Politico has a big story up today about what it labels the “petty feud” between the White House and the NY Times. This battle of the upper crust in Washington and New York allegedly started with a simple error. A Times staffer got a quote for a story but attributed that quote a specific White House staffer.
According to rules set up by the White House that shouldn’t have happened. The quote was given “on background” meaning it could be generally stated to have come from an unnamed White House official but not from a named individual. The White House called the Times‘ Washington bureau chief, Elisabeth Bumiller, to complain and request the name of the staffer be removed from the story. Bumiller apparently refused, noting that the story had already been up for 12 hours. When the White House staffer tried to raise another complaint Bumiller, who was on vacation at the time, hung up on her.
The story makes clear that this incident might not have mattered if the White House didn’t already have a chip on its shoulder about the NY Times, one going back several years.
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.
That may all be true but what also comes across in the story is a lot of special pleading from the White House. They want the Times to go all in on the ‘Biden will save democracy’ talking points and so far the paper isn’t backing them up.
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.”
The Biden White House isn’t literally calling the NY Times the “enemy of the people,” as Donald Trump liked to do, but that’s sort of the gist behind these complaints. How dare you criticize the president who is trying to save America. Give the NY Times some credit. They get what the White House is trying to do here, i.e. work the refs to their advantage in a race the are losing.
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.
Another element that comes through the story is just how sensitive the White House is to coverage of Biden’s age. It gets mentioned seven times in the story and seems to be the thing most likely to set off White House comms staffers. They clearly want to downplay that issue at any cost.
The bottom line is that the bad blood is ongoing even if some specific complaints have been addressed and resolved. The White House still refuses to give the Times a major interview and the Times refuses to paint Joe Biden as the young and virile savior of democracy. No doubt this will continue until the election at which point it will either get worse (if Biden loses) or be forgotten (if he wins).