I’m using up my free New York Times links pretty quickly, but I want to share this horrifying look at the state of the race. The likelihood of President Biden’s recovering and winning is nil — and that’s assuming he doesn’t have any more senior moments.
Biden helped himself a little. So what happens next?
If President Biden had handled himself in the debate the way he did at his news conference Thursday night, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. He was OK — far better than in the debate and better, too, than he was in his interview with George Stephanopoulos.
He navigated the weeds on foreign policy, rambling on in a way that demonstrated his deep knowledge of the international scene. I don’t care that he mixed up a few names — he always has. But he faded toward the end and lost some of his earlier coherence. I think he helped himself a little. And that creates a dilemma. It’s one thing if he’s clearly unfit to run and to serve. It’s quite another if he comes across merely as low-energy and perhaps not up to the challenge of defeating the authoritarian menace that Donald Trump represents. What do you do then?
Writing on Threads, media observer Brian Stelter put it this way: “Millions of Democratic voters watched Biden’s press conference, and now some of them are wondering, ‘why are the chattering classes trying to force this man out of office?’”
If Biden had helped himself a lot, maybe we could exhale. If he’d melted down, well, the next steps would be obvious. But by helping himself a little, he left himself in a tenuous position, insisting he’s in the race to stay while much of the media and a rising tide of Democratic officials insist that the time has come for a new candidate.
Ah, yes, the media. They’ve been providing tough coverage of a story that’s of paramount importance — and they’ve been overdoing it, too. This has especially been true of The New York Times and CNN, which have been overloading us with stories about whether Biden is still fit to serve while playing down other news. Yes, that’s a hard accusation to make stick against the Times since it publishes so much about so many topics. But, day after day, its homepage has been dominated by upwards of a half-dozen stories about the latest on whether Biden might step aside. The Times is guilty of one serious misstep as well, botching a report that the president might be under evaluation for Parkinson’s disease.
So on we go. I suggest that we all calm down. If Biden needs to step aside, it doesn’t have to happen immediately. One option is to resign, making Vice President Kamala Harris the president. That’s the cleanest solution, presumably answering any questions about ballot access and campaign funds. A short sprint to Election Day might actually help her.
In any case, there was no reason to feel especially good or bad about what happened Thursday night.
Great moments in anonymous sourcing
I generally am not one who feels faint when the media use anonymous sources. It’s often necessary, although it’s overdone. But a story posted shortly after noon by NBC News is just egregious. It begins:
Several of President Joe Biden’s closest allies, including three people who are directly involved in efforts to re-elect him, told NBC News they now see his chances of winning as zero — and the likelihood of him taking down fellow Democratic candidates growing.
“He needs to drop out,” one Biden campaign official said. “He will never recover from this.”
Further down there’s this:
All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because they don’t want to be seen as further damaging a candidate they appreciate for his victory over then-President Donald Trump in 2020 and his policy wins in the White House.
By remaining anonymous, they’re doing the damage but making it less likely that they’ll accomplish what they say is their goal, which is to replace Biden with a more electable candidate. Time to show some courage.
CNN’s dicey reinvention plans: Layoffs, AI and another attempt at paid digital
You may have heard that CNN’s chief executive and president, Mark Thompson, has plans. As the network’s media reporter, Oliver Darcy, wrote on Wednesday, Thompson is laying off about 100 people, or 3% of the workforce; embracing artificial intelligence; and developing a paid subscription service.
Now, let me acknowledge that it would be incredibly easy to snark. I can’t imagine paying for CNN in addition to all the other stuff I pay for, and I’m getting sick of media executives blurting out “AI” as some sort of solution whenever they have a problem to solve. Moreover, if Thompson is serious about rebuilding CNN, how does another round of layoffs figure into that?
But Thompson is up against some serious challenges, and he may be the person to solve them. He is, after all, the executive who revitalized The New York Times’ business prospects by transforming it into a lifestyle brand as much as it is a news organization. The Times today has more than 10 million paying customers, and many of them signed up for access to games, recipes, consumer advice and other ancillary products.
Ubiquitous though CNN may be, it doesn’t have the brand power of the Times. But it faces the same need to do something dramatic: as more and more people flee cable and embrace internet streaming, cable channels are losing one of their most important sources of revenue. CNN, for instance, makes about $1 per subscriber. As Joshua Benton wrote for Nieman Lab:
The number of U.S. cable subscribers has fallen from 98.7 million in 2016 to 58 million in 2023, with projections — optimistic ones, arguably — putting that number at 40 million by 2028. That’s a lot of monthly $1 charges gone. Add in a steep ratings decline (and an accompanying ad collapse) and the future looks very fuzzy.
