By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, August
24, 2021
Poor Ron Klain.
It’s not a good sign when a White House
chief of staff to a Democratic president wants to retweet favorable news
coverage and all he can find is the least credible and most slavishly loyal
commentators on the Internet.
The Afghanistan fiasco has
created that most disorienting and discomfiting experience for a progressive
administration — a serious bout of critical media coverage immune to White
House spin and determined to tell the unvarnished story of an ongoing debacle.
The White House and its allies have lashed
out at what they are portraying as an insular, pro-war media ignoring its many
successes in the Afghan evacuation.
This, like Ron Klain’s tweeting, is a sign
of desperation and of a feeling of outraged betrayal that usually dependable
allies have, on this story, switched sides. Say it’s not so, CNN.
The White House is unfamiliar with what
it’s like to be on the receiving end of the kind of media feeding frenzy that
Florida governor Ron DeSantis experiences every other day (almost always
involving spurious storylines).
But on Afghanistan, Joe Biden in effect
set out to test how much shameless incompetence and dishonesty the media would
accept. The answer? Not nearly enough.
The press is blatantly biased and has
become even more so over time, repeatedly propagating false narratives that
have shredded its credibility. Still, there are limits beyond which even it can’t
be pushed.
Biden said that the Afghan withdrawal
wouldn’t be another Saigon within weeks of Saigon-like scenes of a hasty
evacuation of the U.S. embassy, of terrified Afghans clinging to a U.S.
transport plane, of desperate Afghans passing their infants over the barbed
wire to Western soldiers guarding the Kabul airport.
There is no number of
look-on-the-bright-side briefings that will overcome these indelible images,
and even a journalist who tilted heavily toward Biden in 2020 and supports his
agenda was going to be hard-pressed to look away.
The contradiction in Biden’s case for
withdrawal was also too stark to ignore. He originally justified his pullout
because the Afghan government and military were capable of defending the
country without us, then he justified his exit because the government and
military collapsed so quickly. Which was it?
Much of what Biden has said in his remarks
and press conferences has been vulnerable to instant fact-checks. When he said
that Americans weren’t having trouble getting through to the airport, reporters
could immediately attest that it wasn’t true.
Who was everyone supposed to believe?
Biden’s misleading assurance, or CNN reporter Clarissa Ward’s compelling report
from outside the Kabul airport that she was threatened with a whip for not
covering her face and her producer nearly pistol-whipped? Ward said it was
“mayhem” and “a miracle that more people haven’t been very, very seriously
hurt.”
The plaints from the administration and its
most committed journalistic supporters that the coverage has been unfair and
the product of a press biased toward interventionism ring hollow.
It is certainly true that the East Coast
media has more cosmopolitan attitudes than the rest of the country, but it’s
hardly full of committed foreign-policy hawks. The press didn’t notably dissent
from President Barack Obama’s pullout from Iraq in 2011 or his nuclear deal
with Iran. It has steadfastly favored the so-called peace process in the Middle
East.
It’s not as though only the American media
has noticed Biden’s ineptitude, either. If anything, our foreign allies have
been harsher about the humiliating mess Biden has stumbled into (former British
prime minister Tony Blair called it “imbecilic”) than journalists here at home.
Since he won the Democratic nomination
last year, Biden has been the subject of relentlessly favorable press coverage
forgiving his lapses and enthusiastic about his alleged accomplishments. It was
hard to see what he could do to lose media support, even for a time, and then
he botched his withdrawal.
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