The New Keyboard Commandos

 

Daniel Marans has a lead article in the HuffPo on the press' new belligerence regarding Afghanistan after years of benign neglect. If you've been watching the hair-on-fire coverage of the chaotic situation in Kabul or President Biden's news conferences, you'll know what Marans is talking about, as he describes here:

"As President Joe Biden ended his news conference on Friday afternoon about the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, a reporter called out an especially bellicose question.

'Why do you continue to trust the Taliban, Mr. President?' the reporter said.

Notwithstanding the militant group’s poor human rights record and ultra-conservative Islamist ideology, multiple U.S. administrations have successfully negotiated with the Taliban. The Taliban have complex interests. As Biden noted on Friday, the organization is at war with the faction of the self-declared Islamic State (also known as ISIS), which is competing for power in Afghanistan.

But the reporter’s criticism-masquerading-as-query was the culmination of a week’s worth of dramatic finger-pointing and fretting from a Washington press corps that usually prides itself on neutrality."  (our emphasis)

After four plus years of brutal treatment by the former guy and his minions, in which their reputations not to mention their freedom was threatened, one would think the "both sides" impulses of the Beltway media would have subsided. One would be wrong. Marans continues: 

"Although the White House’s failure to foresee the rapid fall of the Afghan government and prepare accordingly has exacerbated the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal, Biden and his allies are furious with what they see as reporters’ and pundits’ unduly hawkish coverage of the exit.

'The media tends to bend over backwards to ‘both-sides’ all of their coverage, but they made an exception for this,' said Eric Schultz, a deputy press secretary under President Barack Obama. 'They both-sides coverage over masks, and vaccines, and school openings and everything else. Somehow [the Afghanistan withdrawal] created a rush to judgment and a frenzy that we haven’t seen in a long time.'” (our emphasis)

As we've pointed out on an almost daily basis (here, here and yesterday) since the fall of Kabul, the press overwhelmingly fails to provide any context to the current situation, perhaps because they were asleep at the switch when the former guy made his deal for withdrawal directly with the Taliban last year (which led to this crisis), or because they think their superficial, lazy, "tough on Biden" narrative will win back some "both sides" cred. It's that mentality that helped get us the former guy and where we are.