Yamiche Alcindor, previously a White House correspondent for PBS, will be transitioning into a role covering Washington more broadly for NBC, the network announced Tuesday. She will continue to host Washington Week for PBS.
Over the years, Alcindor has built a reputation as one of the most partisan reporters in the mainstream press, using her seat in the White House briefing room as a soapbox for progressive politics, despite working for the taxpayer-funded, and ostensibly nonpartisan PBS.
Here’s a taste of what NBC will be getting out of its newest employee:
-This summer, Alcindor said the debate around the Biden administration-backed For the People Act — which would have federalized America’s elections systems — was really an argument over “what is American democracy and who should have access to it?” and “whether or not we want America to be the place that the Founders — flawed as they may have been — the Founders wanted it to be.”
-Alcindor asked National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan,“how President Biden plans to convince especially our European allies that former President Trump was an anomaly in some ways, all of the things that he did to in some ways traumatize those leaders —calling into question the need for NATO? What’s the plan there and is there concern that those scars are gonna be deeper than his ability to address them? ”
-At Biden’s first press conference as president in March, Alcindor preceded her question for the president on the border crisis by asserting that “you’ve said over and over again that immigrants shouldn’t come to this country right now. That message is not being received. Instead, the perception of you that got you elected as a moral, decent man is the reason a lot of immigrants are coming to this country and are trusting you with unaccompanied minors.”
-On MSNBC last November, Alcindor said Biden’s burgeoning cabinet, “felt like the Avengers, it felt like we’re being rescued from this craziness that we’ve all lived through for the last four years and now here are the superheroes to come and save us all.”
-Alcindor praised Biden for characterizing Republicans as “trying to bully people into being sick…trying to bully teachers into teaching in unsafe environments,” on Joy Reid’s show in September.
-After Republican Glenn Youngkin won last month’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, Alcindor quizzed Biden on what Democrats should “possibly do differently to avoid similar losses in November, especially since Republicans are now successfully running on culture wars issues and false claims about critical race theory?”
-When White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre briefed the press for the first time in May, Alcindor noted that “she pledged, Karine Jean-Pierre, to be truthful with the press, and that, of course, is a marked difference from Joe Biden’s predecessor, former President Trump,” explaining that “it felt different.”
-In August, as the Biden administration’s plan for withdrawing from Afghanistan blew up in its face, Alcindor insisted that the president was “not running away from the responsibility” for its failure.
-Last September, Alcindor described those who defended Kyle Rittenhouse as “the part of his [Trump’s] base that think that it’s okay for a 17-year-old to shoot people in the street who are unarmed, who are at a protest, who are upset about the way that the federal government is treating African-Americans.”
-Alcindor chided the Biden administration for not backing Congresswoman Maxine Waters and her advice that people become “confrontational” if Derek Chauvin was not convicted of murdering George Floyd, saying “I wonder why the White House isn’t coming to the defense of Rep. Waters given the fact that she is facing an onslaught of attacks by, I would say Republicans, I wonder why the White House isn’t saying, ‘We back what she said about being confrontational.’”
-After Biden took office, Alcindor pushed the administration’s line that on vaccine distribution “what you have is a Biden administration that is, as Vice President Harris said, starting from scratch, and that is really, really hard.” That claim was disputed by even Dr. Anthony Fauci, an outspoken critic of the Trump administration.