In recent days, reporters and pundits looked ahead with anticipation to a press conference that President Biden was scheduled to give last night, at the conclusion of this week’s NATO summit in Washington, DC; following his disastrous debate performance two weeks earlier and the resultant, rampant speculation as to his place on the Democratic ticket to face Donald Trump in the fall, the presser looked like it could be a clarifying moment, or at least good for a high-profile Biden gaffe or two. In the end, the world’s media didn’t need to wait till the presser for that—at an earlier event with NATO allies, Biden handed the floor to the leader of Ukraine by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.” Biden quickly corrected himself, but his words had already escaped. The Guardian sent me a push alert about it; my X timeline, a fractured place for following the news in the Musk era, filled up with it; friends of varying levels of political engagement blew up my phone. In the real world, my girlfriend asked me, “Is it Joever”?
Of course, there was still the matter of the press conference to attend to, and in some quarters, the anticipation continued to mount. (“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the fate of the world hangs in the balance,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said, exaggerating.) After some initial remarks, Biden took a first question from Jeff Mason, of Reuters, who noted, with impeccable understatement, that Biden’s political future has “hung over the NATO summit a little bit this week,” before asking him whether he fears that his vice president, Kamala Harris, might not beat Trump if elevated to the top of the ticket. “Look,” Biden replied, “I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I didn’t think she was qualified to be president.”
The die appeared to be cast. But the presser continued and Biden seemed to grow into it; he rambled at times but was, at the very least, not the Biden of post-debate caricature. He took questions for the best part of an hour; many were about his mental acuity, gaffes, and electoral prospects, but others concerned small matters like global security, whether Ukraine should be allowed to fire US weapons deeper into Russia, and the war in Gaza. David E. Sanger, of the New York Times, asked Biden about the relationship between Russia and China. His colleague, the media reporter Michael M. Grynbaum, noted that “rather than ask directly about Biden’s fitness,” Sanger appeared to have “asked a complex policy question to see how the president handles details on his feet.” Dylan Byers, a media reporter at Puck, suggested that it was “also possible that the nation’s preeminent, Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign policy & national security correspondent with 40+ years in the field wanted to use a NATO summit to ask a substantive foreign policy question of a president who rarely takes questions in public.”
Either way, Sanger sounded relatively impressed by Biden’s performance at the presser. In the end, though, many reporters’ takeaway was that it didn’t clear up very much at all. “For Biden backers who want him to stay in, there were moments for validation: Strong voice, foreign policy command, detailed answers,” the Washington Post’s Matt Viser noted. “For those who want him out, there were moments for worry: Mixing up names, rambling answers.” Brendan Buck, a Republican operative turned talking head, noted that he had seen allies of both Trump and Biden taking a victory lap. The words “Rorschach test” didn’t seem far away, and various reporters and their Democratic sources duly delivered them. Not that everyone saw this as astute analysis: the journalist Christopher Ingraham tweeted, “‘It’s kind of a Rorschach test’—reporter who has no idea what to say.” Call it the Rorschach-test Rorschach test.
The Rorschach-test metaphor—which, broadly speaking, invokes the idea of different observers seeing the same people or events very differently—has recurred in the press throughout the Trump era, attaching to subjects as varied as Hillary Clinton, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, and Trump’s handling of a glass of water (and that’s just in the pages of CJR). “What we have is something that has defined the Trump era, which is a political Rorschach test,” CNN’s Dana Bash said in 2019, referring to a crucial document in Trump’s first impeachment trial. “There’s the truth, which we have been talking about. But how you read the truth so depends on where you stand.” Last year, Trump’s mug shot from his election subversion case in Georgia was discussed in decidedly Rorschachy terms. Yesterday’s press conference wasn’t even the first Biden Rorschach test since the debate: that was his interview, last week, with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “At this point,” the AP’s Steve Peoples wrote after the interview, “every Biden answer, interview and speech will serve as a Rorschach test of sorts to voters.”
