SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
President Biden gave one of the few press conferences of his termon Thursday, after the NATO summit marking the 75th year of the alliance. He gave long and detailed answers about foreign policy and answered questions about his own fitness for office. The coverage in the news media mostly focused on the latter. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik joins us. David, thanks so much for being with us.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Pleasure.
SIMON: The president's aides, and a good number of voters, criticize media outlets for focusing so much on the question of the president's fitness for office suddenly, as opposed to his record, his policies. Has there been too much attention to the fitness question?
FOLKENFLIK: I think that it's very hard to make that argument. What we saw just two weeks ago, in late June, at that debate, has sharpened a concern that has been burbling along pretty much since Biden emerged as a leading figure in the Democratic primaries in 2020 - that is, you know, he's an old man. He's a very senior senior citizen, and it's only getting ever more thus. And it popped out in view in a way in which all the suppression of those concerns, all the deflections of them no longer seem credible.
SIMON: Before what I think we can fairly call this crisis, what was the President's approach to the press?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, it's interesting, in retrospect, to look back on it, through the crisis that we're now thinking about. You know, he's been accused by Republicans and his critics of being essentially in a bit of a bubble, of being held apart from the press - you know, very few press conferences, if you compare him to his immediate predecessors, former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump; far fewer moments where you could have spontaneous interactions. Biden has really sought out interviews with friendly folks, talk show hosts rather than major journalists, very few sit-down interviews. The New York Times really hasn't had any sit-down interviews with President Biden. He's been frustrated with them, and that, just kind of holding people off, was a way of which - that he was trying to, it appears, protect himself from a possible vulnerability, but has left him vulnerable to this perceived weakness, which is that he can't really handle it.
SIMON: Does the president's distance from the press now influence how they're treating the story and the president now?
FOLKENFLIK: I think it's doing so on two levels. One is that there's this ferocious, intense and unrelenting focus on this very question, because they haven't had that access, and now it's as though a curtain has been raised in revealing Biden's weakness and frailty on this matter, and also because you don't have, you know, hundreds of other interactions to judge it against. If this were one among dozens of such moments that were unscripted and he was fantastic in all of them - including recently - it'd be much easier to dismiss as an off night, a guy with a cold traveling a lot of time zones relatively recently prior to it. Much harder to do when it's one of relatively few.
SIMON: I also learned, this past week, the president has been asked apparently nearly identical questions in interviews on local talk radio programs. What do we know about this?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, right, so there were two interviews with local talk show hosts, in Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Both of those hosts were interviewed on CNN, and one of them said, look, you know, I posed these questions that Biden's aides had wanted posed, and in fact, the host on CNN turned and said, well, actually, it seems as though both of you asked the same questions. He turned to the Milwaukee host, and it turned out that the host in Milwaukee had as well taken questions from Biden's aides, originally characterized as the White House. The White House says, actually, it's the Biden campaign, but whatever it was, they were essentially scripting these things.
Well, this is a problem on a number of levels. These are the appearances that Biden's camp is pointing to as saying, look, Joe's in it; you know, he's proving himself every day. He's taking tests every day because he's doing these interviews. Here are these interviews he did in local talk shows. They asked him their own questions, and here they go. Well, it turned out it wasn't their own questions, and in fact, The New York Times took a very tough look in recent days at a couple of dozen of such interviews and found that they all basically overlapped in the questions that were asked.
SIMON: Let me ask you this question. I get it - we might both do - on social media platforms. Why does it seem that the press goes after President Biden when he commits a gaffe more than it does Donald Trump when he tells a howler or goes off on a rhetorical tangent?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, look, the press has focused on that question about Trump pretty much since the outset of his announcement that he was running in August of 2015, and part of the definition of news is new. And is the questions about Biden's mental acuity new? No. Is the focus and the seeming evidence in front of our eyes new? Yeah. That's still very fresh. I think you're going to see more focus on Trump just in coming days. You know, the Republican National Convention is going to formalize Trump's nomination to the presidency, seeking the White House once again. That's going to lead the press to focus on not only when he misspeaks, when he inflates, when he is unable to figure out what point he's trying to make, when he expresses an incredibly dark and dystopian view of what America is and should be, but right now, this is a crisis for the Democratic Party, for the White House, to be sure, but also for the country, as it assesses the fitness of its president and presumptive Democratic nominee for that office once more.
SIMON: NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. Thanks so much.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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