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The Media Issue
THE PETTY FEUD BETWEEN THE NYT AND THE WHITE HOUSE
Biden’s people think they’re “entitled.” The Times says “they’re not being
realistic.”
President Joe Biden holds a copy of the New York Times as he departs the White
House in May 2021. | Yuri Gripas/Reuters via Redux Pictures
By Eli Stokols
04/25/2024 05:00 AM EDT
Updated: 04/25/2024 01:17 PM EDT
*
*
* * Link Copied
* *
*
*
Eli Stokols is a White House correspondent and co-author of West Wing Playbook.
When news broke one Saturday night in March 2023 that President Joe Biden’s
nominee to lead the Federal Aviation Administration was withdrawing, Mark Walker
was the reporter on duty in the New York Times Washington bureau. Assigned to
write up the news, Walker asked the White House for a comment just before
midnight. Assistant press secretary Abdullah Hasan was still up and emailed a
quote blaming the withdrawal on a barrage of “unfounded Republican attacks.”
After going through edits, Walker’s 502-word story was posted on the Times’
website in the wee hours Sunday morning.
Then all hell broke loose.
Hasan, who has since left the White House, had offered the quote to Walker on
background sourced to “an administration official.” Walker, not a member of the
Times’ White House team, was unfamiliar with the protocol and had made an
unintended mistake and attributed the quote to Hasan. When officials in the
press shop called him Sunday morning about the mistake, they asked to speak with
White House Editor Elizabeth Kennedy. But the number he gave them was the cell
phone of Elisabeth Bumiller, the Times Washington bureau chief.
Bumiller, who was away from Washington visiting family, received a call from
Emilie Simons, a White House deputy press secretary who had actually written the
statement. According to three people familiar with the conversation, Simons
asked that Hasan’s name be removed and the quote attributed to a nameless
official. Bumiller, who expressed dismay that the issue had been escalated to
her level, was reluctant to alter a story that had already been online for over
12 hours.
THE MEDIA ISSUE
The Most Feared and Least Known Political Operative in America | By Michael
Kruse
The 10 Thirstiest Members of Congress | By POLITICO magazine
He Worked for the Nastiest People in Politics. Now He’s Airing Dirty Laundry. |
By MICHAEL SCHAFFER
How Newt Destroyed Dinner in Washington | MATTHEW KAMINSKI
Meet the Man MAGA America Wakes Up To | By Adam Wren
The Petty Feud Between the NYT and the White House | By Eli Stokols
Inside the Off-the-Record Calls Held by Anti-Trump Legal Pundits | By Ankush
Khardori
How Donald Trump Gets His News | By Meridith McGraw
Both parties later told colleagues the call ended on a sour note. Two Times
staffers recalled Bumiller grumbling, as she occasionally does, about how she’d
been spoken to. Aides in the press shop recalled hearing that the bureau chief
had been surprisingly defensive and that when Simons tried to bring up another
concern with Walker’s story, Bumiller just hung up. The following day principal
deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton emailed Bumiller asking the Times to
reaffirm its commitment to abide by the administration’s rules about information
given on background. For Dalton, Simons and others, it was about ensuring
fairness with embargoed information so that all news organizations could be on a
level playing field. But the Times’ bureau chief never replied. In response, the
White House removed all Times reporters from its “tier one” email list for
background information about various briefings and other materials, a situation
that wasn’t resolved for 11 months.
The seemingly minor incident over sourcing might not have escalated or triggered
such emotional responses on both sides if not for tensions between the White
House and the Times that had been bubbling beneath the surface for at least the
last five years. Biden’s closest aides had come to see the Times as arrogant,
intent on setting its own rules and unwilling to give Biden his due. Inside the
paper’s D.C. bureau, the punitive response seemed to typify a press operation
that was overly sensitive and determined to control coverage of the president.
After a quote mistakenly attributed to then-assistant press secretary Abdullah
Hasan (left) published in a Times story in March 2023, deputy press secretary
Emilie Simons (right) asked that Hasan’s name be removed and the quote
attributed to a nameless official. | Francis Chung/POLITICO
According to interviews with two dozen people on both sides who were granted
anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject, the relationship between the
Democratic president and the country’s newspaper of record — for years the
epitome of a liberal press in the eyes of conservatives — remains remarkably
tense, beset by misunderstandings, grudges and a general lack of trust.
Complaints that were long kept private are even spilling into public view, with
campaign aides in Wilmington going further than their colleagues in the White
House and routinely blasting the paper’s coverage in emails, posts on social
media and memos.
