The woman who says Joe Biden sexually assaulted her a quarter century ago certainly has some weaknesses and discrepancies in her account.

But Tara Reade has more corroboration for her claim than Christine Blasey Ford did when she made her accusations against Brett Kavanaugh in the fall of 2018.

And yet the differences in the way the media treated both cases are stark, raising unmistakable questions of a double standard.

The New York Times remained silent for 19 days before publishing a story on Reade’s allegations, which Biden strongly denies. And the Washington Post, after interviewing Reade starting last year, declined to run a story -- until the paper decided to follow the Times a day later.

Dean Baquet, the Times executive editor, said in a Q&A with his paper that it never occurred to him that the delay would be tantamount to helping Biden’s campaign against President Trump.

“Mainly I thought that what The New York Times could offer and should try to offer was the reporting to help people understand what to make of a fairly serious allegation against a guy who had been a vice president of the United States and was knocking on the door of being his party’s nominee,” he said.

Baquet said he gets the argument that the Times should at least have run a short story on Reade’s allegations at the outset. “But I’m not sure that doing this sort of straightforward news story would have helped the reader understand.”

But the contrast with the Kavanaugh episode is inescapable. Ford, a California professor, had written a confidential letter to a Democrat on the Senate panel weighing his Supreme Court nomination.

Ford later went on the record with the Post, which published a lengthy story, and the Times and the rest of the media immediately pounced on her claims, leading to the confrontation at those televised hearings. But Ford was unable to produce any real-time corroboration because she said she told no one about the alleged incident at a high school party four decades earlier until 2012. That didn’t slow down the coverage one bit, even in the face of Kavanaugh’s heated denials.

Reade, however, produced a friend who confirmed to both the Times and Post that the accuser had told her about the alleged Biden attack at the time. Both papers withheld the friend’s name.

Baquet was asked about the Kavanaugh case, particularly the decision to write about claims by Julie Swetnick, who said he had joined in fraternity house rapes and later backed off that accusation. The Times story, written the same day, said “none of Ms. Swetnick’s allegations could be independently corroborated.”

Baquet’s response: “Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh’s status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation.”

But with Biden, “it wasn’t like we were in a heated race with the clock ticking.” Sure, he’s only the de facto Democratic presidential nominee. That strikes me as a weak rationalization.

The editor also brushed off the paper’s “stealth-editing” of a key sentence: “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.” Baquet said the second part was cut after the Biden campaign complained and that he deemed the deleted words vague and awkward.

Beyond the delays, both papers did a good job with their stories, which raised questions about Reade and her accusations from 1993. She made her increasingly explicit allegations while supporting other Democratic candidates, the last one being Bernie Sanders, and after heaping praise on Vladimir Putin (a “compassionate, caring, visionary leader”).

Most damaging is that Reade changed her story. In an interview with the Post last year, she said Biden had touched her neck and shoulders but nothing about the more serious allegation that he had penetrated her with his fingers. Reade also “laid more blame with Biden’s staff for ‘bullying’ her than with Biden. ‘This is what I want to emphasize: It’s not him.’”

She now blames a lack of courage for not telling the full story.

Also, Reade’s brother Moulton informed the Post that she had told him parts of the experience with Biden but not the alleged sexual assault. A few days later, he called back to say he now remembered his sister saying Biden put his hands under her clothes.

What’s nore, two former top Senate aides to Biden told the papers they never spoke to Reade, despite her claim that she had complained to both of them. And she could not produce a complaint she said she filed with a Senate personnel office.

Liberal Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, not a Biden fan, says the problem is that Reade’s account is unclear:

“No one, looking at what’s been reported about Reade and Biden, can claim to have more than a hunch about what happened, which is why, I suspect, a lot of mainstream feminists haven’t said much about it. Writers on the left and the right purport to find their silence damning: So liberal feminists don’t ‘believe women’ after all!”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just endorsed Biden, but said of the allegations at a public forum: "I think it's legitimate to talk about these things. And if we want, if we, again, want to have integrity, you can't say, you know — both believe women, support all of this, until it inconveniences you, until it inconveniences us."

The Federalist says that “perhaps this story would be bigger if the allegations hadn’t come out in the midst of a pandemic, but the Times and Post still found space in their pages to cover Reade’s story—just with questionable framing and weeks after they went public. That stands in clear contrast to their treatment of Ford.”

The Reade case remains somewhat murky, and yes, the coronavirus is overshadowing almost everything else. But what’s not murky is that at least in the early stages, two of the country’s top newspapers handled the Biden and Kavanaugh accusations quite differently.