Peter Baker holds the lofty position of chief White House correspondent for the New York Times. He frequently appears as a guest political analyst on MSNBC.
And it was Baker who shared the byline with national health reporter Emily Baumgaertner on Monday’s New York TImes story about how Dr. Kevin Cannard, an expert on Parkinson’s disease from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center had visited the White House eight times in eight months between July 2023 and March 2024.
Baker based his report on an analysis of White House visitors’ logs, but these do not state the purpose of Cannard’s visits. The story insinuated that President Joe Biden has Parkinson’s disease. The original story was updated Monday night after White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor released a letter.
In his letter, O’Connor confirmed that Cannard had seen Biden three times during the three-and-a -half years of his presidency as part of the president’s annual physical exam. and “his findings have been made public each time.”
O’Connor wrote that Cannard had repeatedly ruled out that Biden was suffering from any neurological ailment, including Parkinson’s. And the White House physician added that Biden “has not seen a neurologist outside of his annual physical.”
O’Connor also said the neurologist regularly visits the White House Medical Unit in support of the thousands of active-duty military personnel assigned to support White House operations.
But what made this story another embarrassment for Baker and The New York TImes was the failure of anyone to look into where Biden was on those eight dates that Cannard visited the White House.
Baker, who has covered every president since Bill Clinton, had easy access to Biden’s daily schedule for that eight-month period. .
NBC News did check Biden’s schedule and found that Biden was outside Washington, D.C. on five of the dates mentioned in The Times story.
Biden was at the White House on three of the dates, including Jan. 17 when Cannard took part in the president’s annual physical exam.
Here is Biden’s schedule for Jan. 26 when he was in D.C. , and March 28, when he visited New York.
You don’t even need to be a White House correspondent to look up where President Biden was on a particular date. Just Google it.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre might have fared better when she confronted a hostile White House press corps on Monday if she had done her homework and pointed out Biden’s travel schedule on those dates.
Last Saturday, the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post started this whole feeding frenzy when it reported that White House visitor logs revealed that Cannard met with the White House physician and two others at the White House residence on Jan. 17. The story did not mention any other dates.
That was the day when Biden had his annual physical exam. O’Connor wrote a six-page report on the results of that exam that was released by the White House on Feb. 28. O’Connor said the physical included a neurological exam which ruled out Parkinson’s story.
But the Post story did quote Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), who was the White House physician for both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, who claimed the O’Connor was a close friend of the Biden family and was trying to “cover up” the president’s diminishing cognitive health.
And Jackson said the Bidens knew O’Connor could be trusted “to say and do anything that needed to be said or done and cover up whatever needed to be covered up.”
A pretty outrageous comment considering that after examining Trump, Jackson gushed in January 2018 that the president had “incredible genes” and joked that “if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years he might live to be 200 years old.”
Two days after the New York Post story appeared, Baker rushed out his story about Cannard’s eight visits to the White House. That set off a feeding frenzy within the White House press corps coming as it did after Biden’s weak performance in the June 27 debate against Trump.
Mark Sumner reported on this yesterday in a DK front-page story titled “Shameless media insinuates that Biden has Parkinson’s.” So I’m not going to go over ground that Mark already covered.
The Washington Post, to its credit, held off on the story about Cannard’s visits to the White House until O’Connor issued his statement on Monday night.
“We decided to wait until we knew why he (Cannard) was visiting the White House before determining if it was actually newsworthy,” Dan Diamond, a national health reporter for The Washington Post wrote on his Substack. “My colleagues and I had been making calls for a few days, trying to answer that question.”
“Then the White House announced last night that, yes, Dr. Cannard had seen the president, an announcement we chose to write up.”
The Washington Post story, co-authored by Diamond, was much better reported and fairer to Biden than the rush job by Baker. Here is the lead:
The White House confirmed Monday that a neurologist who is an expert in Parkinson’s disease has evaluated President Biden three times, saying that the tests were part of the president’s annual physical exams.
Now that’s how journalism should be practiced.
But let’s leave the last word to Lawrence O’ Donnell who excoriated the White House press corps and the New York Times over their reporting of this story. O’Donnell pointed out that no one knows how many times Cannard visited the White House during the Trump administration because it broke with past precedent and sealed off the visitor logs to the press — a policy restore by the Biden administration.
O’Donnell said that if The New York Times “would have done just the minimal amount of homework” by checking the president’s travel schedule it would have found, as NBC News reported, that the neurologist had visited the White House only three times when Biden was there in that eight-month period.
“That was easily available information. to the New York Times — the president’s travel schedule, and they did not bother to even think about it, look at it or report it. Not one person working at The New York Times from the publisher, editor on down to those reporters, did it ever cross their minds where was President Biden on that day … That is college newspaper standard that we’re talking about here., …
“The New York Times did not even bother to check the president’s travel schedule before suggesting to the world that a neurologist visited the White House eight times in eight months presumably to treat patient Biden. That was a very bad piece of reporting by our best newspaper which remains our best newspaper.”
Well many here might disagree with that last statement.
So far only audio is available of O’Donnell’s Tuesday night broadcast. The relevant section runs from the 13:25 to 19:10.
But O’Donnell did emphasize that there is a bigger problem with the press than this one case of bad reporting by the New York Times. He said:
“At a period when too much in our politics is broken, accurate information for the voting public has never been more valuable or more important or more necessary for the preservation of this constitutional democracy.”