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Brooke Gladstone: One topic dominated headlines this week and last.

Judd Legum: Joe Biden is old.

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Judd Legum: I'm sorry you all had to find out this way.

Brooke Gladstone: Flood the zone coverage of the president's advanced years made for some awkward moments.

Chris Wallace: Is Biden's age now a bigger political problem than Trump's indictments?

Brooke Gladstone: If so, why? From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Jon Stewart is back on late night. Will his once cutting-edge political commentary hold up today?

Jordan Klepper: Did you save democracy yet?

Jon Stewart: No, I didn't.

[laughter]

Jordan Klepper: Okay. Your '90s brand of snark and both sider-ism.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, a pop star turned politician in Uganda on his journey from the slums of Kampala to the leader of a pro-democracy opposition movement.

Bobi Wine: I said, "Okay, now since the Parliament has refused to come to the ghetto, the ghetto will come to the Parliament." [laughs]

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Late last week, Special Counsel Robert Hur, announced that he won't be charging President Joe Biden for the classified documents found in his residences. Hur's several hundred-page report explains that Biden fully complied with the investigation in contrast to the "serious aggravating facts in Donald J. Trump's classified documents case." The report also included a line that came to define the news cycle.

Presenter 1: Hur's report also described Biden as a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory and diminished faculties in advancing age.

Presenter 2: He allegedly forgot the years when he was vice president and when his son died of brain cancer.

Presenter 3: In the last hour, the administration has mounted an angry rebuttal of the counsel's quotes.

President Joe Biden: I'm an elderly man and I know what the hell I'm doing. I've been president and I put this country back on its feet.

Micah Loewinger: Biden, at a press conference last Thursday when he fanned the flames with this comment about his handling of the war in Gaza, mixing up the presidents of Mexico and Egypt.

President Joe Biden: Initially, the president of Mexico El-Sisi did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in.

Sean Hannity: The Democrats and the left, they are waking up to what we have been telling you on this program for years now.

Micah Loewinger: Sean Hannity of Fox News.

Sean Hannity: That is the White House has a massive problem with Joe Biden. It's an age problem.

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, in the mainstream press, the legacy media, where balanced, clear-eyed coverage might be expected, we saw a rush to flood the zone without much scrutiny of the basic premise, but heaps of speculation on the political implications.

Presenter 4: I'm sure you saw the opinion pieces pouring it over the weekend in The New York Times. Why is the age issue is hurting Biden so much more than Trump?

Chris Wallace: 76% say they have a major or moderate concern about whether Biden has the necessary mental and physical health for a second term.

Micah Loewinger: CNN's Chris Wallace.

Chris Wallace: 76%, while 61% have major or moderate concern about Donald Trump facing multiple felony charges. Lulu, is Biden's age now a bigger political problem than Trump's indictments?

Micah Loewinger: New York Times writer and CNN contributor Lulu Garcia-Navarro joined Wallace last Saturday.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I don't mean to laugh, but this is what we're left with. Is the man who's 81 and might die in office in a worse position than the man who's facing absolute legal jeopardy?

Micah Loewinger: Yes, both men are old. Both have had their recent senior moments captured on tape, but age is just one issue among many. Despite their focus on it, political reporters aren't even covering it well.

Charan Ranganath: The problem is people aren't being specific.

Micah Loewinger: This is Charan Ranganath who wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined, I'm a Neuroscientist: We're Thinking About Biden's Memory and Age in the Wrong Way. He says people too often conflate recall problems with memory problems.

Charan Ranganath: There's forgetting and there's Forgetting. Forgetting is basically when you have the memory there, but you can't pull it up when you need it. It's not like as if he doesn't know the difference between Mexico and Egypt. It's just that the wrong word came out and so it was an articulation issue. As a memory researcher, I wouldn't even call that a memory issue.

Micah Loewinger: Ranganath takes issue with Special Counsel Robert Hur, a lawyer, not a doctor, noting Biden's struggle to remember the year his son Beau died and the year his vice presidency ended.

Charan Ranganath: These were cited as signs of poor memory. Now, remembering when something happened is not the same as remembering what happened. I would be concerned if somebody were vice president and they didn't remember anything from their last year of the vice presidency, or if there was something very important that happened, I would be worried.

Judd Legum: Yes, Joe Biden is old. I think that's without a doubt a fact, and I think it's a legitimate thing for voters to take into consideration.

Micah Loewinger: Judd Legum tallied the amount of coverage of this issue for his newsletter Popular Information.

Judd Legum: I looked at three major outlets, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and, The Wall Street Journal, and found that in the four days following the release, there were 81 stories.

Micah Loewinger: 18 from The Wall Street Journal, 33 from The Washington Post, and 30 from The New York Times. The Post and Times disputed his numbers. We reviewed Judd's list, which includes newsletters, wire stories, blogs, and videos. Let's zoom in on the Times coverage, which he's sorted into three buckets.

