The White House correspondent beat isn’t what it used to be, writes Max Tani in Politico, because the “central Biden promise” to make “Washington news boring again” has been fulfilled.
Here is my favorite snippet:
“Jen [Psaki] is very good at her job, which is unfortunate,” one reporter who has covered the past two administrations from the room said. “And the work is a lot less rewarding, because you’re no longer saving democracy from Sean Spicer and his Men’s Warehouse suit. Jawing with Jen just makes you look like an asshole.”
Challenging “Jen” might make you look like an asshole in your hermetically sealed, intellectually incurious, snobbish, ideologically stunted friend group. To others, it only makes you look like a principled professional. It wasn’t the antagonistic disposition the media took toward Trump that was the problem over the past five years (setting aside all the fake stories the media were chasing for a moment). It’s that these are the same people who had adulated Barack Obama and are now covering up for the disastrous and feckless presidency of Joe Biden.
The “celebrity reporter” has disappeared, says Tani. No more question-begging and vacuous moral preening, I guess. But Tani bangs Fox’s Peter Doocy for keeping his “focus on topics that make for good Fox News fodder: Crimes at the Southern border and in big cities, the president’s son Hunter Biden, and gas prices and U.S. energy policy.” Why are historically high gas prices, one of the top concerns of voters in numerous polls, good fodder for Fox and not others? Because it’s bad news. Just as spiking crime rates and unprecedented anarchy at the southern border (mismanagement of the economy, the abandonment of Americans to warlords in Afghanistan, and so on) only hurt the president. Boring stuff, right? The corruption of the president’s family — and possibly the president himself — is only Fox News fodder because it’s the sole TV outlet willing to report on it regularly. That’s the problem.