Just as the left-wing media treated the Bush administration differently than it treated the Obama administration, it is clearly treating the Biden administration differently than it treated the Trump administration.
Trump was routinely slammed by mainstream media outlets for allegedly infringing on their First Amendment rights – the same First Amendment rights they routinely support being removed from college campuses and are currently arguing be removed from Fox News and other conservative outlets. Trump said mean things about the biased press at rallies and on social media, and the outlets cried and declared themselves victims of targeted harassment campaigns, claiming they were at risk of violent lunatics at any second.
While this was going on, these same reporters and journalists forgot that the Obama administration actively spied on them and punished anyone who leaked information to the press.
Now, in what would be a scandal if it had happened during the Trump administration, The Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani reported Monday that the Biden administration is asking reporters what questions they plan to ask during White House briefings. Tani spoke to “three sources with knowledge of the matter” and reviewed written communications to discover that Biden’s communications staff “have already on occasion probed reporters to see what questions they plan on asking new White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki when called upon during briefings.”
One might say “on occasion” doesn’t sound so bad, but remember Biden has only been president for 15 days. And the Biden White House’s choice to ask for questions in advance comes at a time when the president is not facing any media-created scandals (because he probably never will).
In mid-February 2017, less than a month after Trump was inaugurated, the Times reported that Trump’s communication’s team “steered the formal questions to two conservative-leaning news organizations” during a meeting between Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. As a result, the questions were about topics relevant to the two world leaders and their meetings. But the Times was upset at this, because it meant Trump wasn’t asked about his then-national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s phone calls with the then-Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak.
“Presidents, it must be said, routinely pick and choose reporters at news conferences, often with an eye to drawing certain kinds of questions. The Trump administration, however, has taken that strategy to a new level, managing to avoid scrutiny on a major running story,” the Times wrote at the time.
The Flynn was only major because the media wanted it to be. Americans outside the D.C. bubble and CNN/MSNBC outrage machine could hardly see what was wrong with an incoming administration speaking with other countries and how that violated a decades old law that was almost never enforced.
Yet the Times and other outlets took umbrage over the fact that Trump didn’t answer questions from antagonistic reporters.
What the Biden administration is doing is different. They’re requesting to know what questions will be asked in advance, rather than simply calling on friendly outlets. Yet, there is no article about this from the Times.
Tani wrote that asking for questions in advance isn’t necessarily new, as former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders apparently asked “certain news outlets about their questions in advance of some major or high-profile Trump press conferences or events.”
“Communications staffers during the Bush and Obama years would ask reporters for the gist of questions in advance if they wanted to interview Cabinet secretaries,” Tani added.
But Biden appears to be doing this on regular days, which makes one wonder what will happen when Biden faces a scandal the media can’t ignore.