This week’s Liberal Media Scream features the classic attitude of the Washington press corps toward Democratic presidents that originally got us working with the Media Research Center to highlight out-of-touch newsies.
It is the complaint that the press is too tough when, in fact, they have barely scratched the surface of what some critics believe to be a corrupt presidential operation dating back to President Joe Biden’s days as vice president under former President Barack Obama.
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NBC’s Meet the Press featured Franklin Foer, an Atlantic writer who just released a bestselling book on the president titled The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future.
Foer told moderator Chuck Todd that “Trump caused the media to become so emotional, to get so engaged in covering all the high drama.”
And with Biden, he said, there has been a “desire on the part of the press to reassert its standards of objectivity.”
But, he added, Biden has continued to complain about his press, just like every other president. “He has been covered probably tougher than he deserves,” Foer said.
That line prompted our partner Brent Baker, the Media Research Center’s vice president of research and publications, to grade it five out of five screams.
From Sunday’s Meet the Press on NBC:
CHUCK TODD: You write: “Biden considered his poor approval rating a failure of the media, which someone neglected to note all the ways in which his administration was superior to Trump’s. It was also a failure of his own White House to effectively communicate. He complained that there weren’t enough surrogates on television defending him.” I’m shocked to find out that a White House believes they have a communications problem, not a substance problem.
FRANKLIN FOER: Right. So I think that Biden has — of course, every president who suffers an upside-down approval rating is going to moan about the media, and I think that there is some truth to it in his case where Trump caused the media to become so emotional, to get so engaged in covering all of the high drama. And I think, with the Biden administration, there’s been this desire on the part of the press to reassert its standards of objectivity. So I think, on certain measures, he’s probably right. He has been covered probably tougher than he deserves. But it also —
TODD: There’s no curve? He’s not being graded on a curve?
FOER: No.
TODD: No.
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Baker explains our weekly pick: “To channel what President Biden would say, ‘not a joke.’ Foer was seemingly quite serious. But it’s a ludicrous assessment to anyone but the most enthused Biden sycophants or Democratic partisans. To contend that Biden is the subject of media ‘objectivity’ and has received ‘tougher’ coverage than he ‘deserves,’ does not pass the laugh test.”
Rating: FIVE out of FIVE SCREAMS.
