Frieden's complaint

 Former CDC Director Tom Frieden talked with an editor at BMJ. He did not mince words:

In the US what we’ve seen is a response [to the Covid-19 pandemic] that wasn’t organised, wasn’t based on science, and didn’t communicate openly, honestly, or forthrightly with the American public. So I’m enormously encouraged by the start of the Biden administration where it’s very clear there’s organisation, there’s a plan, there’s clear communication, and science will rule again. 

Q:It must have been painful to watch as political appointees to the CDC began making decisions about data, policy, and recommendations

It really was unprecedented. The CDC was undermined, sidelined, and maligned in a way that has never happened before. Materials were put on the CDC website that weren’t written by the CDC. I would compare that to someone writing graffiti on a national monument, except as someone pointed out to me [at least in that case] everyone knows it’s graffiti. I think it’ll take some time for the trust in the CDC to be regained. . . . 

At the press conference at which the CDC announced the recommendation that people should wear masks, President Trump said, I’m not going to wear a mask. Now, if President Trump had said, I don’t want the CDC issuing a recommendation that people wear masks, that would have been within his authority—[though] I wouldn’t agree with it [and think] it would have been a terrible mistake. But to have the complete dysfunctionality of a government that’s recommending masks and at the very same press conference, undermining that recommendation was really mind boggling.

 

Okay, that's important for Americans to know. So why is this only happening in a British medical journal? Eric Alterman's e-mail newsletter may help us understand:

Thanks to a heads-up from Mediaite, we may take a moment to focus on what ought to be considered a seminal moment in the history of the White House press corps. It came last week when, during one of Jen Psaki’s briefings, NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander tried to script Joe Biden with a demand that he praise Donald Trump’s vaccine performance. I swear I’m not making this up.

(One reason, by the way, that even political obsessives may not be aware of it is the fact that, as Eric Boehlert notes, while CNN ran “virtually every minute of every White House press briefing live and in its entirety,” it stopped after a month of Biden’s.)

Sounding like a made man in the Trump crime family, Alexander complained that, in Biden’s speech to the nation last week, “there was no mention of the president under whose administration these vaccines were developed … Does former President Trump not deserve any credit on vaccines?” Psaki didn’t take the bait, praising “science and medical experts,” who, you know, actually developed the vaccine, and also noting that “most of the infrastructure to vaccinate people was not in place when Biden took office.” After not getting the answer he wanted, Alexander nevertheless kept at it. “But on the development of the vaccines, it was Operation Warp Speed that was invented, executed, initiated under the former president.”

That’s all bad enough. But here is what would be called “the beauty part” were it not so damn morally, intellectually, and professionally revolting. Alexander went on: “So in the spirit of bipartisanship and unity last night, as opposed to the first comments which were about the denials in the first days, weeks or months, why not just say, ‘With credit to the previous administration and the former president for putting us in this position, we are glad that we have been able to move it forward?’”

Got that? This guy is not from Fox or Newsmax or Breitbart or OAN or Gateway Pundit or Ben Shapiro or National Review or Sinclair or The Daily Caller or The Washington Times, etc., etc. And he’s not merely demanding to know why the president is not crediting the man who regularly accuses him of being senile and having stolen the election and having a son who belongs in jail and of hating his country, but the man who in his spare time totally screwed up virtually everything having to do with both the virus and vaccine, because in addition to all of the above he’s an egomaniacal psychopath. That’s why, when Stephen Colbert asked Dr. Fauci “what changed” under Biden, the good doctor grinningly replied, “Everything.” Don’t forget also that we know that the Trump administration did not bother to come up with a plan to distribute the vaccine, though even here, Alexander took up the Trump team’s dishonest propaganda: “You can’t say it was absolutely not usable at all,” though, in fact, dropping vaccines off at the airport in each state and saying, “Go to it, guys,” is pretty damn close to unusable.

What I would ask, if I didn’t already know better, is what the hell is an NBC reporter doing trying to script the president on behalf of Trump in the first place? And no less important, why is he doing so, when, even narrowly speaking, he’s talking bullshit? And why didn’t the rest of the room burst out in hysterics? And why hasn’t he been fired for it? And really, how can we ever believe anything he ever reports again, knowing that this is his attitude toward covering the Biden administration? And what business does NBC News think it’s in, anyway?

This is a short newsletter, so here are some short answers.

• White House reporters think their job is to play “gotcha,” not to get news.

• White House reporters cannot admit that one of America’s two major political parties has become a cult in thrall to autocratic, conspiracy-minded lunatics who care not a whit about governance, even if that means hundreds of thousands of people must die unnecessarily.

• There are exceptions, of course, but most TV journalists think of themselves as entertainers, not as news gatherers. They care about their Q Ratings far more than about telling the truth. They understand, likely accurately, that their corporate bosses don’t want the truth and their audiences have not been prepared to hear it. That’s why they loved Trump; he cast them as “the enemy of the people” and gave them a clear role to play. It’s also why the members of the White House press still have not figured out how to handle a president whose only concern is how to get the job done that he was elected to do, without theatrics and the kind of childish playacting that so many White House reporters think the job entails.

 

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