It's unusual for the public to hear CNN take a Democrat to task. But the cable outlet that wore itself out hammering former President Donald Trump over his entire four-year term, on Monday ripped the current president, Joe Biden, over his bungling of the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Among the reactions at CNN:
- "Joe Biden is sitting at Camp David right now. He must feel humiliated watching these images on TV."
- "Friends and foes alike are calling this withdrawal a fiasco – a debacle – and it is one that apparently the administration did not fully appreciate or see coming."
- "Let's be honest. This looks like a disaster."
- "This is Biden's boondoggle. This is a foreign policy disaster in the making."
- "Where is the President? Why isn't he out there now? Kabul fell yesterday – where is the President?"
Anchor Jake Tapper (pictured) even went after the president's speech to the nation Monday afternoon:
Tapper: "The speech was full of finger-pointing and blame, especially for the Afghans."
And it wasn't just CNN, according to Bill D'Agostino of Media Research Center.
"Even the broadcast networks have been slamming him," the MRC spokesman tells AFN. "[Monday] morning all three of them – ABC, CBS and NBC – were completely laying into him. You had the 'Saigon on steroids' kind of talk. You had CBS calling it an absolute debacle for the administration."
Also among those was the left-leaning Atlantic, whose staff writer George Packer wrote that the administration's "failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden."
But D'Agostino says he's confident this is a one-off from the mainstream media, and they haven't started committing journalism again.
"What we have here is probably a case of a situation gone so wrong that even the pro-Biden media have to tell it like it is," he concludes.