Although the president’s communications teams bristle at coverage from dozens of
outlets, the frustration, and obsession, with the Times is unique, reflecting
the resentment of a president with a working-class sense of himself and his team
toward a news organization catering to an elite audience — and a deep desire for
its affirmation of their work. On the other side, the newspaper carries its own
singular obsession with the president, aggrieved over his refusal to give the
paper a sit-down interview that Publisher AG Sulzberger and other top editors
believe to be its birthright.
The president’s press flacks might bemoan what they see as the entitlement of
Times staffers, but they themselves put the newspaper on the highest of
pedestals given its history, stature and unparalleled reach. And yet, they see
the Times falling short in a make-or-break moment for American democracy,
stubbornly refusing to adjust its coverage as it strives for the appearance of
impartial neutrality, often blurring the asymmetries between former President
Donald Trump and Biden when it comes to their perceived flaws and vastly
different commitments to democratic principles.
“Democrats believe in the importance of a free press in upholding our democracy,
and the NYT was for generations an important standard bearer for the fourth
estate,” said Kate Berner, who worked on Biden’s 2020 campaign and then as
deputy White House communications director before departing last year. “The
frustration with the Times is sometimes so intense because the Times is failing
at its important responsibility.”
Biden aides largely view the election as an existential choice for the country,
high stakes that they believe justify tougher tactics toward the Times and the
press as a whole. Some Times reporters have found themselves cut off by sources
after publishing pieces the Bidens and top aides didn’t like. Columnist Maureen
Dowd, for example, complained to colleagues that she stopped hearing from White
House officials after a column on Hunter Biden. For many Times veterans, such
actions suggest that the Trump era has warped many Democrats’ expectations of
journalists.
“They’re not being realistic about what we do for a living,” Bumiller told me.
“You can be a force for democracy, liberal democracy. You don’t have to be a
force for the Biden White House.”
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BIGGEST DONORS
2. SEN. MARK KELLY: KARI LAKE COMMENTS ‘COULD RESULT IN PEOPLE GETTING HURT OR
KILLED’
3. ‘THERE’S VOTE-BUYING GOING ON AT A SCALE LIKE WE HAVE NEVER SEEN BEFORE’
4. ‘THEY MAY BE REPUBLICANS, BUT THEY STILL COME IN FOR SERVICES’
5. PROSECUTORS: DOCS IN BOXES SEIZED FROM MAR-A-LAGO WERE INADVERTENTLY JUMBLED
Journalists watch Sen. Elizabeth Warren during a Democratic primary debate,
co-hosted by The New York Times and CNN, in 2019. Biden aides still hold a
grudge under the belief that the paper was institutionally aligned toward Warren
and progressives. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Having been in politics for some 50 years, Biden has long dealt with reporters
and editors from the Times, and, for the most part, cordially. But frustrations
began to mount early in 2019 as Biden launched his third run for the White House
in a crowded Democratic primary field. Times reporters were annoyed not to have
been invited to Biden’s first public appearance after announcing his candidacy,
an informal stop at a Wilmington pizzeria that two other reporters were tipped
off about. But aides to Biden, who tended to trust his generational
contemporaries at the Times — columnists and other journalists he’d gotten
comfortable with over several years — said they didn’t know anyone on the
politics team well. “Unlike some outlets, the Times just never invested in a
reporter who really knew and understood Biden and his appeal,” said one former
campaign staffer. “And the coverage reflected that.”
In the early months of the Democratic primary, the Times was responding to
pressures of its own. Still in the throes of covering the Trump presidency, the
institution had become acutely self-conscious about criticism that it was out of
touch with much of the country. At the same time, Editor-in-Chief Dean Baquet
and then-Managing Editor Joe Kahn were stung by former editor Jill Abramson’s
criticism of how the “narcissistic” Times had missed the rise of Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, according to four Times veterans. As Democratic
presidential hopefuls began debating, coverage focused heavily on the policy
debates among more progressive candidates — debates Biden largely wasn’t
involved in.
While Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was gaining ground in early polls and
enjoying positive early coverage, stories about Biden in the Times frequently
depicted him as a relic, out of step with younger, more liberal primary voters
and, following defeats in the early contests, poorly organized. Although it had
nothing to do with the newsroom, the Opinion page’s double endorsement of Warren
and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota (neither of whom won a single primary or
caucus), helped cement Biden world’s view that the Times was out of touch with
the broader electorate — an electorate personified by the Times security guard
who gushed over Biden in the Times elevator as he was headed up for his
interview with the editorial board. (In a subtle tweak aimed at the Times,
Biden’s campaign invited that security guard to formally nominate him at the DNC
months later.)
