The New York Times took a rightful beating for its good faith headline in the wake of the El Paso shooting—“Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism”—that was so by-the-book it could have been a Yankees box score. The five words, bereft of context, sparked yet another debate about truth and journalism in the Trump age, spearheaded by blue-check-mark Twitter personalities who aren’t journalists but posture as experts when the retweets demand it. Can a newspaper straight up call the president a racist? Or should reporters stick to the old rules of dispassionate he-said-she-said journalism? The controversy illuminated an existential challenge for the Times as its business model has migrated from advertising to subscriptions: The newspaper of record is now beholden to a reader base of educated and angry liberals who scream “Do better!” even when the men and women of the Times are doing their best.

The controversy, though, felt distinctly about the Times and the convulsions inside it, a media story for media people. Less attention was paid to another Times headline that revealed much more about the shaky state of political journalism in the digital age, and its failure to ditch the tiresome habits that helped give rise to Trump in the first place. The headline—“Joe Biden Asks Audience to Imagine Obama’s Assassination”—posted on a summer Friday, August 23, late in the afternoon. Biden, speaking in New Hampshire, had been rambling through one of his usual monologues, this one about how America emerged from the dark trauma of the ’60s to find itself again. Like the grandpa he is, Biden sees younger faces in his crowds and often tries to draw historical parallels to our current moment. Touching on the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Biden invoked Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. “Imagine what would have happened if, God forbid, Barack Obama had been assassinated after becoming the de facto nominee. What would have happened in America?” Biden said in two sentences, before moving on to other things.

Biden—literally, folks—asked the audience to imagine Obama’s assassination. But was this news? For the reporters at the event, Biden’s remark was at least new, which is certainly one definition of news. But were Biden’s off-the-cuff remarks worthy of the avalanche of sinister-sounding headlines that followed, rapidly pushed out on social media with attention-grabbing tweets and murky implications? The Times posted its story at 7:01 p.m. on Twitter, and the floodgates opened. In the next two hours, Fox News, the Hill, the Washington Post, HuffPost, AP, Politico, USA Today, CNN, and other newsrooms all followed the lead of the Times—as they always have—by posting their own versions of the Biden story, primed for Twitter. None of them cited an interview with an actual voter. The Times headline was barely distinguishable from those of the Daily Caller (“Biden Asks Crowd To Imagine If Barack Obama Had Been Assassinated”) and Sputnik (“Biden Asks Voters at His Rally to Imagine if Obama Had Been Assassinated”), which are very much not the newspapers of record.

The Biden campaign pushed back aggressively against the assassination “news,” noting that his comments were being ripped out of context by some of the nation’s top reporters and premier media organizations. “The crowd didn’t even react because they understood his point,” tweeted Andrew Bates, Biden’s rapid-response director. “This click-chasing is sickening.” After the campaign complained, the Times changed its headline—without notation, of course—and added a dash of context: “Joe Biden, Recalling ’68, Asks Audience to Imagine Obama’s Assassination.” As to the news value of the comments themselves, the Times could only bring itself to call them an “unusual rhetorical detour.” But with Biden, of course, unusual rhetorical detours are the norm. Other reports that followed revealed more clearly what was going on here. “Biden has long been prone to gaffes and misspeaking, another aspect of his candidacy that has come under scrutiny during his latest presidential run,” wrote the Associated Press. And there it was: This was a gaffe story, and Biden is the gaffe candidate. Never mind that he’s been making gaffes his whole political career, that it’s baked into his political identity. His verbal flubs might even be one of his most endearing strengths for voters who crave authenticity. But these gaffes have now apparently “come under scrutiny,” which really just means his gaffes are being chronicled by reporters who go into his every event hunting for the latest gaffe. As the linguist Steven Pinker said in 2008, “Political coverage, when it’s not the horse race, is just gaffe-spotting.”