were just the result of video editing and they lack context or any kind of real information of value. There were stories, Fox and the New York Post were pretty dogged in their reporting about the president's decline. But in fairness, the Times, the Washington Post and others did stories too, but not with the kind of focus and proportion that was needed given the level of the problem that all Americans who watched the debate saw before their eyes and why the press didn't dig deeper and see this as a major story.

I do think the First Amendment protections that we in the press enjoy involve the responsibility of being watchdogs and holding power accountable. And the president's competence would seem to me a crucial issue. And one, given the seriousness of his lapses, that certainly called for a greater intensity and frequency of the best investigative reporting that the public can be given. Do you think reporters were duped by the White House, or were they incompetent, or were they just partisan? At this point, I would say I'm trafficking in something I don't like to traffic in, which is conjecture. And I should answer the question first and foremost with a big, I don't know. I do know that I personally spoke with the senior editors of a number of publications about this back in February when the Her report came out describing President Biden as a well-meaning but very forgetful older

man. And that seemed to me to be a major ghost signal for all of the press to dig into this story. And they didn't, except for, as I described, some fitful efforts by good reporters and good journalists. The White House press corps is huge. There are a lot of reporters sitting in the press area of the White House. So I think a number of them did try hard to report this story and were met with a fierce counterattack by the White House. I would like to think that happens on other stories too. I mean, every White House I've covered or planned the coverage of has pushed back fiercely at many inquiries that were made. Again, these are not nosy reporters just asking for reasons of curiosity. These are reporters who are digging out the truth on behalf of the public. So I think, A,

the White House fiercely attacked and even threatened reporters who were reporting on the state of the president's mental fitness for office. B, I think, and this is where, again, I'm in that field of conjecture. I do think that the press corps, maybe with the exception of Fox and like-minded conservative media outlets, that the press is deathly afraid, not for itself, but on behalf of American voters of Donald Trump coming back to power and probing President Biden's mental decline, I think was viewed as potentially helping Trump get elected. And I think editors and reporters were extremely reluctant to be involved in an endeavor that would bring Donald Trump back to power. But isn't that a violation of what you see as the primary responsibility of the press to report the truth and hold power accountable?

Yes, it is. And I, as an editor, was extremely committed to what the phrase I'll use is keeping the news side of the New York Times. I'm not talking about opinion and opinion columnists. I was in charge of the news and I was 100 percent committed to keeping the news side of the New York Times straight. Keep the paper straight. And that means reporting the news and other Timesian phrases without fear or favor. Let's take a step back and talk about the media more generally. What's changed in the media over the last 10 or so years? Everything. Everything has changed.

Digital journalism has changed everything. I like to always, I'm an optimist by nature, talk about the good things and what the internet and the web have done is democratize information. It's no longer just professional journalists who cover the news and analyze it and write about it. It's any citizen who wants to go online and express what they know or their viewpoint. So that in many ways has been a healthy thing. The unhealthy aspect of the digital revolution has been the complete destruction and upending of what was the old revenue model, which was advertising. The New York Times for most of my career made its money in two ways, from advertising, paid

advertising and circulation. People who paid first for home delivery of the print newspaper and now for digital subscriptions. And during the course of my career as an editor there, which spanned from 2003 to 2014, advertising cratered. It just almost disappeared. It was gobbled up digitally by Google and Facebook and other big tech platforms. And so not having a secure revenue model has meant just drastic cuts in newsrooms everywhere and the disappearance of thousands of local and regional newspapers. The news gathering muscle of journalism has withered horribly during the course of my career. And, you know, I'm not saying poor, pitiful journalists who lost their jobs. I'm saying poor, pitiful America, which has so much less firepower turned on local corruption, on covering things like education and all kinds of

local concerns, city councils, county councils, state houses, they're all going uncovered. That's a big danger to democracy. That's why I care about it, not because my colleagues have lost their jobs. And that's part of what you call holding power accountable. Yeah, the ability to do that has weakened over time. One of the other changes that we've all seen is that individuals in all fields are now establishing their own direct connections with consumers. Many reporters now have their own social media accounts. How does that change the news when you have reporters that have their own massive numbers of individual followers? How does that change news as well as their reporting?

Well, it's changed it profoundly because along with individual journalists becoming brands has come a kind of eye-eye-eye that has first-person slant on everything in the news and news stories. I mean, when I first joined the Times, there was no practically no first person journalism. And now it's just ubiquitous on the news pages. And I'm not saying that, like as a reader, I find some of it excellent and engaging. I just, you know, before I began talking to you for the podcast, I was reading a story in the Times Magazine by one of the best writers around. Taffy Broad, Sir Ackner, has written a story about a neighbor of hers from her growing up years who was kidnapped, and she weaves her own trauma into that story.

And I couldn't put it down. It's fabulously written. But that is the kind of journalism that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal just did not do during the key years when I was a reporter. And to what extent do you think that the younger generation of reporters, which is to say those under the age of 30, have different values than older reporters? I mean, not all of them, but I think at the risk of painting too broad a brush, they do have different values. deeply reported investigative journalism, which is told in a voice rather than getting hung up on the definition of objectivity. I'd like to say it's an authoritative voice and the authority

comes from the dogged research and collection of facts through interviewing as many people as I can on all sides of whatever issue I'm talking about. And if you do enough of that, you can see where the weight of truth is. And that's how I was trained. And that's the kind of journalism like I'll go down doing. What are your major concerns about the media? That it stay alive, that the kind of reporting I just described to you, that there's instant because you need institutional backing to do that kind of work. You need a news organization with resources, places that will pay good reporters to spend a lot of time on stories that are hidden or hidden behind smoke screens like the one we've been talking about. And so my fear is that at a certain time, there'll be so little

of that that the public will just be drowning in a sea of opinion and misinformation. The press has really lost credibility over this issue of the reporting of President Biden's health. How do you think that, A, they can regain it and B, that such an incidence of failure can be avoided going forward? They can recover from this by just going back to first principles, reporting, reporting, and more reporting. But what has distressed me in the aftermath of the debate is most of the stories I'm reading are like horse race stories. They're like, can he survive? Who's sticking with them, who's peeling away. That's the easy stuff. The hard stuff is getting hold of the medical professionals who have actually seen and examined the president. And at this point, the White House is fiercely battling to keep that information secret. But don't tell me you can't find out the truth. I know from my own work and from working with other great reporters over the years that

with enough knocking on doors, enough calling, enough connecting with people who are of good conscience, and there are those people in this story. You will get the truth. And with focus and good leadership, journalism is going to get that story. I know we are. I know we are. Jill, before I ask you for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today, is there anything else you'd like to mention that you haven't already talked about? I would just like to say, because I feel so many of my comments have been critical, that it is hard work. And I know that.

And I know most of the journalists and certainly those in the White House press corps are really trying to serve the public. They're trying to honor the First Amendment and our role in society. They really are. And for the most part, every day they succeed. What are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with

today? Well, because we've talked so much about journalism is read. Read everything. Read everything from novels to the news. It not only makes you better informed, it enriches your life. Number two is connect with the animal world. It's a way to lift your spirits. And third, connected to that is just be grateful. Most of us who live in this country are so lucky, either because we have wonderful families or we are involved in community service that's important. even while we focus on the problems of the country, like spend a lot of your day and certainly wake up being grateful for the good things that we all have. Jill, thank you for taking the time today.

It's so important. The media is so important. Thank you for your inside and unique perspective. You're most welcome. Thanks for the good conversation, Lynn. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at threetakeaways.com, where you can also listen to previous episodes.

You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is 3 Takeaways. Thanks for listening.