As Ingraham suggests, the idea has often been used as a lazy media cliché, particularly when it has been invoked as shorthand for America’s profound divisions. But it does strike me as apt in the context of this post-debate moment and how it has played in the media; as gallons of ink have pooled out, some observers have seen a press corps rushing to catch up on a story—Biden’s age and acuity—that they previously ignored (or, worse, covered up) while others have seen an over-the-top feeding frenzy. For what it’s worth, I’ve seen a lot of sharp coverage and commentary on everything from Biden’s true condition to the political fallout from it, but also coverage and commentary that has been snide, panicky, overblown, and—perhaps most markedly—angry. Pools of ink, of course, can depict more than one thing at once.
Others also seem to have noticed the anger coursing through some of the coverage; on occasion, it has bubbled visibly to the surface. Some of it has come from liberal pundits who fear Biden’s weakness throwing the White House back to Trump, but it has also come from reporters who feel as if the White House spent years shielding Biden, and thus the truth, from them: Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, of Axios, wrote last weekend that “hell has no fury like a press corps deceived”; yesterday, they described the press corps as “red-hot,” and as also feeling “ignored” and “used.” While aggressive scrutiny is always desirable, I’d question the appropriateness of how some of this anger has been expressed in recent days. But frustration is, on the whole, understandable. While Biden has done some proper interviews and many shorter “gaggles” with reporters, he has conducted far fewer formal sit-downs with traditional outlets than did his immediate predecessors, and far fewer solo press conferences, too. Per CNN, yesterday’s was his first of 2024 and only his fifteenth overall since taking office. In light of Biden’s debate performance, it is fair for journalists to ask why this might have been the case.
And yet the answer is likely far more complicated than the right-wing caricature of a four-year acuity cover-up would allow. (Exhibit A: Biden’s team willingly putting him on a debate stage with Trump months earlier than would typically be expected.) And, also contra right-wing caricature, the mainstream press hasn’t meekly accepted this lack of access; journalists have pushed back on it, sometimes sharply, since the earliest days of Biden’s presidency. When the press corps has gotten access to Biden, it hasn’t always used it wisely; following his first solo news conference, in 2021, I and others judged that reporters had largely eschewed the chance to ask him substantive questions in favor of horseracey triviality. (As one journalist put it succinctly at the time: “It was a shit press conference and the reporters are why.”) And, as I wrote in 2022, the lack-of-access story has sometimes been a little overblown. Still, from today’s vantage, it seems clear that Biden’s relative lack of traditional media engagement has been bad for transparency.
It also seems, at least to me, that it may have been bad for Biden. It has, at least, allowed the impression that he’s been hiding; it may also have made differences in his performance levels seem more pronounced to the press and the public by inserting bigger gaps between them. (As I’ve written before, Trump’s incoherence, to which we are all exposed constantly, seems to have been normalized by sections of the media.) Of course, the debate performance was so bad that it likely would have triggered a similar media reaction either way; it’s possible that more press exposure to Biden would have led to something like it happening earlier. But if Biden had put himself out there more, it likely wouldn’t have stood alone as the one shocking moment we all saw the man behind the curtain (even if, as I wrote in the aftermath, this framing has in some ways been overblown). History might well suggest that agreeing to the debate was Biden’s biggest error. It might be right. But he may also have erred in not agreeing to more events like it.
To come back to the idea of the Rorschach test, the debate, in the above context, was something like the opposite of one: a rare moment of clarity and consensus, at least in the moment. Bar a repeat performance, though, every Biden interview or presser going forward seems unlikely to offer that same clarity, as Peoples noted; even if he performs well, the debate will still have happened and Biden’s critics will not likely be mollified. Biden seemed to address this idea last night, albeit in the context of a different question, about whether he’d be willing to take a cognitive test. “No matter what I did,” he said, “no one’s going to be satisfied.”
