Becket Adams
National Review, May 7, 2023
“Fellow journalists, including the Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona and former Washington Post opinion columnist Radley Balko, were quick to amplify Allyn’s false claim, racking up hundreds of combined likes and retweets.”
On the last Saturday in April, before a rapt crowd of cheering journalists and B-list celebrities, President Biden declared the American press an indispensable institution, necessary to the very survival of the republic.’
“The free press is a pillar — maybe the pillar — of a free society, not the enemy,” the president said at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, referring to a notorious criticism of the media leveled by former president Donald Trump.
Then he joked, “In a lot of ways, this dinner sums up my first two years in office. I’ll talk for ten minutes, take zero questions, and cheerfully walk away.”
Attendees of the dinner roared with laughter.
Though the president says he respects and admires the press, his actions suggest otherwise. His refusal to take questions, for example, suggests that he holds the industry in as much contempt as did his predecessor. On this count, Biden has an awful lot in common with the public, which holds an overwhelmingly dim view of modern journalism. In fact, according to Gallup’s most recent data, only 16 percent say they have either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in “newspapers” and “news on the Internet.” Even fewer — 11 percent — said the same of “television news.” Which is to say, modern journalism is perhaps one or two notches higher on the popularity scale than syphilis.
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