The Democratic hacks disguised as journalists on MSNBC dismissed the long delay in Joe Biden holding his first press conference as nothing more than a scam “fomented” by “Fox News primetime.” The disgraced Brian Williams huffed that any concern in it taking so long is “whataboutism.”
He whined, “That there is a certain false equivalence in our coverage that campaigned to get Joe Biden to hold a formal news conference in many ways started as part of Fox News primetime programming because they needed to foment and raise a question.”
So nearly everything Donald Trump did was an assault on freedom and the First Amendment, but asking Biden to hold a press conference is unreasonable? Williams dismissed it all as unimportant to the American people:
In this day and age, presidents talk on their way to and from the helicopter, presidents talk at photos ops. Presidents have Twitter accounts, at least current presidents and I want to read you something from the journalist Dave Weigel. This was back on March 16th. He was in on the joke the day it was announced that president Biden would be doing this. “Did Biden agree to do a press conference? I was in a blue collar diner and all of a sudden working class voters got on the tables and started dancing.”
Kasie Hunt mildly stuck up for the need for Biden to hold a press conference. But she did it by touting the truth telling abilities of... Brian Williams???
In an age when social media on the one hand has been democratizing, in terms of allowing more voices to have access to bigger audiences, it used to be just the news wires or our TV broadcasts have the ability to reach that many people, that's obviously not true anymore, but it's also had the effect of making it so that politicians can avoid filters and go straight to those audiences, which removes, frankly, a layer of accountability.
You and I are charged with seeing the information that politicians provide and then trying to help our audiences understand that making sure we fill in context, that we point out untruths, lies, mistruths. Obviously, we spent a lot of time doing that during the Trump administration.
Williams, you might remember, lost his NBC Nightly News job after multiple lies.
A partial transcript is below:
MTP Daily
3/25/2021
1:11 PM ETBRIAN WILLIAMS: NBC news Capitol Hill correspondent Kasie Hunt also joining our conversation at this hour. K.C., let's take one of Michael Steele's points. 65 days in to the administration having what we now call the first formal news conference. Of course, in this day and age, presidents talk on their way to and from the helicopter, presidents talk at photos ops. Presidents have Twitter accounts, at least current presidents and I want to read you something from the journalist Dave Weigel. This was back on March 16th. He was in on the joke the day it was announced that president Biden would be doing this. “Did Biden agree to do a press conference? I was in a blue collar diner and all of a sudden working class voters got on the tables and started dancing.” You see what he's driving at, there's a certain what aboutism, that there is a certain false equivalence in our coverage that campaigned to get Joe Biden to hold a formal news conference in many ways started as part of Fox News primetime programming because they needed to foment and raise a question.
KASIE HUNT: So, look, Brian, one of the earliest things I learned about being a journalist at AP is we're never the story. The press is not the story. Now, that said, why is it important for a president to hold a press conference even when they have all of these other tools of communication? Because the reason the press is important because is because every American can't be in that room and the idea is that reporters are able to get a chance to press the president in a setting that's not scripted, where they don't get a chance to set the agenda themselves to have the conversation on their own terms in a way that does a better job of showing the American people what's really going on, what the President really thinks.
In an age when social media on the one hand has been democratizing, in terms of allowing more voices to have access to bigger audiences, it used to be just the news wires or our TV broadcasts have the ability to reach that many people, that's obviously not true anymore, but it's also had the effect of making it so that politicians can avoid filters and go straight to those audiences, which removes, frankly, a layer of accountability. You and I are charged with seeing the information that politicians provide and then trying to help our audiences understand that making sure we fill in context, that we point out untruths, lies, mistruths. Obviously, we spent a lot of time doing that during the Trump administration.
This is a normal ritual of a white house, something president Biden campaigned on bringing back. I would be very surprised if this turns into basically the circus we saw former president Trump's first press conference turn into. I'm sure you were watching that day. I remember going down into the basement tunnels of the Capitol and trying to find a Republican member of congress who stopped to watch the president's press conference. It was very difficult to do because it was so controversial. I don't think that's going to be the case this time. I think there are Democrats who are going to be very proud of what they see from president Biden and, of course, Republicans who are going to feel as though he said things that they disagree with and there are policies that they oppose. But we're in a much different environment now than we ever have been. And I do think it's important to underscore that we're dealing with complicated, difficult issues. We've been in a pandemic for a year. People are really struggling. There are kids who are not in school, people who lost loved ones. We lost over a half a million people. When you stack those challenges up against whether or not the president is having a press conference, obviously it's clear what the most important issue here is. It doesn't mean this isn't something important for presidents who want to adhere to the norms of the office do. And President Biden has said he wants to be somebody who does that.
