No sooner had Donald Trump boarded Air Force One for the last time than the ear-piercing screech emanating daily from the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room abated, replaced by the sound of thumb sucking. It’s the Obama years all over again. Even the face behind the podium is a familiar one. Jen Psaki, who tag-teamed with Marie Harf (now a Fox News Channel contributor!) as the voice of the State Department under Obama, is back, this time as press secretary.
The fractious media are now free to go back on autopilot, asking questions that inquiring minds want to know the answer to. Example:
REPORTER: "Will [Biden] keep Donald Trump's Air Force One color scheme change?
PSAKI: "This is such a good question!" pic.twitter.com/PafHiBtRUs
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) January 21, 2021
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
It’s not that the handwriting wasn’t on the wall.
Perhaps it is just coincidence but on the same day this question was asked, Axios reported that trust in the media had hit a new low:
For the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media, according to data from Edelman’s annual trust barometer shared exclusively with Axios. Trust in social media has hit an all-time low of 27%.
These numbers, which have been echoed elsewhere, might have been troubling to the major broadcast networks and daily newspapers once upon a time. But now that they have dropped the pretense of ideological neutrality, they can sit back and enjoy the Democrats’ latest (and, they hope, final) effort to transform the nation into a European-style socialist democracy.