Of course, we’ve been down this road before. Thompson’s predecessor once removed, Jeff Zucker, tried a subscription service called CNN Plus, which was killed by new ownership almost as soon as it got off the ground. Thompson has not be especially clear about his own subscription plans, but I think that at a minimum he needs to offer a standalone streaming channel that features the same programming that’s on TV plus some extras. I wouldn’t be interested because I still have cable; if done right, though, such a service could prove to be compelling.
One of the most ridiculous shortcomings of CNN Plus was that CNN-TV was missing, which was no doubt a concession to the cable industry. That’s less important than it was a couple of years ago.
I like to say that friends don’t let friends watch cable news. But CNN, more so than MSNBC’s opinion-heavy lineup and much more so than Fox News’ right-wing propaganda, has its roots in journalism, and they’ve been trying to get back to those roots under Thompson. It hasn’t paid off in ratings; I just hope that Thompson’s corporate masters are allowing him to play a long game.
The Boston Herald’s hedge fund owner cuts three jobs
It has been a while since we’ve heard about cutbacks at Alden Global Capital’s Massachusetts properties. But Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan writes that the hedge fund is once again on the move, as the Boston Herald has cut three employees from its small staff.
Those reportedly losing their jobs: a full-time sports reporter, a part-time photographer and, on the business side, a part-time account executive. Boston Newspaper Guild president Scott Steeves tells Ryan, “It’s unfortunate because it seems like both the online version and the print version have done well as of late.”
No current headcount, but Ryan observes that the Herald’s newsroom was down to 24 in 2020. Just a few years earlier, the Herald employed 240 people, but it’s not clear whether that’s an apples-to-apples comparison. The Herald also lacks a newsroom.
I’d be curious to know whether Alden’s other Massachusetts properties, The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg, have been affected — and if Alden papers across the country are being cut yet again. If you have a tip, just use the “Contact” form.
A horrifying but dubious story about Trump is making the rounds once again
From the moment that President Biden started coming under fire for his disastrous debate performance of June 27, Biden’s most vociferous supporters on social media have demanded that the press focus on Donald Trump’s undemocratic and sociopathic behavior.
No doubt that Trumpworld is a target-rich environment. He is an insurrectionist and a felon. He’s been found in a civil case to have committed rape. He is accused of illegally taking classified documents from the White House and of attempting to rig the election results in Georgia. He and his allies are planning an authoritarian takeover through an agenda known as Project 2025.
Recently, though, we’ve also seen the resurfacing of an allegation that, if found credible, could shake Trump’s support even among his most devout supporters: accusations that he sexually assaulted two young girls, ages 13 and 12. It is by far the most disturbing accusation he has faced, and is obviously the sort of thing for which people go to prison for the rest of their lives.
But even though this horrifying story is being told anew, and even though some elements of the anti-Trump movement on social media have been demanding to know why the press isn’t covering it, the reality is that this is an old allegation lacking in credibility. Journalists should be looking into this again, and maybe some are. But there are good reasons that you’re not reading about it in The New York Times or The Washington Post. As Tom Nichols wrote for The Atlantic on Monday, “credible news outlets rarely treat a single deposition as adequate sourcing for incendiary accusations against any individual.”
Nichols was so leery of giving the story any oxygen that he didn’t even explain what he was talking about. Well, I will. The Trump allegations were reborn as the result of a Florida judge’s recent decision to release 150 pages of transcripts regarding the late Jeffrey Epstein. According to The Associated Press, “The transcripts show that the grand jury heard testimony that Epstein, who was then in his 40s, had raped teenage girls as young as 14 at his Palm Beach mansion. The teenagers testified and told detectives they were also paid to find him more girls.”
Trump, as you no doubt know, liked to pal around with Epstein. So did many other prominent men. Only Trump, though, has ever been accused of raping young girls procured for him by Epstein.
The release of the transcripts prompted Ed Krassenstein, a harsh Trump critic, to post on Twitter/X a page from an affidavit containing the allegations. “So many people didn’t even know that Donald Trump was accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl with Jeffrey Epstein,” Krassenstein wrote. “They pretend that this complaint never happened.” The affidavit is date-stamped April 26, 2016. Krassenstein’s July 2 tweet, as of this morning, had been liked 34,000 times.
There’s even a fake AI-generated photo of Trump, Epstein and a teenage girl that’s making the rounds.
Both girls are identified by pseudonyms — Katie Johnson, who was the 13-year-old, and Maria Doe, who was 12. Johnson’s allegations were actually investigated in some detail back during the 2016 campaign. In fact, if you take a look at Vox right now, you’ll see that its own 8-year-old story about Johnson’s allegations is currently the seventh-most-viewed story on the site.