Judd Legum: There were some straightforward articles just talking about the report, the fact that Hur did not recommend criminal charges, and that he made these judgements about Biden's memory. Then there were the news analysis pieces, which essentially painted this as a political crisis. Then I think the third category were the opinion pieces where things really got even ratcheted up to another level. You started hearing things about how Biden was slipping into dementia, that it proved that he has no business running for reelection, that his mental state was responsible for the emboldenment of America's rivals.

The New York Times editorial board said it was a dark moment for Mr. Biden's presidency. What I think is disingenuous about some of these pieces is that it purports to be just observing and describing what's happening, but actually it's the stories themselves that are creating the crisis. Meaning in the absence of this flood of alarmist coverage about these comments, there really would be no crisis.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, The Times is so gifted at helping set the terms of the national conversation while pretending that that very conversation is playing out without its role.

Judd Legum: Yes, and I think that a lot of the justification for how much coverage there was of these comments by the Special Counsel is justified by noting that in public opinion polling, many people are concerned about Biden's age. That's true, but those concerns are developed through impressions that people gain through reading media coverage. It becomes a bit circular.

Micah Loewinger: In your newsletter, you wrote that incidents that raised questions about former President Trump's mental state received far less coverage by some of these same outlets.

Judd Legum: Yes, there's been a whole bunch of incidents involving Trump that could reasonably raise some questions about his memory. Not from a medical expert perspective, but just from an outside lay observer. He called Viktor Orbán, who's the leader of Hungary, he said he was the leader of Turkey. Also said that Orbán shared a border with Russia, which is not true of Hungary or Turkey. He warned that America was on the verge of World War II, which did happen some time ago. He claimed that he defeated Barack Obama, which was someone he never ran against, that actually never lost a race for the presidency.

The one that actually got the most coverage of all of these incidents was when, recently in a speech in New Hampshire, he repeatedly confused Nikki Haley, who's his primary opponent with the former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and essentially talked about how Haley on January 6th, 2021, made all sorts of mistakes about security in the Capitol. Not just once, but this was a lengthy portion of his speech where he mixed this up multiple times. We looked at the same three outlets, that incident was covered a total of 15 times, 9 in The Washington Post, 4 in The New York Times, 2 in The Wall Street Journal. Obviously much less coverage of that incident than of this report about Biden.

Micah Loewinger: When it comes to the focus on Biden's age, Judd Legum echoed a sentiment shared by many in the press this week, including Margaret Sullivan in her latest Substack piece, it's not a question of whether to cover this, it's how and how much.

Judd Legum: It's important not only to cover the issues, but to put them in their appropriate context. In my judgment, having read 81 or so articles about this topic, I think that they've missed the mark in this case.

Micah Loewinger: Jack Schaefer, senior media critic for Politico disagrees.

Jack Schaefer: The people who object to the coverage also do score of how many stories were published. What they neglect to mention here is that inside a paper like The New York Times, there are various beats. There's a Justice Department reporter who wrote on it. There's a White House reporter who wrote on it. There's a political reporter who wrote on it. There were at least three or four columnists. This is what typically happens when big news breaks.

Micah Loewinger: Judd Legum, who was reporting on the first few days of The New York Times' coverage of the report, showed that there was a consistent narrative in much of the news analysis that we saw from The New York Times. It was called "a political disaster, a political nightmare, a political crisis, a political mess." A report that was inflicting "a searing political damage on the campaign." Not one of those articles even mentioned that this report was not medical in nature whatsoever.

There was one article during that period of time, it involved interviews with medical professionals who described the limits of what can be gleaned about Biden's mental acuity, his physical strength, how it relates to his ability to govern and lead. That article was not featured in print. That's where I see lack of balance and a lack of, I think, important context.

Jack Schaefer: I'll give you this, The Times coverage wasn't perfect. I think that the Gina Colada story that you're referring to probably should have been into print. Though, if you talk to people at The New York Times or the general reader, the print paper itself is no longer the instrument of record.

The second point is I'm not a doctor either, but during the 2020 campaign, I wrote a piece saying, "Biden is too old and too infirm to run for president." I don't remember any huge outcry during the Trump administration where there were hundreds of articles about Trump's mental state and people were diagnosing him left and right as a paranoid schizophrenic or a crazy man, or a narcissist. No one said, "Well, you can't possibly say this because you're not a psychiatrist."

Micah Loewinger: I do recall psychiatrists writing op-eds basically saying, it's considered a cardinal rule of our practice to not diagnose a patient you haven't seen. I remember having that voice on our show. I'm not saying that that was a particularly well-represented viewpoint, but it was there and I'm seeing some of that again now with respect to Biden. I agree with you that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden could be more forthcoming about health.

