Jim Geraghty of National Review Online reacts to a truly mystifying media hiring decision.
It turns out that the recently canceled Brian Stelter was a prophet when he asked then–White House press secretary Jen Psaki, “What does the press get wrong when covering Biden’s agenda?”
At the time, Stelter got a decent amount of grief for asking the softest of softballs, and essentially asking how coverage of the White House could get even nicer and more flattering. But apparently Stelter isn’t the only person who thinks Psaki makes an ideal critic of media coverage of politics.
Because Jen Psaki will soon be on MSNBC, “debunking things, calling out BS.”
“First of all, my business is not rage,” Psaki said at Vox Media’s Code Conference in Los Angeles. “What I hope to do is bring that passion for explaining things, debunking things, calling out BS when you see it to my next job.”
That’s right, we’re about to enter the era of Jen Psaki, fact-checker. I expect this means we’ll get more declarations that the CDC director offers separate personal assessments of health policies, that President Biden meant to say the opposite of what he actually said, that the White House doesn’t have a view on whether it’s wrong to leak drafts of Supreme Court decisions, that it is “unfair and absurd” for companies to increase costs on consumers in response to higher tax rates, that anyone who criticizes a Biden speech is proving that the president struck a nerve. or that the supply-chain crisis is mostly a matter of treadmill deliveries being delayed.
If MSNBC wants to hire Psaki to be a left-of-center talking head who will defend whatever Biden says or does 99.9 percent of the time, that’s their right. But please don’t try to sell us that she’s offering a show that serves up explanatory journalism, debunks falsehoods, and calls out “BS.”