If the debate felt clarifying to many media observers because it unfolded before their eyes, the press conference is a reminder that seeing things for ourselves can be confusing, too. This is not to say that it wasn’t welcome on transparency grounds, or that the press should cover it with hand-waving clichés or purely in terms of optics; those are important at the moment, but there was substance last night, too, not least thanks to the questions of reporters from foreign outlets that are removed enough to see the stakes of this election for the world. It’s to say that access has limits; that it is, usually, a starting point for the difficult work of reporting and explaining, not a substitute.
Those watching will have seen what they wanted to see, including in Biden’s Putin and Harris gaffes; one viewer’s evidence of dementia will have been another’s evidence of Biden being as Biden has always been. Of course, many of those who weren’t watching the presser, in all its shades of gray, will have seen those moments, be it in their group chats or on social media; in the hours after the debate, for example, a Daily Mail clip of Biden mixing up Harris and Trump was viewed millions of times on TikTok. The debate as to what it all means is far from Joever.
Other notable stories:
- After a radio station in Philadelphia parted ways with a host who recently asked Biden questions that his campaign proposed in advance, the Times’ Ken Bensinger reports that Biden has been served “nearly identical questions, prescreened or suggested ahead of time by campaign staff members,” in dozens of audio interviews in the past two years. (The Biden campaign and some of those involved in the interviews said that the questions weren’t mandatory.) In other news about Biden and the press, Semafor’s Max Tani spoke with Tommy Vietor, of Pod Save America, to find out why he and his cohosts have called on Biden to drop out of the presidential race despite their deep ties to the upper echelons of Democratic politics. And—amid some criticism of various editorial boards for calling on Biden to drop out but not Trump—that of the Times declared Trump “unfit to lead.”
- In May, LAist and its affiliate public-radio station initiated a wave of buyouts; now The Wrap reports that twenty-one staffers have taken one, and that an additional wave of layoffs has begun. In other media jobs news, Justin Baragona, a media reporter who recently left the Daily Beast after taking a buyout, will write a media newsletter, called Rage Bait, for Zeteo, a company founded by Mehdi Hasan. Ben Sherwood, who took over as the Beast’s CEO earlier this year and has overseen job cuts there, told staffers that the site had been “hours away” from a private-equity takeover that would have led to “almost everybody” being laid off, per the Hollywood Reporter. And Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews announced that she is stepping down as president of CBS News.
- For CJR, Joel Simon reports that José Jasán Nieves Cárdenas—the editor of the independent Cuban news site El Toque, who now lives in exile in Miami—has recently received threats, including a WhatsApp message featuring images of his home, that he suspects were sent by operatives of the Cuban state; he reported the threats to the FBI as well as deciding to go public by talking to Simon. “Threatening an independent journalist in the United States would represent a serious escalation by Cuban intelligence, if confirmed,” Simon writes. “But unfortunately Nieves’s experience is not unique,” with journalists from many countries having been threatened on US soil.
- In other news about the foreign press, the Financial Times reports that the German behemoth Axel Springer’s media properties could be divorced from its classified-ads business, though such a deal is not yet certain. Elsewhere, a news site in Wales took the unusual step of confirming that a former minister in the Welsh government was not its source for an explosive recent story about Vaughan Gething, the nation’s first minister, after Gething fired her on suspicion of leaking. And Thibaut Bruttin was appointed head of Reporters Without Borders, succeeding Christophe Deloire, who died in June.
- And Vogue appointed Jack Schlossberg—the grandson of President John F. Kennedy, who has recently become a social media sensation—as a political correspondent. The role “will see him combine his background in law and business (he received his JD and MBA from Harvard) with the self-described ‘silly goose’ tendencies he displays online,” Vogue reports. “I am inspired by my family’s legacy of public service,” Schlossberg said. “I take that very seriously, and I want to contribute in my own way.”
ICYMI: When CJR examined the close relationship between the political press and the elderly.
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.