Nate Silver: “As someone who was an early proponent of the theory that Biden’s age was in fact a huge liability for him, I have complicated feelings about how the media has covered the story both before and after the debate. On the one hand, the coverage before was clearly inadequate — and it centered too much on the electoral implications and not the even more fundamental question of Biden’s fitness for office.”
“On the other hand, the coverage wasn’t zero by any means: the Wall Street Journal, in particular, had taken the issue seriously, and Biden’s age and mental acuity was the subject of several weeks of sustained coverage following Special Counsel Robert Hur’s finding in February that Biden was a ‘well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’ who had ‘diminished faculties in advancing age.'”
“But the partisan media critics I cited before succeeded in keeping coverage to a simmer — the pot never quite boiled over. Journalists are human beings, and although they won’t want to admit it, most of them actually do read the mean Twitter messages you write about them. And, although they won’t admit to this either, most who work for high-prestige media outlets like the Times and the Washington Post are left-of-center. They aren’t necessarily partisan Democrats, but vanishingly few are Republicans or would like to see Trump elected again. (Nor would I, for that matter.)”
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