Media top headlines April 29
A racial slur about Tim Scott trending on Twitter and more round out today’s top media headlines.
CNN and MSNBC pundits were outraged over South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott's, R., response to President Biden's first joint address to Congress on Wednesday, accusing the senator of lying and misleading the public on vaccines and voting laws.
In his remarks, Scott said the Biden admnistration "inherited a tide that had already turned," in a nod to the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership that helped steer the record breaking development of COVID vaccines.
"This is a speech delivered from a planet where facts don't matter which is where the current Republican Party resides, so it's really not his fault," MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace charged of Scott. "But it is his responsibility to get his facts straight. He said this: 'Biden inherited a country that had already rounded the bend on COVID.' Four thousand people per day were dying in January, so I don't know, again, on what planet we had rounded the bend."
Scott also argued the Georgia voting law, SB 202, is a "mainstream" measure and that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed it into law because, like most Republicans, he wants to make it "easier to vote and harder to cheat."
CNN's Dana Bash accused Scott of lying about the new voting law, which some pundits have referred to as "Jim Crow 2.0."
"He's the only Black Republican in the United States Senate and talking about the Democrats attacking these voting restrictions that are being passed across the country and these states as Jim Crow – worse than Jim Crow and fighting back against that kind of rhetoric; was interesting but it’s actually – it’s not necessarily true," Bash said.
CNN senior political correspondent Abby Phillip agreed and laughed with her colleague that Scott's take on the Georgia voting measure was just "not true" and dismissed Scott's speech as "partisan." CNN commentator Van Jones nodded and predicted that Scott "lost a lot of African-Americans by the tens of millions when he said ‘America is not a racist nation.'"
On PBS, Harvard University Professor Annette Gordon-Reed agreed Scott's take on the Georgia bill was "not exactly accurate" and, likewise, she questioned Scott's words on the COVID vaccines, arguing that they "got jumpstarted after the new administration."
The Media Research Center recently produced a video debunking the myths surrounding the Georgia law, including that it limits minorities' ability to vote.
MEDIA RESEARCH CENTER DEBUNKS GEORGIA ELECTION LAW MYTHS IN NEW VIDEO
The media heaped praise on Biden for his one-hour speech, perhaps no one more so than left-wing CNN correspondent John Harwood, who gushed that Biden struck the perfect tone.
"His use of voice modulation was rather extraordinary," MSNBC anchor Brian Williams said.
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Biden delivered his first congressional address to a masked, distanced audience, where he laid out government expansion that hosts compared to the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.