I Don't Think it Really Matters How the New York Times Covers Trump and Biden in February

There's a lot of this miserable campaign still to go

Photo from Oliver Morris via Getty.

Last week, Special Counsel Robert Hur decide not to charge Biden for mishandling classified documents. That’s good new for Democrats. The bad news for Democrats is that Hur’s report portrayed Biden, who is 81, as an 81 year-old. Biden gave a press conference to allay fears about his mental fitness, but during that press conference, he said “Mexico” when he meant “Egypt”. That mistake was softened by the fact that Trump made a virtually identical mistake at the same time, and also by the fact that Biden has been verbally stepping on his own balls for decades. Remember this?

Biden’s rough week caused everyone even remotely connected to Democratic politics to have kittens, shit a brick, or pass some other surprising object through a lower body orifice. That concern was extensively covered by the legacy media, with the New York Times’ coverage getting extra scrutiny:

Thus began a debate about the debate, or possibly a debate about the debate about the debate — I’ve lost track and also lost the capacity to care. But, to summarize: Many people felt that the Times was repeating a mistake they made in 2016 by giving negative news about the Democratic candidate equal weight as Trump’s vast universe of crimes. Other people argued that concerns about Biden’s fitness were legitimate news and needed to be covered. This intra-Acela-corridor sniping happened while most Americans were doing things like watching the Super Bowl and enjoying their lives.

I don’t have an opinion on the Times’ coverage. I know that they’re struggling with a thing that I’ve written about before (once on this blog and once on TV): The impossibility of covering a candidate’s flaws in proportion to Trump’s. You simply cannot talk about any candidate’s shortcomings and talk about Trump’s shortcomings using the same frame of reference — it’s like trying to use the same scale to weigh an apple and a neutron star. To form an opinion about the Times’ coverage, I’d need to think hard about journalistic principles, and review the Times’ work to see if it adheres to those principles, and folks: I’m not going to do that. Because one thing I’m pretty sure about is that the Times’ editorial decisions in February won’t make a fat frog’s ass of difference come November.

Politics is sports for nerds. And most people don’t follow that sport. The fact that you’re reading this blog means that you probably do follow that sport, as do I. But to understand the mindset of most of the country, ask yourself: Who’s the top driver in the IndyCar Series right now? If you said “Mario Andretti, perhaps?”, then your level of knowledge is about the same as mine. Unfortunately, Mario Andretti died ten years ago. Except no he didn’t: He’s alive, but he retired in the ‘90s, and you didn’t know that. The real top driver is Álex Palou, except just kidding, that’s a name I made up, the real guy is Jens Van der Bruggen, except that time I was kidding: Álex Palou is the real guy. My point is: You know jack shit about IndyCar, because you don’t follow IndyCar. And most people don’t follow politics.

Politics nerds use the phrase “election year”, but there is no election year: There is election week. There is a Halloween once every four years where people dress up like slutty versions of the candidates, and at that point, most people think: “Oh yeah…that.” Those people approach voting the way that I approach holiday shopping: It will be addressed at the last possible moment and not a second before. My mom sends me an e-mail every July asking for Christmas ideas, and I consider her to be mentally ill. And that’s how most of the country views people who talk about the November election in February.

Anyone who’s following the presidential election this early knows how they’re going to vote. Another large chunk of voters are solidly Republican or Democrat, and they’re not following things but they still know how they’ll vote. Most undecided voters will check in a few days before the election. Those people — and those people only — will experience news of Biden’s age and Trump’s criminality with fresh eyes. You, me, and others who share our disease will have typed our fingers bloody about the scale and nature of Biden and Trump’s vulnerabilities. But undecided voters will confront that information with the naïve innocence of Rober Smigel’s “The Baby, The Immigrant, and The Guy on Mushrooms”.

Most undecided voters also aren’t getting their information from the New York Times. They’re getting it from Facebook, the five o’clock news, and chatty cashiers at Safeway. They’ll form impressions based on a few randomly collected bits of information, and basically the entire game in politics is trying to ensure that the bits of information floating around are as favorable to your candidate as possible. People worry about a Taylor Swift endorsement going against them because that’s the sort of random thing that might influence someone. People will think “That lady has shiny legs, so she probably knows the best way to handle Iran.” Politics is just that bizarre.

It’s not that the Times’ coverage doesn’t matter at all. It matters first because “practice good journalism that adheres to consistent principles” is a rule for all seasons. And it matters second because the Times is upstream of other journalism, so its coverage drives our conversations. But it’s not like “Biden is old” wasn’t already a topic of conversation. And we’re nine months from the election, which means that there will be about eleven Trump indictments, 30 Biden gaffes, and — statistically speaking — one game-changing health event between now and when we vote.

If any Democrat thinks that Biden’s age isn’t going to be talked about ad-nauseum, they should disillusion themselves of that fantasy right now. It will be talked about constantly. My people — late night comedy writers — will use “he’s old” as our go-to Biden reference, because it’s gettable and it’s true. And, sure: You can point out that Trump is also old (true), was never mentally fit for the presidency (right again!), and that his policy ineptitude is more troubling than his general incompetence (three for three!). That should be part of the conversation; I’ll be one of the people arguing that those concerns outweigh concerns about Biden’s age. But imagining that we’ll get through this campaign without voters thinking about Biden’s age is like imagining that you can raise a child to adulthood and have them still believe in Santa.

A small subset of the country is peeing their pants in anticipation of the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, which will kick of the IndyCar season on March 10. Those people are probably on Reddit boards right now debating the merits of the new hybrid powertrains and arguing about whether Josef Newgarden can return to top form. The remaining 99.7% of us don’t care. We might turn on the Indy 500 for a few laps in…May? July? Somewhere in there. For sure, the maximum amount of time we will spend thinking about IndyCar this year is roughly an hour. That’s how most swing voters experience politics. And that’s why I don’t think a few Times articles on a sure-to-be-covered issue nine months before the election really matter much at all.

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