In all the media coverage of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the national crisis the country now finds itself in, one aspect of the emergency has been left out. The American media, once powerful enough to put in motion Nixon’s eventual downfall with the New York Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers – a damning history of US involvement in the Vietnam War – has become virtually powerless. Or to put it painfully, and more precisely, the New York Times itself, once the proud flagship of American liberalism, has been emasculated.
In the past two weeks, the Times has run not just one, but two house editorials calling for Biden to step aside as the Democratic candidate for president. If the paper had called for Clinton or Obama to step aside, let alone Truman or Kennedy, the candidacies of all four men would have been cut off at the knees. For generations, the paper had that kind of clout.
Just as 30 million Americans – something like 20 per cent of the adult population – once watched the legendary anchorperson Walter Cronkite present the evening news every night on network television, educated Americans, from teachers to novelists to politicians, drew their sense of reality from the Times every morning. A forceful call for a sitting president to withdraw as nominee of the president’s party on account of what the paper argued was clear evidence of the nominee’s mental deterioration would have had a devastating effect on their candidacy.
Instead: nothing. Biden never even acknowledged the Times’s editorials. He simply grew more emphatic and defiant in his determination to remain the Democratic nominee. To add insult to injury, when ABC interviewer George Stephanopoulos quoted a passage from one of the paper’s editorials expressing concern over Biden’s mental condition, Biden simply waved it away.
After that slight, the paper made a remarkable turn in response. It began giving Biden what you might call the Trump treatment. Even people, such as myself, who despise Trump had been taken aback by the slanted way in which the Times – along with the rest of the liberal media – covered Trump from the moment he announced his candidacy in June 2015. In article after article, the paper didn’t report on Trump; it built a case against him. The paper’s lead reporter on the Trump beat, Maggie Haberman, even seemed to be wildly overcompensating after she was unfairly accused of somehow being easy on Trump because her mother was, at the time, an executive at a PR firm that had represented Trump’s organisation.
It is a pretty irony. Biden’s indifference, not just to the Times, but to calls from the entire liberal media establishment to withdraw, has its origins in the media’s grossly biased treatment of Trump. Just as Biden’s declarations of defending democracy from the “existential threat” of Trump now appear to be camouflage for the threat to democracy posed by his own deceitfulness about his cognitive condition, the liberal media’s violation, during Trump’s reign, of the journalistic principles of impartial reporting have now delegitimised it altogether. Biden and his people can tell themselves that if the media could be so unabashedly biased about his predecessor, it only makes sense that its approach to Biden is similarly compromised.
The term “elites” is often thrown around as if it referred to a uniform class of people all of whom are in solidarity with each other. Of course, nothing could be further than the truth. Like a seemingly happy and harmonious family that springs at each other’s throats once the family trust is contested, a democratic society’s elites are only in accord when the situation they share is proceeding smoothly. The instant one elite group’s interests are threatened by another’s, things start to fall apart.
The unwinding of the liberal elites has happened with striking suddenness. Having had its editorials blithely ignored by Biden, the Times seems to have set its reporters to cover him in the same prosecutorial way they covered Trump. The paper reported, dramatically, that a neurologist specialising in Parkinson’s visited the White House eight times in eight months. The clear implication was that the specialist was there to examine Biden. But if you read the story, which was confusingly reported, a neurologist had examined Biden three times in that period; the other five visits were with other people at the White House. It was a classic, slanted hit-piece of the kind the paper’s readers were used to enjoying reading about Trump.
But even that sensational headline failed to budge Biden and his allies. Meanwhile other nabobs in the liberal media were hurling themselves at the Biden redoubt, with David Remnick, editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, writing a piece thundering at Biden to step aside, a gesture that had about as much effect as would a piece by Anna Wintour calling on Israel to leave Gaza.
Still, Biden pushed on, uncannily like Trump pushing on after two impeachments, four criminal indictments and a criminal conviction on a felony. Perhaps Trump’s perpetual insult that the liberal media is “failing” – aimed particularly at the thin-skinned Times, which further eroded the paper’s commitment to fairness – was a perspective that was discreetly adopted by Biden and his inner circle. Trump, they might be telling themselves, successfully brushed aside the liberal media’s scathing, relentless attacks on him. He must have been onto something. Look how easy it is.
C. Wright Mills, the American sociologist whose 1956 The Power Elite was a profoundly influential study of American elites, divided the elite stratum into a number of types and subsets. One subset was celebrities. The liberal media elite now finding itself, to what must be its utter astonishment, unable to exert influence on the liberal political elites, resorted to summoning to the rescue, in the manner of a Hollywood western, Hollywood itself. Its editorial board ignored, its reporting waved way, the Times published an op-ed by George Clooney imploring his old friend, Biden, to step down.
This must have come as more of a shock to the Biden people than betrayal by the liberal media, with which the Biden administration had been more or less amiably tangling for years anyway. With the exception of a few outliers – Ronald Reagan, chief among them – Hollywood had always been stalwart allies of every liberal president. It just so happened that an obituary for the actress Shelly Duvall published in the Times the day after Clooney’s stab in the back – he had just hosted a fundraiser for Biden in Los Angeles – referred to “the cruel vapidity of Hollywood celebrity, the way supposed friends can suddenly become enemies”, touchingly quoting Duvall, who once asked: “How would you feel if people were really nice, and then, suddenly, on a dime they turn on you?” Hollywood routinely devours its own. But gobbling up a president of the United States? That is a new development in the theory of elites.
If anyone in the media by this point was naïve enough to think Clooney’s essay would have an immediate effect on Biden (“Folks, here’s the deal. I loved him in Gravity. I’m stepping aside”) they were badly mistaken. Thursday’s news conference was an unmoored, meandering horror. Sensitive to criticism that they were being too hard on Biden, the liberal media responded, not to the news conference, but to the criticism, and with exasperating absurdity praised Biden’s performance (“demonstrated a command of foreign policy” as the New York Times put it). With that craven bit of image-control, the inability of the once all-powerful liberal media establishment to affect the fortunes of either Trump or Biden, to affect American politics in any morally or practically consequential way, was complete.
Biden will step aside; the calls for him to do so from other Democrats and from wealthy donors make that a fait accompli. But that will happen not because of pressure from the media or from Hollywood. It will be accomplished by good old-fashioned political elites, namely by powerful Democrats in the Senate. Chuck Schumer and others will pay a visit to Biden, tell him that either he steps aside or they humiliate him by holding a press conference calling on him to step aside, and, angry, bewildered and dazed, Biden will do so. The new reality of the American media, however, will have been revealed. It has no claws, or teeth. It is strictly in the business, as both Biden and Trump are, of hanging on.
[See also: How Ukraine shattered Europe’s balance of power]
Content from our partners
Related