Biden speaks with Jacquelyn, a security guard, at the New York Times building in
Manhattan, in December 2019. | Brittainy Newman/The New York Times via Redux
Pictures
Biden aides, who spent months privately imploring the paper’s editors and
reporters not to write him off too early in the cycle, still hold a grudge under
the belief that the paper was institutionally aligned toward Warren and
progressives. “It’s just not true,” one senior Times editor told me. Biden, the
editor continued, “wasn’t involved in a lot of the debates about Medicare For
All [that dominated the early months of the race]. And while a lot of campaigns
were offering access to the candidate, Biden was not. That played out in the
coverage.”
But it was the paper’s willingness to legitimize rumors swirling around Hunter
Biden’s past business dealings in Ukraine that left top campaign officials most
incensed. In a letter to Baquet in October 2019, deputy campaign manager Kate
Bedingfield blasted the Times for a story by reporter Ken Vogel and freelancer
Iuliia Mendel focused on allegations by Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies
that Joe Biden took actions toward Ukraine as vice president in order to boost
his son Hunter Biden’s business interests there. The paper’s reporting, the
letter claimed, legitimized a “debunked … conspiracy theory” that had been, to
that point, “relegated to the likes of Breitbart, Russian propaganda … and
regular Hannity guest John Solomon.”
Complaints about the paper’s Hunter Biden coverage dominated a late 2019 meeting
at campaign headquarters in Philadelphia, where Bedingfield and other senior
Biden operatives met with Times politics editor Patrick Healy and a few
reporters to discuss the paper’s coverage.
Although the meeting was not especially confrontational, both sides mostly
talked past one another, according to people in both camps familiar with the
conversation. While Healy and the Times reporters made clear they took Biden
seriously as a candidate and potential nominee, they defended coverage of the
allegations swirling around his son — and, ultimately, made little headway in
convincing campaign aides to make Biden more available. “It was helpful to hear
what was on their minds,” one Times staffer familiar with the meeting said. “But
in some ways they don’t shape and control their narrative the way they could if
they were more engaged.”
Biden talks to reporters, including Times chief White House correspondent Peter
Baker (second from left), aboard Air Force One on Oct. 18, 2023. “Every White
House I've covered complains about our coverage. It comes with the territory,”
Baker said. | Evan Vucci/AP
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Although the newspaper, like most mainstream outlets with a heavy White House
presence, devoted pages of coverage to the president’s early legislative
successes, its unrelenting focus on Biden’s advanced age and his low numbers in
the NYT’s approval poll have frustrated the president and top aides to no end.
Beyond that, they bemoan the newspaper’s penchant for sweepy comparisons,
analytical reporter memos — referred to in the Biden press shop as “opinion
pieces” or “diary entries” — and story frames that seem consistently skeptical.
The Times’ chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, whose stories about
Biden’s age have regularly strummed a particularly sensitive nerve, told me that
the administration’s frustrations over his and his colleagues’ coverage wasn’t
all that unique. “Every White House I’ve covered complains about our coverage.
It comes with the territory,” he said. “But because of Trump, there’s this new
assumption that the New York Times and other media are supposed to put their
thumb on the scale and take sides and we don’t do that.”
Privately, other Times reporters who have engaged with the Biden White House and
campaign view the frustration with the paper as a misguided effort to control
its coverage. Beyond that, they believe writing about Trump with the stronger
language Biden aides seem to want would likely do more to affect the newspaper’s
brand, and the public’s trust in it, than Trump’s.
“We haven’t been tough enough on Trump? I mean, give me a break,” Bumiller
responded when I asked about that oft-heard complaint. “Have they read our
coverage? I don’t have to go through all the things we have covered on Trump so
I just — we just do our jobs.”
Still, the White House and campaign officials most incensed by the Times’
coverage often trace their outrage back to Trump, who they see as a true threat
to American democracy and, by extension, a free press. No current White House
staffers were willing to speak publicly to voice their complaints, but those
willing to talk on background without their names being used told me they viewed
the matter as bigger than their or even Biden’s self-interest, expressing
aggravation over the Times’ determination to maintain its neutral voice of God
approach to an election that, in their view, is a matter of democracy’s
survival.
