OPINION:
When you join the White House in the press office, your job is to say … whatever they tell you to say.
They all do it. The wonderful Dana Perino told us again and again that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (they didn’t). Mike McCurry told us that Bill Clinton having sex in the Oval Office with an intern his daughter’s age was a “very complicated story” (uh, it wasn’t).
President Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney, a onetime journalist, was a prolific liar, and President Trump’s spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany vowed she would never lie to us in the press room and then did, oh, so often. Remember, it’s the job.
But those guys are left-bank sophisticates compared with President Biden’s flacks, Jen Psaki and her successor, Karine Jean-Pierre. While their predecessors had a seamless transition to the legacy media — they had, after all, toed the company line for years already — the Biden girls have failed miserably after lying professionally for the president, with one even trying so hard to sell a book that she announced she’s leaving the Democratic Party.
In her upcoming book, “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines,” Ms. Jean-Pierre says she feels it’s time for Americans to “stop thinking in boxes and not be so partisan.” Well, now’s a fine time to tell us! She’d been hyperpartisan from behind the White House podium for years, telling us her boss was at the top of his game and all his critics were, frankly, partisan rubes who likely still defecated in outhouses.
Her book, set to hit shelves in October, offers an insider peek at the three weeks leading up to Mr. Biden’s infamous decision to bow out of the 2024 presidential race. Like the new book from CNN lapdog Jake Tapper, we can only presume that she’ll say, “Oh, yeah, jeez, he was a mess mentally” (something she vehemently denied from the podium).
Then there’s Ms. Psaki, Mr. Biden’s first professional liar. She followed in the footsteps of many of her brethren in the liberal media, right into the liberal media. It makes sense; she’d been helping them tell their lies for years, and now, she was one of them.
As host of a show in the 9 p.m. ET hour Tuesdays through Fridays, Ms. Psaki let MSNBC down big time. Her show, “The Briefing,” which launched May 6, averaged 971,000 viewers, a 47% decrease from her predecessor’s numbers. But maybe the 46-year-old did better with Generation X? Nuh-uh. In the coveted 25- to 54-year-old demographic, she averaged just 78,000 viewers in May, a 52% drop from the average 161,000 viewers of her predecessor.
Ms. Psaki is not the only former Biden official to struggle on the liberal network. “The Weeknight,” co-hosted by Symone Sanders-Townsend, the official liar for Vice President Kamala Harris, has averaged 772,000 viewers since it launched May 5, down 19% from the previous hosts.
The move from the White House to media has, in the past, been a given. Presidential spokesmen are all good on TV (hence the job), and they’re all just fine saying whatever they need to say to get paid.
But this time around, it’s weird. Americans aren’t happy that the media lied to us all these years about Uncle Joe’s health (see the fallout on Mr. Tapper’s book, which is barely selling). They aren’t letting the professional liars transition from their lying jobs in the White House to their lying jobs in the media.
So maybe we really are making progress.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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