Biden's first 100 days: Experts hit press for 'overwhelmingly favorable, polite, and gentle' coverage

As President Biden’s tenure in the White House hit the 100-day milestone this week, media watchdogs and journalism professors alike have noticed that journalists are "overwhelmingly favorable, polite, and gentle" when covering the current administration.  

"The pious smugness is gone," Fox News contributor Joe Concha said. "Journalists should be outraged, for example, on a daily basis that news organizations are being kept out of border facilities, which almost no one is calling ‘kids in cages’ anymore."  

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Journalists haven’t expressed much outrage at Biden, but some feel the cozy coverage was inevitable after he was treated with kid gloves during the 2020 campaign.   

"Mainstream liberal media coverage of the Biden administration's first 100 days is only slightly more harsh than the media coverage of the last 100 days of the Biden campaign," Cornell Law School professor and media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News.  

"The coverage is overwhelmingly favorable, polite, and gentle," Jacobson added, noting "there are some dissident journalistic voices willing to challenge the administration's mishandling" of the ongoing border crisis.  

While the first 100 days of an administration is only a sliver of the four-year term, it is often seen as a window into the president’s approach and priorities as an agenda is established. The media can be judged the same way, as the first 100 days of the administration offer a glimpse into what Americans can expect from the mainstream press for the duration of the Biden presidency.  

Aside from a few reporters who have dared to probe Biden on the border crisis, DePauw University professor and media critic Jeffrey McCall agreed coverage of the Biden administration by the establishment media has been "quite soft" through the first 100 days.  

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"The president's public relations people could hardly have scripted things any better for him," McCall told Fox News.  

"News consumers could have seen this tilted coverage coming, given the cozy way in which reporters treated Biden during the campaign," McCall continued. "There are plenty of problems right in front of the administration, but the mainstream media continue to portray Biden as an affable grandpa who is presiding over a settled news landscape." 

As Biden’s presidency began, left-wing CNN executive Matt Dornic declared Inauguration Day fireworks would "inspire our friends and shake our foes" in a widely mocked tweet that would serve as a preview of the glowing coverage on the horizon. In the weeks since, the mainstream media has published puff pieces on everything from Biden’s exercise bike to his early bedtime to his conversations with his grandchildren.  

CNN published a story headlined, "Inside the new President's routine: Oval Office fires and early bedtimes," that fawned over his "publicly affectionate relationship" with the First Lady and "early-to-bed" lifestyle.

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Newsweek lauded Biden for "playing MarioKart with his family," the Associated Press declared his "empathy will be on full display" during a trip to Texas to survey weather damage and CNN declared he is a "breath of fresh air."  

Glowing stories have been written on Jill Biden’s hair scrunchies, the couple’s dogs (before a series of biting incidents occurred) and even the president attending mass at a church that flies a Black Lives Matter banner. While the president receives a ton of ink related to favorable and humanizing moments, McCall feels more significant issues go underreported.  

"In reality, of course, Biden is facing problems on the southern border, and has international tensions simmering in the Ukraine-Russia theater, with China's bolder approach on Taiwan, Iran's nuke development, and North Korea launching more missiles," McCall said. "All of these news items would have been covered with a shrill, flashing red light in the Trump era."    

Political satirist Tim Young noticed the mainstream media has done a complete about-face over the past 100 days.  

"Gone are the days of fighting in the White House press room," Young told Fox News. "Now, it's simple questions about fluff projects and no challenges when the press secretary doesn’t have answers -- and when the White House slacks on their 'everything is fine' talking points, propagandists who claim to be journalists, like PBS's Yamiche Alcindor, step up and cover for them."

Young noted the definition of words like "infrastructure" have changed, the migrant children who are coming to the southern border are no longer considered to be in "concentration camps," and when Biden "fell three times on the steps no one questioned his health."

All of this has occurred while reporters helped promote Hunter Biden’s book, claimed the infrastructure plan was a "window into Biden's soul" and rarely criticize anything suggested by a member of the administration. The AP and Politico have even banned the word "crisis" from being used when covering the chaos happening along the southern border on Biden's watch.

"The corporate media has shown itself to be nothing but the extension of the DNC press room," Young said.

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The conservative Media Research Center recently published a study of evening newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC that found Biden received positive coverage 59 percent of the time through his first three months in office. In a stark contrast, the study found former President Donald Trump only received positive coverage 11 percent of the time during his first three months on the job.  

The MRC study found that the evening newscasts were overwhelmingly positive when covering Biden’s coronavirus response, COVID spending bill and infrastructure bill. The same study found that evening newscasts barely mentioned some of Biden’s gaffes, such as his insult about Republicans exhibiting "Neanderthal thinking" with the push to re-open Texas and Mississippi, and his claim that Georgia voting laws were like "Jim Crow."

"The media continues to downplay the challenges faced by the Biden White House because the narrative being worked now is that the current administration is a more measured and reasonable operation than Trump's," McCall said. "If the establishment media were to fully scrutinize Biden like it did Trump, it would be providing a backhanded legitimization of the Trump administration, which the media just won't do, of course."  

The MRC's Tim Graham said there is "no doubt there is a dramatic difference in the tone of coverage" compared to the previous administration.   

"It's now blandly promotional, instead of hysterically enraged. They're clearly happy ‘their people’ are in power now," Graham told Fox News.  

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While the press has taken it easy on Biden, his vice president hasn’t been scrutinized much either.  

Concha thinks journalists should "dust off their soapboxes and press the White House" on why Kamala Harris has not taken questions in a press conference since she was appointed in March to manage the administration’s response to the migrant crisis. 

"Vice President Pence was out in front of reporters on an almost daily basis last year," Concha said. "So why can’t Kamala Harris do it even once?"