@joshtpm.bsky.social has a good post about the NYTimes' crusade to push Biden to quit.
This is serious. The Times had less to work with when they made Hillary's emails the main story of the 2016 campaign, leading to Trump's election.
talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/times...
This time, I think it means Democrats are in for four months of absolutely unrelenting coverage of Biden's alleged senility, no matter what Biden does.
Good interviews? Good rallies? Doesn't matter, the Times still has grist for almost infinite news stories and editorials tracking his decline.
As in 2016, both the House Republicans and the Times will be seeking many of the same documents and videos and audio and whatnot, but the Times is better at getting the goods. They will get the goods, from off-the-record quotes to materials for a multimedia package of some kind.
The time for Democratic leaders—and especially the Biden team—to price this in to their assessment of how the next four months will go is now.
There is not a way to get the Times to abandon this crusade, and a lot of media takes cues from the Times.
Is this fair? No.
But it should certainly figure heavily in any assessment of whether Biden should stay in the race or drop out. It provides a pretty strong reason to expect things to get worse not better.
And if Biden stays in, he and his people should at least know what they're up against.
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Good question. There's a baseline of extremely asymmetric heightened scrutiny of Democrats that is part of these editors' ultimately hopeless, pathetic effort to persuade conservatives (and themselves, I think) that they do not have a liberal bias. This never works, and it never stops.
BUT...
I think this is something more. Sinking your teeth into a huge story like Biden's decline or Clinton's purported fast-and-loose-with-national-security behavior feels to many journalists like the highest and best thing to do.
Whether Harris will have any story like that is hard for me to predict.
