I'm really not sure what folks who keep saying it's the media who are harping on Biden's age are doing. Every person I know think's he's old and has been saying that for a while. This isn't a manufactured concern.
Everyone has a diff take re: what to do but that he's old is not in question.
It's been showing up in the polling all along. He never had real popular support as the nominee -- it was an intra-elite decision, and the elites bear the responsibility for figuring out what to do about it.
Feels like what we're witnessing is those elites "figuring it out".
Namely, the ones who didn't want Biden in 2020 but got behind him to thwart Bernie are now salivating at the prospect of replacing him with someone worse (on, e.g., labor/finance/crypto/antitrust regulation, equally bad on Israel).
My timeline has made me feel like I'm disassociating or something lately. People were concerned about this in 2020, and he looks a lot worse now!
Every person I know in actual real life has some level of concern about his age and fitness. The NYT didn't summon this into existence
It's kind of a complicated situation, because the concerns definitely are there regardless, but the weird media campaign for a candidate swap (and lack of media focus on Trump) is still an issue in itself.
Basically: The NYT didn't summon this into existence, but certainly not for a lack of trying.
The thing is, everyone has been saying "you need to provide more than just 'we're not the other guy,'" though. That it's blown up this way was predictable and avoidable.
Pretty sure the criticism here is their laser focus on the issue in comparison to *waves arms frantically*, not that the NYT is inventing the issue out of whole cloth.
I think the main issue people are having is that the media are making his age the main story above all of the other variables in this election cycle they could *also* be covering. There are journalists who are doing that, but the loudest national outlets aren't.
I see what the opinion pages are doing. What I said is that the concerns about his age precede the current MSM press and those concerns are real and have been expressed prior to this latest round of media.
His age isn't even one of the three biggest issues with most of us democratic voters who complained about it for the past three years... his age doesn't matter to us anywhere as much as his policy and the decision making he does at home and abroad. This is a petty controversy compared to all else.
Being born in 1942 when the current year is 2024 is the reason Biden is old but it is not the reason the media has made it the #1 story for the past week and a half. That is a choice folks in charge at the NYT, CNN, et al. made. And that choice has very obviously affected what people tell pollsters.
