Rumors of a credible sexual misbehavior accusation against Joe Biden were circulating before Tara Reade went public on a left-wing podcast in March, and yet Biden made it all the way to May without having to confront directly the allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman in the 1990s. Indeed, rather than shaking the ground underneath the presidential campaign, the way much of the political media treated the story didn’t change for over a month after her appearance.
At press time, Biden was scheduled to address the situation on MSNBC. Until then, Team Biden was able to get away with deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield’s statement to the Washington Examiner that the claim is “untrue.” The Washington Examiner waited for a campaign response before writing an initial story about the alleged incident, acknowledging Reade’s shifting recollection of the facts and the timing of her decision to go public. Piecing together the fragments, carefully and with full context, should be Reporting 101. But this was the exception within the media. It was remarkable that for over five weeks, the public still had no idea whether Biden personally denied the simple question of whether he sexually assaulted a woman in 1993.
For those unfamiliar with the backstory, Reade worked as a staffer in Biden’s Senate office in the 1990s. She claims Biden sexually assaulted her in a congressional hallway and faced general mistreatment from her colleagues in retaliation. Members of her family and a former neighbor say Reade told them about the incident at the time or a few years after, and there’s tape of a woman, apparently Reade’s mother, calling in to Larry King Live that year expressing concern about her daughter facing problems at a powerful senator’s office.
Until late April, if you didn’t know about any of this, one could hardly blame you. It took weeks for either the New York Times or the Washington Post to run a single story about the accusation, even after Reade filed a police complaint against Biden. That criminal case remained open for over a week, a peculiar fact about an alleged crime beyond the district’s statute of limitations.
In a five-week span, Biden was interviewed 19 times and faced 142 questions from reporters at outlets ranging from MSNBC to Politico. Not one asked him about Reade.
The Washington Examiner has also learned that reporters from several organizations, including ABC, had interviewed Reade and a neighbor who corroborated the allegation shortly after her accusation but did not run a story on the contents for weeks.
I have followed Biden’s every move for 17 months now, often literally on the campaign trail, where I’d chase him to his van yelling questions about the Iraq War or his son, Hunter. I’ve had Biden point his finger in my face and one time even pull me into a bear hug after I asked him about the popularity of socialism among millennial voters. I was never offended or made uncomfortable. All seemed in good humor — Joe being Joe. But the allegations had credibility and earned our dispassionate coverage.
Not a single other reporter whom I ever saw on the campaign trail was covering the matter. I’ve long had my gripes with the political and social dynamics that inevitably arise between the “kids on the bus” and powerful politicians seeking the presidency. Those from the networks or outlets such as the New York Times and Bloomberg who earn a coveted position as a “pool” reporter often gain access to exclusive interviews with candidates and staffers, while the rest of us are forced to push ourselves to the front of the line during a formal gaggle if we wish to get a question in. Many of these pool reporters suffer from a kind of Stockholm syndrome, in which they grow more and more fond of the person on a personal level the longer they spend time with him or her. That often translates into softball coverage, which was particularly beneficial to Biden during the primary.
Biden’s relatively consistent gaffes, slurring of words, and general signs of aging were often overlooked in nightly broadcasts because they were inconsistent with the general message of his campaign, which revolved around empathy and leadership, two things he often communicated very well.
But there was a more cynical explanation that accounted for the glaring gap of coverage around what was the second-largest political scandal in the country, aside from President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. Access makes or breaks a reporter’s career, particularly in an era of instant news and diminishing writing standards.
Rocking the boat, through uncomfortable or aggressive questions, can all but ensure that your outlet will miss the latest piece of opposition research or leaked news. It also means that you’re unlikely to get a friendly phone call or message from a fellow reporter or editor during the inevitable next round of industrywide layoffs. If you’re of no use to Biden, you’re probably of no use to CNN either.
When the New York Times eventually decided to cover the issue, the story was done in close cooperation with the Biden campaign. Not only were many potential witnesses provided directly from the campaign itself, the paper’s editor openly admitted that he made a significant correction to the piece after fielding complaints from Team Biden.
“I think the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct,” said Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor, in reference to a removed line that stated: “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.”
That article would later be circulated from Biden campaign officials to surrogates as evidence that Reade’s allegation has been debunked. You wouldn’t question the New York Times, would you?
The newspaper later expressed indignation at this fact in a statement, saying its reporting reached no conclusion. The editorial board, along with the Washington Post’s, then called for the Biden campaign to release any evidence of an alleged sexual harassment complaint Reade filed from a sealed archive housed at the University of Delaware.
That same archive houses tens of thousands of documents from Biden’s entire time in the Senate, 99.99% of which are apparently of no interest to the journalists at either paper. Reporting emerged in late April that Biden operatives have already accessed the archive, which the university has said for years isn’t accessible to the public, meaning we’ll never know what was initially in them anyway.
Two of Biden’s high-profile female surrogates, Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand and former Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams, have issued their support for Biden, even after mounting evidence corroborating her accusation surfaced.
The hypocrisy of supporters of Christine Blasey Ford and other accusers of Justice Brett Kavanaugh now blindly accepting the Biden campaign line at face value aside, it’s rather refreshing to see public figures all but call Reade a liar instead of simply ignoring the issue. Democratic Party interests have controlled much of the narrative surrounding this scandal in the press for weeks, just as they did regarding Juanita Broaddrick’s accusations against Bill Clinton decades ago. What happens now will tell us how much about the media landscape has really changed — and how much hasn’t.
Joseph Simonson is a political reporter for the Washington Examiner.
