Part of the problem with political reporting, and it's certainly not exclusive to the NYT at this point although they are the biggest offender, is that it all feels outsourced to polling. The "shoeleather" stuff isn't actually being on the ground trying to find out what people are talking about, it's the paper hiring a polling outfit to do a poll, and then having the political folks do a large writeup on said poll and drawing sweeping conclusions. And then sending the reporters out into the field to interview folks on the basis of whatever the polling results are.
Obviously old school political reporting can be informed by hard data, and certainly reporters shouldn't be drawing conclusions off of random interactions in the field, but often times it just seems like the data does all the driving and reporters just work backwards. And that really seems mailed in.
100%, it's all about the brand.
I think it's a fair discussion to have as to whether Biden is out giving independent interviews enough, but the sense of entitlement that the Times demonstrates is off-putting regardless. Especially in a time when other publications in the industry who don't have the resources that the Times has are facing existential challenges