96 Hours

The drums of war.

For nearly 48 hours, our media had more drums sounding than the garage of a thirteen-year-old boy. This was it. This was everything they'd dreamed of. A vicious enemy marching on the capital. The fleeing of refugees. Mass evacuations. Chaos. And the opportunity to place the blame squarely at the foot of a Democratic president.

Flash forward 96 hours.

We now have a very different picture of the world from Sunday afternoon. Joe Biden provided a master class on Monday by not only owning the situation but also by explaining it coolly and calmly to the American people. As Nicole Wallace noted it was a speech where "95% of Americans will agree with everything he just said. 95% of the press covering the White House will disagree." With this unusually honest assessment of our media, Wallace made clear that what was best for the country was not what was best for the media and they knew it. By identifying a media-driven by conflict rather than competence, Wallace showed us all that the reality of what was happening was subject to interpretation. And it was subject to a media that thrived on elevating the drama and downplaying the successes of what was actually happening on the ground in Afghanistan.

Tuesday continued to dismantle the media's hopes for calamity. The major commercial airport in Kabul was secured, aided by the presence of an additional 1,000 American troops, allowing for the evacuation of nearly 6,000 people since August 14. This caused NBC News' Richard Engle to finally mellow out after a 48-hour bender. Since there was no longer any immediate threat on the ground, media coverage shifted to those who had been evacuated. Of course, it took no time for Republican xenophobia to kick in and to already proclaim the hundreds of inbound refugees as dirty and untrustworthy. But when you get the Republican governor of Utah coming out as being "eager" to accept Afghan refugees, suddenly any type of controversy about refugee resettlement seems to take a major hit when the effort to do so is already bipartisan. Once again, the media had been thwarted in its efforts to generate some sort of Afghanistan controversy. 

Then we had Wednesday.

At approximately 3 PM EST, Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley came forward with a joint press conference with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. As part of his statement, Milley reflected on the rapid Taliban advancement and stated unequivocally, "There was nothing I or anyone else saw that indicated the collapse of...this government in 11 days." This was the final nail in the coffin of the Very Excited Media and their quest to create Biden's Katrina. Biden owned the decision. The airfield was secured and evacuations were being conducted in a timely and efficient manner. There was bipartisan support for refugee resettlement stateside. And now America's leading general has said that even our most advanced intelligence agencies that no idea just how quickly these events would have unfolded. In short, everything the media has been saying on Sunday had now completely been disproven by Wednesday afternoon.

How this unfolded in the media was a disgrace but it is exactly what we have come to expect. Our media is irreparable, especially when it comes to breaking news. Rather than doing in-depth pieces on the twenty-year conflict, our media gleefully hopped right in when they thought it might be a moment that would damage Joe Biden. Because let's face it: Sleepy Joe isn't good for business. Major media ratings are down across the board since Biden took office with CNN alone having lost 45% of its viewers and MSNBC having lost 30%. These "left-leaning" cable news networks needing something, anything to get back viewers, and they saw a prime opportunity to damage President Biden when it came to Afghanistan, even if everything that was happening was put into place by previous administrations. All these media outlets saw was chaos and chaos has and always will be fantastic for their bottom line.

What we can learn from all this is that President Biden is what the media hates: a thoughtful, decent human being. Someone who has seen the cesspool of the DC Beltway Media for nearly a half-century and knows them to be the parasites that they are. Biden's Monday speech wasn't for the New York Times or the Washington Post, it was for the voters. The media knows this and they hate it. They hate not being able to ask their gotcha questions at press conferences. They hate not being able to take quotes out of context. They hate a president who actually explains his positions and does so using facts and history of the issue at hand. But most of all, they hate the fact that a drama-free, competent administration forces them to invest in actual journalism and not the clickbait headlines they have been accustomed to over the last four years. 

That is the real issue here. Biden is no Trump. For America and the world, this is a good thing. For our media, it is bad. It is bad because they don't have someone who is a walking, talking controversy each and every day. They don't have someone constantly attacking his political opponents. They don't have someone whose administration is constantly riddled with corruption. They don't have an adversary; someone who insults and belittles them and who attempts to make them feel small. Trump's war on the media may have been mean-spirited but the media loved it. They loved the give and take. They loved the childish insults and monickers. They loved it because not only were they reporting the news, they were the news. And you don't get into journalism without a healthy ego that secretly or openly wants you to one day become the subject of your own writings. 

With Joe Biden, our media is forced to once again do its job. A job that takes time and effort and holds you accountable to your editors. A job where research must once again be done on issues like child poverty. Our media can no longer walk into a press briefing and expect to have the next day's headline given to them on a silver platter thanks to some outrageous statement by the White House press secretary. Our media now has to work for its stories, something it has not done in nearly 5 years. They will jump at any opportunity they see to revert back to the days of Trump with scandals, real or manufactured. What we saw these past 96 hours is not an aberration; it is very much the MO of today's media. We must be vigilant as always and know that no matter what the truth may be, our media will willingly bypass it in order to generate some much-needed ratings. That is why our media can no longer be trusted to serve the American people. 

And that is why we need an informed citizenry now more than ever.