In case you’re not familiar with Vox, it’s a high-quality outlet that specializes in fact-checks and explainers. To cut to the chase, what Vox’s Emily Crockett found in 2016 was not just that Johnson’s accusations couldn’t be verified, but that there was some reason to believe that she doesn’t even exist. As Crockett wrote after Johnson failed to appear at a news conference:
It was the end of an incredibly strange case that featured an anonymous plaintiff who had refused almost all requests for interviews, two anonymous corroborating witnesses whom no one in the press had spoken to, and a couple of seriously shady characters — with an anti-Trump agenda and a penchant for drama — who had aggressively shopped the story around to media outlets for over a year.
Crockett notes, too, that even the Hillary Clinton campaign wouldn’t touch the story, writing:
It’s true that the allegation is explosive, and could make voters see Trump’s many disturbing comments about young girls over the years in a new light. But it’s also very dubious and uncertain, and there’s no real need to promote a case like that when a dozen women have come forward with much more credible stories, using their own names and making themselves available to reporters for scrutiny.
Not that any of it mattered on Election Day.
Both the affidavit and the Vox stories I’ve linked to are full of lurid, disturbing details that I needn’t quote here, and the latter should give you a clear understanding of why the mainstream media have not touched this.
Those of us who fear the authoritarian threat that Trump poses to our democracy would like every possible negative story about him to be true, or at least to get a thorough airing in respectable news outlets. But this particular rancid tidbit doesn’t rise even close to the level that journalistic ethics demand.
To repeat: I hope that some reporters are sifting through this even now in order to determine whether there’s anything they missed the first time. Absent that, though, we ought to concentrate on the very true Trump stories that really matter.
A few Biden updates
With the prospects of President Biden’s remaining in office still uncertain despite his insistence that he’s not going anywhere, here are three updates:
• The Wall Street Journal posted a five-byline story Monday night headlined “How Biden’s Inner Circle Worked to Keep Signs of Aging Under Wraps.” It’s a well-reported reprise of a piece that the Journal published a month ago that was widely dismissed at the time because of its reliance on partisan Republican sources. Now that earlier article looks prescient (free links).
• What you might call a mini-feeding frenzy broke out Monday afternoon when The New York Times, CNN and others reported that a specialist in Parkinson’s disease had visited the White House eight times over the past eight months. Hours later, the story looked like a cautionary tale in not getting ahead of the story, as we learned that the doctor had almost certainly been called in to see other patients, and that his service at the White House goes back a dozen years.
• Josh Marshall is always worth reading when you’re trying to make sense of complicated political stories. On Monday he wrote that he’s less sure than he was a week ago that Biden would step aside, mainly because, well, he hasn’t stepped aside. “By the end of the weekend,” he wrote, “I was back to near total uncertainty about where any of this was going.”
Settlement reached in lawsuit over an illegal police raid against a Kansas newspaper
The fallout continues from an illegal police raid on a Kansas newspaper and two private homes last August. According to The New York Times, Deb Gruver, a former reporter for the weekly Marion County Record, has reached a $235,000 settlement as part of her federal lawsuit accusing then-Police Chief Gideon Cody of grabbing her cellphone and injuring her hand.
The Associated Press reports that Gruver’s lawsuit against two other officials continues. Nor is that the only legal action under way. Publisher Eric Meyer is suing local officials over the death of his 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, who was stricken a day after officers entered her home and rifled through her property.
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North Shore art
I took one of my favorite rides Saturday — from Danvers Center along the rail trail and then east and north to Wenham, Hamilton and Bradley Palmer State Park, south to Route 97 and back along the rail trail from the Topsfield Fairgrounds to Danvers, a little over 18½ miles. I also cruised around the Pingree School and took pictures of some of the outdoor art installations. Enjoy!
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Not a game-changer
We were at a Worcester Red Sox game Friday night, so we watched George Stephanopoulos’ interview with President Biden when we got home. I don’t think it moved the needle. Biden was neither strong enough to put the doubts to rest nor weak enough to accelerate calls for him to step aside.
Stephanopoulos did an admirable job of asking tough questions while maintaining a respectful tone. As for his repeated queries about whether Biden would agree to take a cognitive test, I was surprised that Biden didn’t answer that he would if Donald Trump would. But whatever.
Biden’s flat-out denial that he’s behind in the polls and that his approval rating is very low wasn’t great, but that seems to be his approach: dig in, even if it means contradicting reality. It would have been better if he’d said, “Yes, I’m behind, and here’s how I’m going to overcome it.”
And let me join with other commentators who were appalled at his answer to how he’ll feel next January if he loses to Trump: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” No. The challenge we are all facing is how to beat authoritarianism. The Democrats need to meet that challenge with their strongest candidate, whether it’s Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris or someone else.