President-elect Joe Biden’s term in office may be only four years.
But the fawning news coverage of his incoming administration already is making it feel like a century.
On Thursday, Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris made an appearance on CNN. During the interview, the host asked if Biden and Harris have talked yet with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci.
The former vice president responded in the affirmative, revealing some of what they had talked about.
“We talked about masking,” said Biden. “It is important that we, in fact, the president and the vice president, we set the pattern by wearing masks.”
He added, “And, so, it’s a matter of — and I think my inclination, Jake, is, on the first day I’m inaugurated, is to say, I’m going to ask the public for 100 days to mask, just 100 days to mask, not forever, 100 days. And I think we’ll see a significant reduction if we incur that — if that occurs, with vaccinations and masking, to drive down the numbers considerably, considerably.”
That’s not exactly groundbreaking stuff. Still, following the interview, this is an actual subhead that appeared on CNN’s website Friday morning: “The President-elect revealed the galvanizing, altruistic, first national rallying call of his administration in a CNN exclusive interview.”
Next I suppose CNN will tell us Biden hit five hole-in-ones during his very first round of golf.
CNN ran a similarly worded news alert on social media: “The President-elect revealed the galvanizing, altruistic, first national rallying call of his administration in a CNN exclusive interview with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, previewing a sharp change of direction when he succeeds President Donald Trump.”
The network tweaked the language on its webpage later so that the headline read, “Biden-Harris interview reveals a fresh approach,” followed by a subhead that read, “the President-elect announced an effective promotion for Dr. Fauci, who Trump has marginalized and insulted.”
To be clear, these are news alerts and headlines. This is not the work of CNN’s opinion division. The post-interview news analysis bears two bylines: White House reporter Stephen Collinson and CNN national political reporter Maeve Reston.
The line about Biden’s “galvanizing, altruistic,” rallying call, by the way, is in the news report itself, right there in the second paragraph.
The opening sentences are not much subtler.
“President John F. Kennedy urged Americans to ask not what their country could do for them,” the article reads, “but what they could do for their country. When he takes the same oath of office next month, Joe Biden will effectively beseech the nation to do exactly the same thing, if in more prosaic terms, with an appeal for every American to wear a mask for his first, symbolic 100 days in office.”
The story adds later, “FDR told Americans in his first inaugural address that ‘the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself,’ steeling a demoralized citizenry to hold firm amid a banking crisis that threatened to destroy an already devastated economy. … Like his Democratic forbear, he will use the iconic opening moments of his term to summon an exhausted people to unite, in common cause — with the help of new vaccines — this time to beat the virus and save the economy.”
God almighty. As if nobody else has been urging us all to wear masks for the past eight months.
It is going to be an agonizingly long four years of this sort of thing, isn’t it?
