Watch Gushing MSNBC Host Tout Biden Ad as 'All True' - But It's Actually Misleading
The establishment media will protect presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden at all cost, even if it means sabotaging their own reputation.
Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than during Monday’s airing of “Deadline: White House,” when host Nicolle Wallace played a segment from a misleading Biden campaign ad before she and her guest cheered its contents without providing any real critical analysis or countervailing facts.
The ad claims that President Donald Trump left the nation “unprepared and unprotected” to deal with the coronavirus health crisis.
It heavily implies that Trump’s restrictions on travel to the U.S. from China were too weak, suggests the current high unemployment rate is his fault and declares that the U.S. has more confirmed COVID-19 cases than any other nation.
Looking at these claims critically would require adding context to them, something that Wallace and her panel apparently had no interest in doing.
“It’s a devastating political ad because it’s all true,” Wallace told former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, who concurred emphatically. (For what it’s worth, Schmidt abandoned the Republican Party in 2018 and is fiercely opposed to Trump.)
“Well, it’s entirely true, and no amount of negative ads — as the Biden ad says — is going to change the truth about Donald Trump’s incompetency at the response to what the ad correctly says is the worst public health and economic crises of our lifetime,” Schmidt said.
In essence, the Biden campaign speaks and MSNBC applauds. These are not reporters or analysts; they are Democratic campaign lapdogs.
Let’s point out the distortions and provide the facts that eluded the commentators on MSNBC.
“The travel ban he brags about — Trump let in 40,000 travelers from China into America after he signed it — not exactly airtight, ” the ad’s narrator says.
But Biden’s policies would have been even less airtight.
Remember, the same day that the White House announced the travel restrictions, Biden called out Trump’s “xenophobia.”
“This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia — and fear-mongering to lead the way instead of science,” Biden said at a campaign event in Iowa on Jan. 31.
“We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering,” Biden tweeted the following day, Feb. 1.
We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) February 1, 2020
The Biden campaign tried to explain away the candidate’s remarks by claiming that Biden wasn’t referring to the travel restrictions when he accused Trump of xenophobia. Yet he made those comments the same day that the White House restrictions were announced, so you be the judge of that.
And it’s telling that Biden’s campaign waited a whopping two months to acknowledge the travel restrictions were wise.
“Joe Biden supports travel bans that are guided by medical experts, advocated by public health officials, and backed by a full strategy,” Kate Bedingfeld, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told CNN on April 3.
“Science supported this ban, therefore he did too,” she added.
Bedingfeld did not point out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was sounding the alarm bells and urging Americans to cease nonessential travel to China days before Trump announced the travel restrictions.
Hence, Biden was very late to accept the verdict of the scientific community; Trump was not.
It is true, as Biden’s ad says, that 40,000 people arrived in the United States from China after Trump’s travel restrictions took effect.
Yet, according to Fox News, these were American citizens, permanent residents, or relatives of passport and green card holders. Democrats and the media would have gone ballistic had the president blocked these individuals from flying back to the United States.
The ad’s implication that the travel restrictions were not tough enough reeks of outright hypocrisy and represents an almost Orwellian rewriting of recent history.
And there’s more.
“Look around — 22 million Americans are out of work,” the ad continues. The implication is that Trump’s policies led to the economic downturn.
But the Biden campaign is deliberately distorting the facts: The coronavirus pandemic is an unprecedented catastrophe in world history that smashed an astounding era of American prosperity.
Prior to the pandemic, the president’s economic policies helped lead to record-breaking employment figures, a sky-high stock market and an overall booming economy that was going to make it very difficult, if not impossible, for Democrats to defeat Trump in 2020.
The current staggering unemployment figures are due to a health crisis that was not the result of Trump’s economic policies. Moreover, the president is calling for the economy to be reopened as quickly and safely as possible.
The ad’s implications that the economic downturn is Trump’s fault are thus grossly unfair.
The campaign ad also says that “we have more officially reported cases and deaths than any other country.”
“Donald Trump left this country unprepared and unprotected for the worst public health and economic crisis in our lifetime. And now we’re paying the price. All the negative ads in the world can’t change the truth.”
This is another garbling of the truth.
Indeed, the U.S. does have the highest case count and death toll due to our large population of roughly 330 million. But on a per capita basis, the American coronavirus death rate is lower than those in most European nations, including Spain, Italy, France, Belgium and the U.K., according to the BBC.
The U.S has “one of the lowest mortality rates in the entire world,” White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said at a news briefing Tuesday.
The failure of Wallace and Schmidt to provide the full context of the charges leveled in the ad shows that there is no journalistic integrity at MSNBC. The station is merely central headquarters for Elect Joe Biden 2020.
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