Critics Attack The New York Times for Daring to Do Journalism on the Biden Granddaughter Story

Forgive the New York Times for it has sinned according to President Joe Biden’s more loyal allies in the media.

On July 1, the Times made note of something that many of the president’s conservative critics had been pointing out for awhile: the president habitually misstates the number of grandchildren he has, boasting about his close relationship with the six he claims as his own and ignoring Navy Roberts, the daughter of his son Hunter Biden and his former assistant, Lunden Roberts.

In a profile of the forgotten four-year-old and her mother, it was revealed that neither Hunter Biden nor his father had ever met Navy, and that the president’s aides are told that he has six grandchildren in what can only be described as a galling denial of reality. DNA testing conducted after Hunter Biden took Roberts and Navy off of his health insurance has confirmed that the latter is indeed the president’s granddaughter.

Then on Saturday, columnist Maureen Dowd took Biden to task for his implicit rejection of Navy.

“The president can’t defend Hunter on all his other messes and draw the line at accepting one little girl. You can’t punish her for something she had no choice about,” wrote Dowd, submitting that “What the Navy story reveals is how dated and inauthentic the 80-year-old president’s view of family is.”

“The president’s cold shoulder — and heart — is counter to every message he has sent for decades, and it’s out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead,” she concluded.

But while Dowd may be right about that, it’s her own view, that the president’s treatment of his family and misstatements about them to the American people are newsworthy, that is out of sync with other progressives in the press.

At The New Republic, editor Michael Tomasky complained that the situation “doesn’t seem that unusual” to him and complained that if a similar story about Donald Trump had come to light, he doubted “Dowd would be writing any columns accusing Trump of hypocrisy.” Dowd, it must be noted, is the author of a column headlined “Donald Trump, American Monster,” among many others critical of the 45th president.

On Monday, the luminaries on The View nevertheless offered a concurring opinion to join Tomasky’s. “I just, I’m sorry. You know, these things are — for me, when you start talking about people’s families, and what they’re doing, for me, I find it unnecessary,” declared Whoopi Goldberg. “This is not anybody’s business. Nobody needed to know about this. This was private.”

“Yeah, write about something else!” agreed Sunny Hostin.

And in the replies and quote tweets of both the original profile and Dowd’s column, there is much more outrage from more critics accusing the Times’ coverage of resembling that of the National Enquirer or TMZ’s.

It should be self-evident to journalists that an untruth told by the president at the expense of his own granddaughter is newsworthy to the American people. As was the case when Donald Trump was on the ballot and in every election before that, the character of the commander-in-chief and those who desire his office is not merely relevant, but imperative.

If the president will seek to deceive about something as falsifiable as his progeny, what else wouldn’t he lie about? And if he will abandon even his own granddaughter, whose interests would he even consider putting above his own?

To steal Tomasky’s example, if it were Trump in 2019 — or any other Republican president at any other time — who had publicly misstated the number of grandchildren they had to the exclusion of one and was instructing staff to repeat the falsehood, it would be reported by more than the New York Times.

That the Times has distinguished itself by covering the situation given its actual facts is a great credit to — not a strike against — the Gray Lady.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.