“We do not comment on the specifics of our private discussions with reporters
and editors,” said deputy press secretary Andrew Bates in response to my request
for comment from the White House. “But as a White House that believes deeply in
the role of the free press in American Democracy, we would note that a mutually
honest, fact-based, respectful back-and-forth is a cornerstone of any healthy
relationship between a media outlet and an administration. We have that kind of
dialogue with The New York Times and many other media organizations.”
Every modern president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has done an interview
with the Times, except Biden. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Times’ desire for a sit-down interview with Biden by the newspaper’s White
House team is no secret around the West Wing or within the D.C. bureau. Getting
the president on the record with the paper of record is a top priority for
publisher A.G. Sulzberger. So much so that last May, when Vice President Kamala
Harris arrived at the newspaper’s midtown headquarters for an off-the-record
meeting with around 40 Times journalists, Sulzberger devoted several minutes to
asking her why Biden was still refusing to grant the paper — or any major
newspaper — an interview. Harris, according to three people in the room that
day, suggested that he contact the White House press office and later grumbled
to aides about the back-and-forth being a waste of the allotted time.
A few months later, with the Times’ White House team still banned from the
embargoed list and frustrations on both sides mounting, senior administration
officials invited Executive Editor Joe Kahn, Managing Editor Carolyn Ryan and
Bumiller to the White House. Although there was some discussion inside the Times
of whether Kahn should respond to a summons to Washington from anyone besides
the president himself, he decided to go, largely to make the case for Biden to
do an interview.
The meeting with senior adviser Anita Dunn and communications director Ben
LaBolt was not unlike many held from time to time with executives from other
newspapers and TV networks, an exchange of views about the outlet’s coverage, a
pitch for more access and an interview. Dunn and LaBolt went through a list of
complaints: the unrelenting focus on polls and age, reporters not giving the
White House much time to respond to stories prior to publication. The Times
brass listened and sought to explain the principles guiding its coverage. The
meeting, according to three people on both sides familiar with the conversation,
was not especially contentious. One sign of a slight thaw in relations came
weeks later when the White House invited Kahn and his wife to attend a state
dinner for the Australian prime minister in October.
But the pleas for an interview have gone nowhere. As Sulzberger often tells
colleagues and as he and Kahn have stressed in private conversations with the
administration, every modern president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has done
an interview with the Times. That, however, is an argument deemed uncompelling
by Biden aides and one that, to some White House officials, smacks of
entitlement. Plus, Biden has sat for interviews with only two print reporters in
more than three years (Josh Boak of the Associated Press and Evan Osnos of The
New Yorker, who earned Biden’s trust during a lengthy interview during the 2020
campaign that he turned into a book). He has, of course, been eager to engage
with columnists he knows and trusts, two of whom happen to work at the Times.
A group including Executive Editor Joe Kahn (left) and Managing Editor Carolyn
Ryan (right) accepted an invitation to meet with senior administration officials
at the White House last year, largely to make the case for Biden to do a
sit-down interview. | Sara Krulwich/The New York Times via AP
In Sulzberger’s view, according to two people familiar with his private comments
on the subject, only an interview with a paper like the Times can verify that
the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency. Beyond that, he has
voiced concerns that Biden doing so few expansive interviews with experienced
reporters could set a dangerous precedent for future administrations, according
to a third person familiar with the publisher’s thinking. Sulzberger himself was
part of a group from the Times that sat down with Trump, who gave the paper
several interviews despite his rantings about its coverage. If Trump could do
it, Sulzberger believes, so can Biden.
“All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever
reporter they’re mad at that day,” one Times journalist said. “It’s A.G. He’s
the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly
encourages all the tough reporting on his age.”
After this story was published, the Times offered an additional statement on its
push for an interview. “The notion that any line of coverage has been ordered up
or encouraged in retaliation for declining an interview, or any other reason, is
outrageous and untrue,” said Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for the Times who
said the paper will continue to cover Biden “fully and fairly” regardless of
whether he gives the paper an interview. He also emphasized that Sulzberger “has
repeatedly urged the White House to have the president sit down with the
Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, CNN and other major
independent news organizations that millions of Americans rely on to understand
their government.”
When describing their grievances with the Times, almost every Biden
administration and campaign official used the word “entitled” to characterize
the institution writ large and several of the individuals within the newsroom,
where “Timesian” is an adjective routinely deployed without irony. Those
officials described reporters who refused to correct minor errors or
mischaracterizations in stories or those who haven’t been willing to engage with
anyone besides the most senior administration officials. That said, many White
House officials maintain productive working relationships with most of the Times
reporters who cover the beat.
