Get Me Meacham! Biden Brings Back the Media’s Good Old Days
But what of the working reporters in the White House? Most of the writers in that group are generations younger than the 78-year-old Mr. Biden. They may not have read all of Mr. Meacham’s books. And the president-elect appears to have learned from his campaign that he can mostly ignore the news media and sneer at Twitter.
He also has the advantage that Mr. Trump has so raised the bar on presidential scandals and gaffes that even his loosest talk or most questionable hire may not scandalize. But Mr. Trump has also gotten us all used to an extraordinary, if inadvertent, level of transparency. He rarely resisted answering shouted, timely questions, and his leaky White House offered journalists and their audience an X-ray portrait of a government running off the rails. The internet, meanwhile, is noisier and even more polarized than when Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama left office