I think we already pretty much knew this, actually, merely by observing. But now it’s being admitted to:
Former President Joe Biden’s White House staff made “really unethical” demands of the press as part of a campaign to “bully” journalists into portraying the aging commander in chief in a good light, a former staffer revealed Tuesday.
“They did bully a lot of journalists, and I think they would tell you that now. They wouldn’t have told you at the time,” Michael LaRosa, who served as former first lady Jill Biden’s press secretary, told “The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur.
The former president’s communications team, led by Anita Dunn, was “very hostile and very suspicious” of journalists and treated their jobs as if they were operating “out of a bunker,” LaRosa said. …
There was this thing in Biden world about quote approval, everything had to be on quote approval,” LaRosa said, explaining that the practice involved “one person” on Biden’s team deciding “what the reporter can use, what quotes they can use” after an interview with the president. …
“I mean you saw them get caught trying to script questions to radio reporters that summer, summer of 2024. It was very reminiscent to me of being on the campaign in 2020, where these young press staffers in these states like New Hampshire, or Iowa, or Nevada, they were sort of like dog trained to make the questions conditional for interviews,” he said.
“And I said to them, ‘Please never ask the journalist for the questions ahead of time. You can always ask about the topics, but do not ask them for the questions for Dr. Biden,’” LaRosa explained, claiming that he refused to take part in the practice when handling press for the former first lady.
Oh, how ethical of him! Jill didn’t need the help; Joe did. His was a Potemkin presidency, and the press was fully complicit.
And then there’s that name: Anita Dunn. She goes way back. I first mentioned her in 2009 when she worked for Obama and was blasting Fox as biased and holding up CNN as objective (unfortunately the video there no longer works).