Reflection: Biden and the Media

Only in New Hampshire can you see two top-tier presidential candidates in the same town on the same day.

After a morning rally-in-the-park with South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and a couple hours in the Dover Public Library, I walked across the river to the other side of town for an afternoon speech by the frontrunner, former Vice President Biden. Right away, I knew I was at a different type of event. The location was the dirt parking lot of a neighborhood seafood restaurant, a blue-collar establishment along the river that overlooked a small marina of motor boats.

Biden was scheduled to speak under a medium-sized white tent, as the mostly elderly crowd settled into plastic folding chairs. Although the restaurant and marina were perfect for a candidate who refers to himself as "middle-class Joe," the tent, with the feel of a corporate luncheon or a college reunion, seemed out of place. This was not the large downtown rally of a rising star. This was a carefully planned public appearance for the former Vice President.

Former Vice President Joe Biden spoke to a crowd of 200 people under a tent in the back lot of a seafood restaurant on the banks of the Cocheco River in Dover.

Upon my arrival, I reported to the media check-in and claimed my credential. The Biden event was the first of my summer that required members of the media to register in advance. Others either welcome walk-ups at a sign-in table or have no visible media check-in process.

It was easy to see why the Biden campaign was different. No other candidate had attracted even half of the media presence that the former Vice President did that day. Behind a row of television cameras in the back of the tent, there were three rows of chairs for members of the print media, including representatives from the New York Times, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Time Magazine and Bloomberg. Other chairs were marked for local publications and one at the end of the last row was reserved for Williams College.

Fifteen minutes before the scheduled start of the speech, the seats were mostly empty as journalists swarmed the edges of the tent. Television crews, with their brightly-colored trucks scattered across the parking lot, were conducting on-camera interviews with voters behind the tent. Print reporters were stalking the sides, looking for the right person to give them a quote, or already engaged in fast-paced conversation with voters, waving a recorder in their face or scribbling notes on a pad.

I soon joined them, finding a couple voters along the sides who were not already talking to somebody else. The ratio of voters to journalists at the event was maybe 8:1.

When Biden finally arrived and took the microphone — I watched from the side of the tent to get a better angle for photos, which would have been blocked by the television cameras from my seat in the roped-off media section — I wanted to keep an eye on these members of the media. Would there be an audible reaction of clicking keyboards and rustling paper if Biden committed a gaffe? What if he hurled a new insult at President Donald Trump or critiqued his Democratic rivals? 

What would eventually make it into the next day's headlines?

The answer was not his emphasis upon foreign policy. After the speech, a dozen protestors, mostly from the New Hampshire Youth Movement with some from the national group Movimiento Cosecha, confronted Biden over his record on deportations during the Obama administration. The activists asked Biden to apologize for the deportations, then raised signs and briefly chanted when the former Vice President declined. Biden clarified his position before turning around and leaving.

A dozen protestors confronted Biden after his speech. The activists listened and held signs as Biden declined to apologize for deportations under the Obama administration.

While the protestors caused a commotion during the meet-and-greet after the speech, they did not disrupt the speech itself. A Fox News report led with the relatively minor confrontation. A Politico headline was misleading. A cursory glance would suggest that Biden was repeatedly interrupted during his speech. Voters who did not stick around after the speech to try to get a photo with the former Vice President or shake his hand would have had no idea what happened.

But when you are the frontrunner, when you attract that many media members for a relatively small event, that seems like the price of doing business. If you limit access to your candidate — Biden did not take questions — reporters are going to leap at anything spontaneous or unexpected. Over the course of the weekend, several journalists told me that the roped-off media section reminded them of the Clinton campaign in 2016.

The protestors themselves were mobbed by journalists after Biden left the scene. I waited for several minutes to talk to Emily Bloch, a Massachusetts-based activist with Movimiento Cosecha. While I was familiar with the New Hampshire Youth Movement protestors from earlier events, Bloch and her organization were new to me. When I reached the front, I remarked on the size of the media presence. "That's good," she said. "That's what we want."

This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.