The establishment media handed President Joe Biden negative reviews after his press conference Wednesday, the sixth reported solo presser of his presidency.
As the oftentimes Democrat-allied media have tried to protect the president from his gaffes, miscues, and overt blunders by avoiding certain topics while focusing on others, many of the establishment media’s headlines after his two-hour press conference were negative.
“As one Joe builds, another Joe destroys,” a Washington Post op-ed headlined about the press conference. The article used language such as, “Biden admitted defeat” and “Biden found himself negotiating with President Manchin through the assembled reporters.”
“It’s time for him [Biden] to produce — or spare us the naive piety. In democracy’s dark hour, he has already done incalculable harm,” the article dissected the speech.
The leading opinion article in the New York Times Thursday morning highlighted Biden’s polling slide with independents and the president’s “weak approval ratings” before acknowledging Biden failed to destroy election integrity.
“Never mind about voting rights or avoiding another Jan. 6. It’s the economy, Joe,” the article stated, criticizing Biden’s 40-year-high inflation.
PBS News titled its response to Biden’s press conference, “Biden acknowledges setbacks to domestic agenda in rare press conference.”
After noting the solo press conference was his first in ten months, PBS News stressed Biden’s answers to the administration’s crisis: “anxiety over omicron,” “soaring inflation,” and the “stalemate on voting rights legislation.”
The Post published a second headline that insinuated Biden’s presidency is broken. “How Biden can fix his presidency,” it read.
“His presidency could use a reset,” the article bluntly stated. “[I]n recent weeks, the omicron variant has set records for new cases in the United States, jobs numbers are volatile, inflation is up, and the Democrats’ $2 trillion Build Back Better plan has stalled in the Senate.”
The Post also published a third negative headline about Biden’s press conference, which admitted the media’s reviews of Biden’s press conference were negative. “The media wants to paint Joe Biden as a failure. He won’t let that happen.”
“President Biden, while marking the end of his first year in office on Wednesday, met a press corps anxious to paint him as a failure,” the article’s first sentence began.
Upon the conclusion of Biden’s press conference, where he defended himself against polling data that suggests 49 percent believe the president is not mentally fit, the White House had reportedly planned a media “clean up” by Vice President Kamala Harris and White House press secretary Jen Psaki:
Harris was reportedly scheduled on all three cable news networks: CBS’s Morning, NBC’s Today Show, and ABC’s Good Morning America. Psaki appeared on Fox News. And White House chief of staff Ron Klain had a prerecorded message ready to air on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:
Reviews of Harris’s interviews were also negative. Harris laughed on CBS about Biden’s failure to shut down the coronavirus and seemingly ignored questions about election integrity on NBC:
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter and Gettr @WendellHusebø.