Anatomy of a Media Freakout

The closer you look, the worse it is.

Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz

When Special Counsel Robert Hur released a report following his decision not to file charges against President Biden over his retention of classified material after he left the vice presidency, the media reaction was depressingly familiar. It was “But Her Emails” redux, an apparent repeat of then-FBI Director James Comey’s notorious 2016 attack on Hillary Clinton’s email management practices. If you found the media reaction infuriating, rest assured: Once you carefully consider the editorial decisions that were made, it’s even worse than you thought.

Let’s briefly go over the context. Like Comey, Hur was a Republican investigating a prominent Democrat; he is a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist whom Donald Trump had appointed as a U.S. Attorney. That’s how things work in Washington: Democratic lawyers are never appointed to be special prosecutors; that task goes only to Republican lawyers and the occasional independent. Also like Comey, Hur didn’t simply announce that no charges would be filed with perhaps a brief explanation (as is standard practice), he felt it necessary to accompany that decision with a lengthy criticism, full of petty insults and absurd speculation, as though it were terribly important that everyone think as poorly as possible about the target of his investigation. But the most important fact to come out of the report was that while like many former officials, Joe Biden had in his possession a small number of classified documents, Hur could establish no criminal conduct. 

The news media then had a decision to make, the same type of decision they make every day. That the president had been cleared of wrongdoing was certainly a story. That Hur would include snide remarks about Joe Biden’s supposed forgetfulness in his report was also newsworthy. But how newsworthy? And how should that fact be framed? What kinds of stories should be written about it?

The answer the most elite news organizations came to was that this was not merely an important news story but a story so important that it merited an absolute nuclear freakout. 

Before we go on, let me make clear that the point of this piece is not to argue that Biden is in perfectly fine cognitive shape, or that whatever limitations he has, they are far less worrisome than the fact that the other candidate is spectacularly corrupt, leaning more every day toward outright fascism, and plainly losing his grip on reality. You can find those arguments in many places. For the moment, I want to stick with what’s going on in the news media. Take a look at the websites of the New York Times and Washington Post from Saturday:

They could have framed Hur’s statements about Biden’s age as a story about partisanship and the weaknesses of the special counsel process. Or they could have treated it as a real but not particularly important story, something you’d assign one reporter to write one article on, then move on to more pressing news. Instead, they reacted as though a) something new had been revealed about the president, and b) it was one of the most important stories of the year. When writing this piece I counted over two dozen Times articles written on the subject of Biden’s age on their website since Hur’s report was released, and a similar number at the Post. It was explored from all angles: What does the report say about his age? What do Democrats think about his age? What do experts in aging say about his age? What do voters think about his age? 

This required deploying multiple reporting teams, an investment of resources reserved for only the most consequential stories. Much of what they produced was presented not only with the cowardly use of the passive voice (“Questions are being raised”), but with a willful lack of self-awareness of the self-fulfilling prophecies at work. Consider this Times story, titled “Why the Age Issue Is Hurting Biden So Much More Than Trump,” which notes some of Trump’s bizarre statements that might reveal cognitive decline, then says this:

The episodes might have raised parallel concerns about age and mental acuity. Instead, while Mr. Biden, 81, has been increasingly dogged by doubts and concerns about his advancing years from voters, Mr. Trump, who is 77, has not felt the same political blowback.

And why might that be? Reporters will discuss any and every possibility except their own role in shaping public perceptions. Might the differing opinions about the two men’s age have something to do with the fact that they’re not writing front-page stories every time Trump displays evidence of cognitive decline and rushing to cable news to say Trump’s latest gaffe “raises questions” about his cognitive capacity? 

Hur has nothing to say about Biden’s mental state

Now let’s think seriously about why it is that Hur’s remarks about Biden’s memory ought to have justified such a huge amount of coverage. Did the report offer some unique insight because of Hur’s expertise in aging and memory? No. He’s a prosecutor, not a neurologist, and one clearly intending to discredit Biden as much as he can. Did Hur observe Biden in contexts and situations no one else has, and therefore he was able to tell us something about Biden we couldn’t otherwise know? No. He questioned Biden for a few hours, in a hostile situation in which Biden was likely distracted by his duties as president and may well have been advised by his attorneys to answer “I don’t recall” as often as possible if there were any ambiguity at all in his memory of particular events, just as innumerable clients have been before him. 

In other words, there was no actual news in the part of Hur’s report that discussed Biden’s memory. He had little to tell us about the actual state of Biden’s mind and a clear antagonism toward Biden (both because of the nature of a prosecutor’s stance toward the person he’s investigating, and Hur’s background as a Republican and Trump appointee). Given those facts, what would be the appropriate level of attention for news organizations to give his remarks about Biden’s cognitive state? I’d argue the answer is: not nothing, but not much. It warranted mention in articles about Hur’s decision not to prosecute Biden, perhaps in the sixth or seventh paragraph. 

But screaming headlines, multiple reporters assigned to fan out to get comments from Democrats and Republicans about it, then write story after story after story? No. Absolutely not. 

But that is the decision editors and reporters made. They said These nasty little comments from this Republican prosecutor constitute a HUGE story, one so important that we have to crank up the siren, sound the alarm, tell our audience that they absolutely must attend to it right now.

What’s actually motivating the media

So why did this happen? There are a number of reasons, the most important of which is that nothing attracts journalists more than a piece of news that reinforces something they already believe. There are literally hundreds of people who are better informed on Joe Biden’s mental state than Robert Hur — aides, White House reporters, political allies, members of Congress who have dealt with him — but Hur’s report gave news organizations a peg on which to hang stories that expressed their own belief that Biden is too old to be president. Just like they thought Hillary Clinton was sneaky and possibly corrupt; her email practices were an excuse to communicate their beliefs about her without saying it explicitly in their own voices. 

Under the strictures of “objectivity,” mainstream journalists can’t just come out and say “Joe Biden is super old, y’all.” Instead, they need somebody else to say it, then they can write a story built around that. Because Hur’s report was an official document that was newsworthy in other ways, it gave them the opportunity to release a flood of words about Biden’s age. 

While there has been pushback from the White House and some other Democrats to Hur’s report, I haven’t seen reporters ask what the hell Robert Hur is supposed to know about Joe Biden’s cognitive state that we couldn’t have learned from innumerable better-informed sources, let alone why Hur’s opinion is of anything more than incidental news value. Which is a reminder that at a minimum, when news organizations decide that a story is important enough to warrant this kind of blanket coverage, they ought to explain to their audiences why that is — and not by saying “Questions are being raised” or “This plays into a narrative” or “Opponents are sure to pounce,” or any of the other things they say to act as though they aren’t autonomous people making decisions for which they should bear responsibility.

That’s something we need to demand more often from the news media: If they’re going to treat a story like this one as world-shaking, they need to tell everyone why they made that decision. And they’d better have a good answer.

And one more thing before we go…

As you may know, Boundary Issues, the podcast I co-host with my sister Ayelet, recently debuted. I wanted to alert people to our newest episode, which I think is the best one we’ve done yet.

We ask, what happened to liberal Zionism? It’s a personal question for us and our family; in the episode, we read from letters our late father wrote home in 1948 when as a committed socialist and Zionist, he went to Israel to found a kibbutz and attempt to create a new country, at the tender age of 23. With the help of David Myers, a professor of Jewish history at UCLA, we examine the idealism and blind spots of our father’s generation of socialists and ask why their dream ultimately failed.

You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.