www.nytimes.com/2020/10/04/business/media/trump-coronavirus-coverage.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20201005&instance_id=22811&nl=the-morning®i_id=94799984§ion_index=2§ion_name=the_latest_news&segment_id=39842&te=1&user_id=aeedb5eab46ff7275a38df5b049bd0feThese are a very few excerpts from the article, chosento express specific points on the geriatric state of American governance, and not to present the readability or logic of the full story. For that, please go to the link at the beginning.
THE MEDIA EQUATION
How to Cover a Sick Old ManBy Ben Smith
Oct. 4, 2020
When John Bresnahan was starting out as a reporter in the mid-1990s, he approached Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who had run for president in 1948 as a segregationist and was still shuffling through the Capitol. Senator Thurmond, born in 1902, gave no indication that he’d understood Mr. Bresnahan’s question and responded with a non sequitur.
The young reporter saw his older colleagues shaking their heads and snickering. The kid had expected the elderly senator to be able to carry on a conversation! They didn’t report on Senator Thurmond’s infirmity — that wasn’t how things were done — but they all knew about it.
These days, Mr. Bresnahan is the congressional bureau chief for Politico. .... he has become Capitol Hill’s grim reaper, a rare reporter with the stomach to print some obvious truths: that some top lawmakers aren’t all there.
In 2017, Mr. Bresnahan and his colleague Anna Palmer wrote that the powerful Republican chairman of the Senate’s appropriations committee, Thad Cochran, was “frail and disoriented,” a story that sped his retirement. Last month, Mr. Bresnahan and Marianne LeVine reported that fellow Democrats were worried whether Dianne Feinstein was up to leading her side of the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings because she gets “confused by reporters’ questions, or will offer different answers to the same question depending on where or when she’s asked.”
.... The White House press corps is trying to perform a fundamental job of journalism — delivering simple facts about President Trump’s condition — in the face of Mr. Trump’s years of casual fabrication and his doctors’ clumsy evasions and contradictions. ....
Physical decline is likely to be a major feature of the next few years of American politics, at least. The current line of succession, after Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, features Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is 80, and the Senate president pro tempore, Charles Grassley, 87, who also runs the Senate Finance Committee. Ms. Pelosi’s two most powerful deputies in the House, James Clyburn and Steny Hoyer, are both 80 or older. Over in the Senate, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee is 85 and coasting to re-election. The chairman of the Appropriations Committee is 86. Joe Biden, who turns 78 next month, is nearly a year younger than the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who is also seeking re-election in November.
This concentration of power in the hands of the old is an American phenomenon, Derek Thompson recently wrote in The Atlantic, noting that our leaders are getting older as European leaders get younger.
“If government of the elderly, by the elderly, and for the elderly will not perish from the Earth, the rest of us might suffer instead,” he lamented.
But it also means that journalists must get past the taboos and be frank about the normal process of aging, and must emulate Mr. Bresnahan’s stomach for blunt truths. Typically, whispers about age and health have remained on the margins of the political conversation, ....
Among the people scrambling this weekend at American newspapers are obituary writers, as major outlets assigned top reporters to update Mr. Trump’s obituary — Peter Baker at The New York Times, Marc Fisher at The Washington Post and Mark Z. Barabak at The Los Angeles Times, people at each paper told me. But the easiest solution to this media quandary is for citizens to elect leaders of working age. A friend recently told me sadly how nice it had been to see a national politician, Kamala Harris, jog down a few stairs.
“It will help if reporters are medically knowledgeable, and ask the right questions, e.g. blood pressure, heart rhythm, sleep disorders,” Dr. Mark Fisher, a professor of neurology and political science at the University of California, Irvine, told me on Sunday. “The more specific and precise questions reporters ask, the better. A robust fund of knowledge by the reporter is a great advantage.”
None of this comes easily.
“Reporters are human beings and we cover these people,” Mr. Bresnahan told me. “You have respect for who the person was. It’s difficult.”
* * * *
The average age of Members of the House at the beginning of the 115th Congress was 57.8 years; of Senators, 61.8 years, among the oldest in U.S. history. The overwhelming majority of Members of Congress have a college education.Dec 20, 2018
Then women are always a hot topic, be it Trump and free grabbing of them, or democrats and trying to appeal to them.
