According to CNN senior reporter Oliver Darcy, a growing number of liberals are accusing The New York Times of being soft on former President Trump, and too harsh on President Biden, in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election.
Darcy himself even agreed with some of these criticisms, declaring the media is “struggling” to figure out how to cover Trump.
In Darcy’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter Tuesday, the reporter explained that as Trump’s prospects of retaking the White House have risen, frustrations have grown that The Times isn’t grilling him harder.
“Criticism of The Times is nothing new, but as it appears with each passing day that Trump has a real shot of recapturing the White House, the expressions of disapproval have become particularly pronounced,” he said.
CNN reported that many liberals see The New York Times as being too harsh on President Biden and too lenient on former President Trump. (Getty Images)
Darcy’s piece explained how critics feel that the outlet has been “far too distracted as of late by worries over President Joe Biden’s age,” a narrative that steals “attention away from the larger and far more serious danger posed by a second Trump administration.”
The reporter described how criticism really peaked when the paper published a new joint poll it conducted with Siena College that “found a majority of Biden voters believe he is too old to be an effective president,” Darcy wrote.
He added, “That poll touched off a torrent of angry commentary directed at the outlet, with some readers even declaring on social media that they had decided to cancel their subscriptions.”
Darcy also quoted CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, who recently trashed The Times for talking about Biden’s age. “That they even asked this question is evidence of the bias — the agenda — in their poll,” Jarvis said, adding, “Who made age an ‘issue’? The credulous Times falling into the right-wing’s projection. This is not journalism. Shameful.”
After describing the paper as being at the “center of the storm” of criticism for outlets covering Trump, Darcy expressed his view that some of these criticisms are valid.
He said, “It is apparent that the U.S. media is still struggling immensely over how to cover Trump and the ongoing threats to American democracy.”
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Critics of The Times have claimed that the paper’s been too distracted by Biden’s age to cover Trump appropriately. (Reuters)
The reporter even threw his own network under the bus, saying, “CNN and MSNBC can’t even seem to arrive at a firm policy over how to cover Trump’s live remarks (at times, both networks have boasted about how they don’t air his lie-filled speeches live, and at other times, such as on Monday, they both did just that).”
Darcy made headlines in 2023 after making a stink about his network airing a town hall event with Trump. He was reprimanded by former CNN CEO Chris Licht and other network executives after he trashed the event in his newsletter, where he wrote in part, “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN.”
In this week’s piece, Darcy ultimately gave The Times the benefit of the doubt, stating, “There is a mountain of thorny issues at the doorstep of outlets like The Times — and often there is no clear answer.”
He explained, “For example, after the 2020 election, the conventional wisdom was that the press should largely ignore Trump’s antics. Now, in the run up toward the election, that line of thinking has changed,” He noted that the Biden campaign has encouraged outlets to cover Trump’s behavior, prompting this change in strategy.
Darcy also claimed that some of the criticism of the paper is “misguided,” like when readers skewered the sample size of the poll – “980 registered voters.”
“But as Harry Enten, CNN’s senior data reporter said such a sample size is ‘well within the norm’ for a scientific poll,” Darcy reported. He also quoted a Times spokesperson who recently defended the poll to CNN, saying, “polling and associated reporting captures and conveys public sentiment at a given moment in time.”
“Our commitment to readers is to report on the world as it is, without fear or favor,” the spokesperson said. “Anything less, or advocacy in favor of one candidate, would run directly against the practice of independent journalism.”
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