Media top headlines August 24
In media news today, critics express outrage as Biden again takes no questions on Afghanistan, DeSantis blasts Associated Press in an open letter, and Psaki gets panned after saying it's 'irresponsible' to say Americans are 'stranded' in Afghanistan
As the Biden administration faces its greatest foreign policy challenge since taking office with the crisis in Afghanistan, White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain has been tweeting, and retweeting, up a storm.
Many high-profile Twitter accounts solemnly declare "retweets are not endorsements," but not in Klain's case. In addition to reports and updates on efforts to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies, his feed has been a drumbeat of praise, spin, and outright sycophancy from media allies.
An examination of his last 10 days of tweeting shows some of the most popular sources of pro-Biden chatter during the foreign policy debacle have been two of the media's most fanatically anti-GOP voices: MSNBC's Joy Reid and the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin.
Their tweets have been shared by him a combined 15 times since Aug. 14, often deflecting blame onto the Trump administration or bemoaning mainstream press coverage of Afghanistan as unfair to Biden. The president's handling of the crisis, admitted surprise at the Taliban's rapid takeover, absences from public view, and public remarks that didn't match reports on the ground have all come under criticism as images of chaos and terror in Kabul captured the globe.
So Klain has been quick to capture any and all praise directed at his boss as his approval rating sinks.
"The media have parroted the right wing's deliberate effort to impugn the administration's motives about ‘abandoning Afghans' (as it airlifts tens of thousands of them out the country) while ignoring the Trump team's destruction of the visa system," Rubin tweeted Monday to Klain's liking.
"Excellent point @JRubinBlogger," former Hillary Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri wrote in another one re-shared by Klain.
"Since we've brought out 42,000 people - overwhelmingly Afghans maybe the line about abandoning our friends needs some refinement," she added Monday.
A glance at Rubin's columns since the country collapsed shows her heel turned with Biden's speech on Aug. 16. Earlier that day, she wrote, "Although Biden correctly saw the past 20 years had come to naught, this administration’s implementation of our departure has been nothing short of disastrous. Insisting, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken did, that we had no choice but to follow former president Donald Trump’s deadline (extended a few months from May) insults our intelligence."
But after Biden spoke that day, she declared he had given the "best speech" under the circumstances and was "not defensive," although he cast blame on the Trump administration and the remaining Afghan forces for the rapid Taliban takeover.
Rubin, who's often derided on the right for her unsubtle devotion to Biden and other Democrats after once identifying as a "conservative blogger", has since heaped praise on the White House to Klain's apparent approval.
Reid has also been a frequent retweet target of Klain, including for her takes that Trump was to blame for Afghanistan's collapse.
"We are where we are in Afghanistan because of Trump's surrender to the Taliban and his administration's venal attitude toward Muslim and really all nonwhite immigrants," she wrote Friday.
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He also endorsed her desire for more briefings on "domestic terrorism" after a man claiming to have a bomb in his truck was taken into custody outside the Library of Congress last week.
Klain even retweeted a clip of Rubin on Reid's program where she asked, "What was Biden to do" about visa backlogs.
They're hardly the only two figures in the media to be retweeted by Klain. Others have included MSNBC figures like Nicolle Wallace declaring "95 percent of the American people" would agree with Biden's speech last week, Lawrence O'Donnell calling it the "best run evacuation" by a war the U.S. lost, and left-leaning polling expert Larry Sabato calling an eight-point polling slip for Biden "hardly the massive drop much of the Beltway bunch" expected.
Klain has also shared several tweets by Daily Beast contributing columnist David Rothkopf, although he neglected to retweet one where Rothkopf declared former President Trump a greater threat to the United States than al Qaeda and the Taliban.