Part of my concern is that this coverage is falling into a political game that Republicans are playing in Congress and in the right-wing press one they've been playing for four years. Around the same time that Biden was interviewed by Robert Hur, Politico reported that former house speaker Kevin McCarthy "mocked Biden's age and mental acuity in public, while privately telling allies that he found the President sharp and substantive in their conversation." I think that's pretty useful context for following this storyline. This fits into a very politically fraught messaging campaign.

Jack Schaefer: Now we're onto a different subject that's not about The Times coverage. Obviously, I agree with you that politicians will use any information available to them for their political advantage. During the Trump administration, Democrats were in the foreground talking about Trump's instability and mental dangerousness, so I would give you that point, but once again, this is politics. I don't think that the press has been particularly taken advantage of by Republicans saying that Biden has lost a step.

Micah Loewinger: You were not a fan of Margaret Sullivan's comparison to The Times coverage of Hillary Clinton's email servers ahead of the 2016 election. You don't see any similarities between the Hur report now and then.

Jack Schaefer: I'm going to blow your mind because I also believe that the coverage of Hillary Clinton's email was completely warranted. Hillary Clinton violated existing standards for how emails are supposed to be handled. When this was finally revealed, the emails were released, and one of the reasons when you go in and do the extra search and you find the amazing amount of coverage is that the emails were released in 19 installments between the first one and election day. Yes, it's a feeding frenzy. Who is responsible for chumming the waters for the press? It was Hillary Clinton's behavior.

Micah Loewinger: Again, I don't disagree that the Hillary Clinton email server was newsworthy. It's really a question of contextualizing that coverage with other coverage about the election. I revisited a 2017 study published in the Columbia Journalism Review that found "in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton's emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election." That's what I'm concerned about The Times floods the zone, and as a result, sidelines the big stakes coverage of what this election is about, what the policies that Trump and Biden stand for, and what their administrations would look like.

Jack Schaefer: I couldn't disagree with you more. The emails provided additional context for the Benghazi disaster. It showed that she broke the laws covering the retention of documents for her whole tenure. It exposed sensitive email to potential exploits by hackers. It spilled the details of her confidential diplomatic activities, interactions with foreign leaders. Do you want the press to just write three-line summaries? Practically, all news organizations covered this story heavily because she was running for the presidency of the United States.

Micah Loewinger: I'm just making a case for balance. I'm saying cover these big stories when they happen, but don't get lost in the sauce. The point of the Hillary Clinton comparison was to say that when we had a similar feeding frenzy eight years ago, the stakes did get sidelined. If we just look at the numbers.

Jack Schaefer: I want to go back to 2016. It was only after Clinton lost that people started to scramble for an excuse for why their candidate who they thought was invincible or lost, and they settled on the emails. The fact that he is currently leading the polls, shows that there is some sort of appeal that Trump has to the voters that is beyond the can of political analysis.

Micah Loewinger: Donald Trump's popularity could also be seen as a large number of voters not being that well informed at how potentially disastrous his second term could be.

Jack Schaefer: You think it's disastrous, and I think it would be potentially disastrous. There are lots of voters who actually caught into the ideas of deportation of a private army of a man who says he'll be dictator for a day.

Micah Loewinger: What voters are voting for are two old men. One of them appears much more old and frail, definitely. Let's be honest, the other seems pretty much corrupt to the bone. Both of them will bring staffs into office, and if neither of these men survive their next term or have to fade into the background, their policy agendas will live on. I think that's what's at stake.

Jack Schaefer: You're not satisfied with the choices either.

Micah Loewinger: No.

Jack Schaefer: You would prefer in a heartbeat, a 60-year-old Biden versus an 81-year-old Biden running for reelection, right?

Micah Loewinger: Yes.

Jack Schaefer: We should pull out the champagne and celebrate because we finally agreed.

Micah Loewinger: We definitely agree.

Jack Shafer: We finally agreed on something. Rebecca, go get some champagne and I want good stuff.

Micah Loewinger: Jack, we agree. I think the majority of Americans have made it pretty darn clear in their polling that they are not happy with a Biden versus Trump matchup. The fact is that's what this election is about right now. What I'm trying to get at with you is how does the press, given the material playing field of this election best inform voters about what that matchup really means? It's not just Biden is too old.

Jack Shafer: Every time you want to pose this question to me, I'm going to come right back to you. Our business is not to engineer coverage, so the right guy wins. It's to put your hand in the stink and bring it back and show the reader the odor. I think that The New York Times has distinguished itself.

Micah Loewinger: Jack, thank you very much.

Jack Shafer: You betcha.

Micah Loewinger: Jack Shafer is Politico's press critic a Times spokesperson said that its coverage of the Hur report was comprehensive, well-rounded, and fair, and said that the paper had conducted many investigations into Donald Trump. To read the full statement, head to onthemedia.org.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, is there a problem with Jon Stewart?

Micah Loewinger: This is On The Media.

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