Bumiller and other Times White House reporters note that it’s always been the
newspaper’s prerogative to determine what to cover and how. “This is pretty much
par for the course,” Bumiller said. “No White House has ever been happy with our
coverage and I don’t see why they should be. Our job is to hold power to
account.”
Biden aides largely view the election as an existential choice for the country,
high stakes that they believe justify tougher tactics toward the Times and the
press as a whole. | Evan Vucci/AP
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Even if some of the hard feelings toward the Times have eased somewhat with time
— several White House reporters, after verbally reiterating their willingness to
abide by the administration’s embargo rules, were added back to the “tier one”
list earlier this year — officials in the Biden press shop remain frustrated
that the coverage hasn’t changed. The paper continues to serve up fodder for the
“NYT Pitchbot’’ account on X, which has amassed a large following (including
almost the entire Biden press shop) by mocking the paper’s perceived negativity
toward the president and its often euphemistic-laden, soft focus coverage of
Trump.
Bates, the deputy press secretary, has developed an online correspondence with
the operator of the Pitchbot account and occasionally shared material for
potential posts, two people familiar with the press shop said. During last
year’s White House Correspondents Dinner, Biden joked about confusing the Times’
coverage of his age with Pitchbot’s tweets. “I love that guy,” Biden said of
Pitchbot, before a subtle parting shot at the Times on a frequency only Times
staffers might hear. “I should do an interview with him.”
Aides in the White House press office and on the president’s campaign pointed to
two recent examples of articles by the Times that presented Biden and Trump side
by side, emphasizing broad similarities and obscuring the proportional
differences. One piece by Michael Shear cast both Biden and Trump as restricting
the information the public has about their physical health. Another in the
paper’s On Politics newsletter by the newly hired Jess Bidgood reacted to
Arizona’s reinstatement of a Civil War era law outlawing abortion by framing
Biden and Trump as two “imperfect messengers” on the issue, a gross journalistic
injustice, campaign officials said, given Trump’s outsized role in appointing
the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.
TJ Ducklo, a senior adviser on Biden’s campaign, blasted Shear’s story as part
of an ongoing pattern of frustrating coverage by the Times. “With limited
exceptions,” he wrote in a post on X, the Times “continues to fail the American
people in covering the most important election for democracy in 150+ years.” It
was not the first time Biden’s campaign team publicly went after the Times in a
way the White House, for all its irritation, has not. In February, the campaign
blasted the Times and other news organizations for focusing more on the
president’s age than Trump’s comment encouraging Russia to “do whatever the hell
they want” to any NATO country not meeting defense spending benchmarks. “If you
read the New York Times this weekend, you might have missed it buried behind
five separate opinion pieces about how the president is 81 year old — something
that has been true since his birthday in November — and *zero* on this topic,”
Ducklo wrote.
Earlier this year, Ducklo, communications director Michael Tyler and other
senior campaign aides met privately in Wilmington with groups of reporters from
a number of organizations covering Biden (including POLITICO), almost all of
whom got dressed down for coverage that was seen as too fixated on the
president’s age or other liabilities, especially compared to the treatment of
Trump. But when Semafor wrote about the off-the-record meetings, only the
meeting with the Times was described as not having been “substantive” or
“productive.”
Times reporters believe the leak had to have come from the campaign, the only
ones who’d have had knowledge of all the meetings. And it led to conversations
on the politics staff about whether to even engage with Wilmington in an
off-the-record capacity. But campaign aides are certain the leak came from the
Times side. “We had done over a dozen of these meetings leading up to the Times
meeting and only got a press inquiry about the meetings less than 48 hours after
the Times meeting,” senior campaign officials told me, noting that Semafor’s Max
Tani “quoted back to us the exact language that had been used by Times reporters
in the meeting two days earlier.”
The campaign’s outward turn toward press criticism is something of a new
phenomenon, mirroring the response of the very online left in the age of Trump.
But the Times is bearing the brunt of it. And many who’ve given their careers to
the institution are perplexed by the shift.
“[Criticizing] our stories in their press releases,” Bumiller said, “I just
don’t know what it gets them.”
CLARIFICATION: This report has been updated to clarify Elizabeth Kennedy’s role
at the Times.
* Filed under:
* Media,
* Joe Biden,
* The New York Times,
* Donald Trump,
* 2024 Elections,
* The Media Issue,
* Joe Biden presidential election 2024
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