NYT, MSNBC, PBS journalists pressed on how they covered Biden's age: We probably need to do 'soul-searching'

AUSTIN, Texas - A panel of political journalists were asked how well the media covered President Biden's age before his disastrous debate performance that resulted in his exit from the 2024 race. 

The New York Times' chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, MSNBC host and Politico White House bureau chief Jonathan Lemire, "PBS NewsHour" correspondent Laura Barrón-López and The Guardian Washington bureau chief David Smith spoke about the media's coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign at the Texas Tribune Festival earlier this month.

Smith conceded the possibility of bias: "There was perhaps, even on an unconscious level, the notion that if you focus so much on Joe Biden's age, you are somehow helping Donald Trump." 

All of them weighed in on how their news outlets and the media broadly handled the subject of the 81-year-old president's apparent mental decline and were asked to compare that to their ongoing coverage of former President Trump, the 78-year-old Republican nominee who has remained in the race. 

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(L to R) New York Times' Peter Baker, The Guardian's David Smith, MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire and PBS NewsHours' Laura Barrón-López discussed how well the media covered President Biden's age at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Texas on Sept. 7, 2024. (Joseph A. Wulfsohn/Fox News Digital)

Barrón-López first responded by pointing to a discussion she moderated on "NewsHour" with two doctors about memory and age before Biden ended his presidential bid, but noted that they also discussed Trump, citing his gaffe mixing up Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi during the GOP primary.

"We weren't relentlessly covering, the way some of my peers were, Biden's age necessarily, even all the way up until the debate," Barrón-López said. 

She continued, "It is and was a valid question. Many times when I was on the trail, even before the debate, voters would bring it up. Almost every single voter I spoke to would bring it up, even if they were planning to vote for President Biden. Compared to now, I definitely think that Donald Trump's age could be covered more by the press."

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PBS NewsHour correspondent Laura Barrón-López said voters constantly brought up Biden's age while reporting from the campaign trail. (Joseph A. Wulfsohn/Fox News Digital)

Lemire called the issue of Biden's age a "persistent story line" and suggested Biden brought it upon himself after he previously suggested during the 2020 campaign that he would be a transitional one-term president," saying it "couldn't be avoided."

"I think that even though that led to the, shall we say, unhappiness of some of the MSNBC's viewing public who felt like, ‘Hey, why are you focusing on this? It shouldn’t matter. He's doing a great job.' And I think our job is to simply call it like we see it," Lemire said. 

The MSNBC host said there has been "more scrutiny" towards Trump's age in recent weeks, but pointed out how the former president "has always sort of been rambling and all over the place," adding "it's hard to see the change perhaps."

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MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire suggested viewers were "unhappy" with the network's coverage of Biden's age.  (Joseph A. Wulfsohn/Fox News Digital)

Smith responded by saying "the further you were away from Washington… the clearer you can see the problem," telling the panel how his fellow British colleagues at The Guardian were saying "What on earth are the Democrats playing at here? The nominee is too old! Why is he the nominee?"

"And then the closer you got to Washington, the White House in particular, the more caveats, the more ambiguous it became," Smith said. "You had all sorts of people - Democratic insiders and White House officials playing this down… It took a while for Washington to catch up and in a sense the media as well." 

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The Guardian journalist went on to suggest an anti-Trump bias within the media was at play regarding the lack of attention Biden's age received prior to the June 27 debate.

"There was perhaps, even on an unconscious level, the notion that if you focus so much on Joe Biden's age, you are somehow helping Donald Trump, who is in an entirely different category. He is a threat to democracy," Smith said. "And to me, that is another indication of how the Trump era has warped so much around it, you know, the normal scrutiny of a candidate and his [frail] condition by 'Yeah, but on the other side there's Trump.' And Democrats would make that point." 

President Biden's disastrous performance at the June 27 debate resulted in his exit from the race less than a month later. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images))

Baker called Biden's age a "hard issue" to cover, but suggested journalists broadly need to do some "soul-searching" on how they handled it after the election. 

"It's very personal. Anybody who's had a father or mother whose age and you talk to them by taking away their keys, these are not easy issues. That's a sense of what the country is going through with Biden," the Times correspondent said. "And how do you write something in the appropriate way, balanced and yet tough… We wrote these stories, aired these stories repeatedly over the last couple years. The editors, our writers got massive complaints from the White House about it. The campaign took after the reporters who did focus on this. And yet it was our responsibility to do so."

"I can sit down and make the case that we did too little about it. I can make the case we did too much. I can play it either way. But the truth is, it's an important issue. And President Biden himself said it was a legitimate issue. And when he was asked about this, his answer was, ‘Well, watch me.’ Well, people did ultimately. And that, of course, came back to haunt him in a severe way in June," he continued.

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New York Times correspondent Peter Baker said the media will likely need to do post-election "soul-searching" about how it went about covering Biden. (Joseph A. Wulfsohn/Fox News Digital)

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Baker agreed with Barrón-López that there should be more coverage towards Trump's "rambling, incoherent statements," but said Trump has been able to "mask" the issue of age because the former president has "volume and energy," at least compared to Biden. 

"Biden had a hard time projecting his voice. It was hard to hear him. He'd shuffle when he walked. He came across in a physical way, as frail in a way that Trump doesn't, right? Trump is very loud and loud seems to cover in some ways for the, you know, the undiagrammable sentences," Baker said.