When Joe Biden entered the 2020 presidential primary, the media decided that they were suddenly very, very concerned that the former vice president was so touchy-feely with women, grabbing them and sniffing their hair. Biden’s relentless touchiness and lack of respect for personal space had been documented and memed for years, but it only became a problem once he stood in the way of a madam president.
Biden should feel very lucky that Tara Reade waited before speaking up in greater detail until after he had clinched the Democratic nomination. For it’s become abundantly clear that Biden the chosen challenger to President Trump gets much softer media treatment than Biden the challenger to Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.
When the rumor mill heated up with the buzz that Biden was finally ready to jump into the Democratic primary, women looking to smear Uncle Joe as a creepy weirdo found a media salivating for their “allegations,” if you can call them that. New York magazine didn’t just write an objective news report investigating Lucy Flores’s claim that Biden kissed the back of her head; they let her wax poetic in a first-person piece, a practice at odds with journalistic standards dictating that outlets break misconduct allegations with corroborating evidence, not a personal account.
But now that Biden no longer stands in the way of a shinier, more intersectional presidential nominee, the magazine has changed its tune. It waited nearly a month to the day after Reade went public with her assault allegation to write a single word about it.
Last year, two days after New York magazine published the Flores piece, the New York Times was out with a lengthy profile of Flores and followed up with its own report on Biden’s “tactile politics” clashing with the post-#MeToo world. The New York Times found a woman alleging that Biden had “rested his hand on her thigh” and “hugged her ‘just a little bit too long'” and another who claimed “he put his hand on her shoulder and then started dropping it down her back.” Damning!
Yet when Reade emerged with the far more serious allegation that Biden assaulted her while she worked for his Senate office, the New York Times waited 19 days to even print her name. Executive Editor Dean Baquet defended the newspaper of record’s divergence from its treatment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh by noting that the “average person” doesn’t already know about Reade the way they knew about Christine Blasey Ford and that “Kavanaugh’s status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation.” As dumb as that nonexplanation is, why can’t the New York Times at least just hold the Biden of 2020 to the same standard as it held the Biden of 2019?
The question is just as applicable to CNN, which raced to put Flores on air just two days after she came out with her claims. They waited nearly a month to write a single piece on Reade’s allegations this year, however, and not one person from CNN who has interviewed Biden, or any other reporter, for that matter, has asked him about Reade’s allegation directly.
Consider that the media turned a couple of people complaining that Biden had rubbed their necks too long into a weeklong news cycle last year. Now, a criminal sexual assault allegation doesn’t even crack the front page.
If only Reade had come forward with her sexual assault claim while Democrats still had hope of crowning a female nominee for 2020. But now that Biden is the only thing standing between Trump and a second term, they really don’t care about sexual assault charges or accusers at all.
