Traditionally “carping about the media has been a nonpartisan event,” but recently “Republicans have dominated the press-bashing competition,” according to noted historian David Pietrusza. “Any criticism aimed even tangentially at Trump plays well with the Democratic base, and that certainly is Biden’s game now as he faces increased competition from the party’s left flank,” Pietrusza told the Washington Examiner.

For Northeastern University professor and American Politics Research editor Costas Panagopoulos, taking an aggressive stance allows Biden to demonstrate that he’s “a fighter” and “up to the task of doing battle with Trump.” “He can’t risk the ‘sleepy Joe’ moniker from cementing in the public mindset. It’s also risky to sit back and let things play out. The other side or events can define a candidate without direct intervention,” Panagopoulos said.

But the University of Akron’s David Cohen said Trump had made it more “commonplace for elected officials to de-legitimize the media as a whole,” but warned the Biden camp against calling the press “fake news” or targeting specific journalists like Trump did in 2016.

“Biden’s strategy is a necessary strategy, but it’s also a dangerous strategy when they start singling out reporters, especially reporters that are well-respected. Then it can get kind of personal and that can be risky,” Cohen explained. “But I think his campaign has to respond to this stuff because if they don’t it leaves people thinking, ‘Well gosh, it must be true.'”

During the 2016 cycle, Democrats railed against Trump for criticizing news outlets, claiming he was undermining an important democratic institution.

Yet in the Wednesday letter, Biden spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield blasted a New York Times story from May by Ken Vogel and then-freelancer Iuliia Mendel as having “an outsized hand in the spread” of the “baseless conspiracy theory” that the 36-year Delaware senator acted inappropriately in Ukraine to shield his son from an investigation. Hunter Biden had a $50,000-a-month gig in Ukraine, sitting on the board of an oligarch-connected natural gas company.

[Opinion: Joe Biden hostility toward the media doesn’t seem to bother journalists]

Trump allies, such as Rudy Giuliani, assert Joe Biden may have created a potential conflict of interest by threatening to without $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees while he was part of the Obama administration unless Ukraine fired its top prosecutor, who had probed the younger Biden’s company, Burisma Holdings. There is no evidence of any wrongdoing by the Bidens.

The crux of the letter, however, was a take-down of a New York Times opinion piece by author Peter Schweizer. Schweizer, who elevated debunked ties between Hillary Clinton and the Russia-Uranium One controversy, argued that although Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma Holdings wasn’t illegal, it should’ve been.

“Are you truly blind to what you got wrong in 2016, or are you deliberately continuing policies that distort reality for the sake of controversy and the clicks that accompany it?” Bedingfield asked the New York Times.

The Biden team also wrote to Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday urging the social media giants not to run a Trump re-election ad targeting the former vice president.

The reaction from Bidenworld follows a similar letter it sent last month to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News imploring the TV networks to quit booking Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, for their shows because he “will knowingly and willingly lie in order to advance his own narrative.” Trump enlisted Giuliani in his efforts to obtain damaging information on Biden.

Giuliani told the Washington Examiner in September Biden attacked him since he and other Democrats couldn’t cope with somebody “standing up” to them.

“All they’re trying to do is kill the messenger and silence the messenger. But they’re not answering the message,” he said.

Meanwhile, Republican strategist Brad Todd recommended Biden develop thicker skin. “Biden spent eight years in the warm media cocoon of the Obama administration, and he doesn’t know how to handle the slightest bit of pressure from a millennial-dominated press entourage that is attitudinally on a far different wavelength from him and unwilling to hide it,” Todd added.