President Joe Biden is 80 years old. It’s possibly the least-interesting fact about a president who has been enormously successful at passing the most progressive politics of any president in generations. But it’s also the one fact that news outlets are trying to hammer home in every single story.
Over the past week, Biden has been on a whirlwind international trip. On Friday, he landed in New Delhi, where he immediately went into meetings and press events with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, before launching into a marathon session of meetings and negotiations with G20 leaders on Saturday. During those long days, Biden huddled in groups and one on one with over 30 world leaders. On Sunday, he finished G20 negotiations, visited a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, then traveled to Hanoi to begin a series of meetings in Vietnam designed to show China that the U.S. remains a presence in the region.
At the end of a long series of days that had Biden almost constantly engaged in high-stakes negotiations, the president conducted an evening press event. So how did The New York Times choose to headline this event?
Did you get that? Biden is 80. Also, poor old guy was maybe just a little confused about what time it was. Aww.
That wasn’t all. At the end of the press conference, Biden waved to the gathered press as he headed for the exit and said, “I’m going to bed.” Naturally, that line was part of the headline in numerous right-wing publications, frequently paired with a mention that Biden had to go take a “nap.”
You don’t have to look at right-wing publications to see this focus. Check out The Daily Beast, which headlined their article on the event, “Biden Wraps Up G20 Conference by Announcing ‘I’m Going to Bed,’” and doubled down by making this the first sentence of their article: “Amid rising concerns among voters about his age, President Joe Biden wrapped up his post-G20 summit presser on Sunday night by telling reporters he was ‘going to bed.’”
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Biden’s age is a big concern. How do we know this? Because every publication on the planet appears set on telling us it’s a concern. Repeatedly. Biden’s age is the “but her emails” of 2024—the story that the press has decided to make the center of their hand-wringing, sad-faced, deeply somber expressions of apprehension.
The Hill wrote, “Concerns around the oldest president in history are growing sharper,” then followed that with numbers lifted from a series of polls in which Americans have been led to respond to questions about Biden’s age. Those polls might generate similar numbers if they confronted people with questions like “Does it concern you that Joe Biden is Catholic?” or just “Does it concern you that Biden is a liberal?” But the polls didn’t ask that. They ask about his age.
Not every but-his-age is so straightforward. Take this Axios article informing you that “Biden has held comparatively few public events past 6 p.m., with 19 evening appearances from June to July this year … By contrast, President Obama held 25 events after 6 p.m. over the same period in 2011.”
They don’t include the word nap, but the point comes through. Outlets are going to remind you that Biden is old and maybe off for nappy-nap time, even if it takes slicing up a dataset to make it give them the story they want. They don’t quite ask if Biden is suffering from sundowning. They just leave it up to the reader to infer.
Nineteen events versus 25 events over a particular two-month period—is that really much of a difference? Are there other parts of the calendar that might be reviewed, or other times that could be used for a cutoff? Surely there are, but if the line were drawn in a different place, or if a different period were considered, it might not fit the narrative.
It’s not quite the disastrous data distortion that the AP pulled when creating out of whole cloth the story about how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton allegedly gave preferential treatment to Clinton Foundation members. But it certainly shows aspirations of reaching those giddy heights.
Media outlets love the “Biden is old” story because … he is 80. He can’t do anything about that.
And there’s another big reason they love this story: Ageism is the one form of prejudice that is not just permitted but is often encouraged. Age is the punch line for sitcoms, social media, and everyday conversation. You don’t have to be 80 to face age discrimination. It's the prejudice that still gets a nod, a laugh, and a wink.
Biden is coming off a grueling four days that would test anyone at any age, and from every indication, he’s been deeply engaged throughout that period, sending vital signals that the U.S. is neither abandoning its allies nor ceasing to look for new alliances. He’s been out there tightening connections, seeking new deals, and working to push back against China’s attempts to dominate Asia and beyond.
That hasn’t stopped the press from putting his age in every headline and planting both subtle and very unsubtle digs about his alertness in every article. After all, Republicans have a narrative to maintain and the media has to help them do it.
But every now and then … they slip up and admit something their bosses and viewers might not want to hear.