With a presidential election looming, covering the White House in 2024 means accounting for the potential political consequences for the incumbent president, two Washington Post correspondents told the Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship class.

“Basically, everything we cover…it’s all through the lens of the campaign now,” said Yasmeen Abutaleb of The Washington Post.

Abutaleb joined Tyler Pager, another member of The Post’s White House reporting team, in a wide-ranging discussion about a demanding beat that becomes exponentially larger during an election year.

The correspondents highlighted a recent report by a Justice Department special counsel examining the president’s handling of classified documents, which instantly raised new questions about Biden’s competency to serve a second term.

The special counsel, while determining that the evidence did not support bringing criminal charges against the president, unleashed a political firestorm by casting Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

“So, the insane news day (starting with the report’s release)…is a great example,” Abutaleb said, adding that the decision not to charge the president became almost secondary to the “comments about his memory and his age.”

“And all of that became a massive campaign story because that is obviously the biggest issue he has heading into this election,” she said.

The White House’s handling of the war in Ukraine and especially the Israel-Hamas conflict also carry increasing political implications beyond the foreign policy challenges.

“I do think this election is a little bit different because, and even White House officials have said this, the Israel-Palestine issue is unique in that it’s a foreign policy issue that is also almost a domestic issue, because there’s a huge swath of America that is directly impacted by the conflict in vastly different ways,” Abutaleb said.

Among the beat’s challenges that does not change during an election year is the constant effort to build and maintain a diverse and reliable repository of sources.

“I think there’s no magic bullet that just unlocks sources,” Pager said. “If there was, everyone would be breaking news all the time, and journalism would not be difficult…

“One, the secret is to be a good person. Sources want to deal with people that are trustworthy, that are honest, that are not going to burn them, that are fair brokers of information,” Pager said. “So, I think that is the easiest thing that anyone can do is approach it with a sense of humility, of honesty, transparency, so that falls into the category of be a good human and that helps with sourcing.”

Access the full transcript here.