Biden brought corporate media to a retreat and instructed them how and what to report?!

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Don’t look now, but journalism might be back.

In a rare uplifting press story, New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn seemed to lose patience with incessant demands that he elect Joe Biden instead of reporting news, directing an epic, And Justice For All-style “No, you’re out of order!” tirade against the White House and its lackeys.

When Ben Smith at Semafor asked Kahn about former Obama official Dan Pfeiffer’s complaint that the Times does not “see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power,” Kahn went ballistic.

“I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House,” Kahn snapped. “We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda, and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?”

Kahn didn’t stop, announcing a formal re-drawing of lines in the sand. He told the White House that fixing the country is their job, reporting is his job, choosing presidents is the job of voters, and stop blaming us if you can’t get re-elected on your own.

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The Biden administration brought Kahn’s outburst on itself, through a stream of leaks and nudges designed to publicly shame the paper that long ago went too far. The specific conflict probably started five years ago, but relations started steaming downhill with breakneck speed this past January. That was when officials from Biden’s re-election campaign invited representatives of the nation’s leading press outlets to an off-the-record retreat in Wilmington to receive, no kidding, campaign coverage instructions. From a January 7th article in Semafor:

Biden’s re-election campaign has begun organizing a series of off-the-record trips for top political reporters… Using it as an opportunity to tell them what they’re getting wrong… Officials have invoked a coverage spreadsheet laying out areas where the team believes their reporting has fallen short… In particular, campaign officials have chafed at…coverage of former President Donald Trump, feeling that outlets are too focused on his legal troubles and haven’t paid enough attention to… incendiary recent statements on the campaign trail… With the exception of its recent meeting with the Times, the campaign meetings had been “substantive” and “productive,”

Those participants, bound not to write about their seminar by off-the-record conditions they themselves agreed to, then had to watch as someone leaked to Semafor that they’d sat like lapdogs while campaign aides rolled out a “coverage spreadsheet” showing where they’d failed to sufficiently amplify administration messaging on Donald Trump. (Apparently the off-the-record deals didn’t cut both ways.) Even worse, or better, depending on your perspective, Semafor’s “source familiar” went out of his or her way to say everyone but the Times got a gold star for obedience.

Consider all the brutal embarrassments to media in just that 200-word report. Someone told Semafor “top political reporters” for the Washington Post and New York Times as well as “ABC, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, Fox, NPR, Reuters, Bloomberg” all submitted to the indignity of not just one “briefing” from the president’s campaign aides on “what they’re getting wrong,” but a series of them.

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