Comparing Signalgate to Biden’s Afghan Disaster is Nonsensical and Dishonest

As the Trump administration grapples with the fallout from Signalgate, a new and bizarre bit of whataboutism has emerged as a key defense of the galling national security leak: What about Biden’s Afghan failure?

Like most attempts at whataboutism, the comparison falls flat and in many way makes very little sense as the two issues are wholly different – other than both being undeniable screw ups related to foreign policy. Vice President JD Vance argued last week, while in Greenland, that the media’s focus on Signalgate was unfair and a sign of bias, because — according to him — the media failed to cover Biden’s Afghan withdrawal in a similar way.

Of course, the media covered the Afghanistan withdrawal relentlessly. So much so, that liberals complained frequently that the media was so fixated on the chaotic scenes and their fallout. One report noted that ABC, NBC, and CBS dedicated 427 minutes of evening news coverage to the withdrawal in August and September of 2021. By the standards of network news, where most topics generally get blink-and-you’ll-miss-it treatment, that is nothing short of wall-to-wall coverage.

Vance was asked by a reporter if the country could expect an update on the internal investigation into why airstrikes on a foreign country were discussed by top Trump officials on the messaging app Signal – a group chat that included and was eventually revealed by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

“I think we’ll get an update soon. Look, we take it very seriously. We all accept that a journalist should not have been invited into the chat, and members of the administration, including my dear friend Mike, have taken responsibility for it,” Vance replied, defending National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who many have called to be fired. Vance added:

But I find the American media’s obsession with this issue very, very interesting, because I happen to remember about four years ago when American military leadership made a catastrophic error that got 13 innocent Americans killed in Afghanistan and handed about $80 billion of military equipment turned over to one of the worst terrorist organizations in the world.

And for years, the American media ran cover, ran cover for a Biden administration that refused to fire any generals or even launch an internal investigation that was meaningful and substantive about what happened. And now the same American media that covered for the Biden administration after the untimely death and the unnecessary death of 13 brave Americans is really, really interested in forcing the president of the United States to fire someone because of a signal chat, because of signal chat. That is not… honest behavior from the American media

Many in the media are comparing Signalgate to the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s emails or other intelligence leaks — a much more similar scandal than Afghanistan, which carries with it some 20 years of history and exit plans drawn up by both Trump and Biden. Vance’s talking point, however, was quickly repeated in the media, including on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday by pro-Trump contributor Scott Jennings:

I hear democrats arguing well, we should fire Pete Hegseth, that we should fire the national security adviser — the bar for firing people like this is really high from the last administration, when after the Afghanistan withdrawal, which was a disaster, people died, and no accountability was meted out.

Vance is certainly correct that Biden didn’t fire any of his top officials following the tragic death of 13 service members amid the disastrous withdrawal, which saw the Taliban tragically retake the country. However, the idea that mainstream media did not ferociously cover the withdrawal and hammer Biden over its failings is categorically wrong.

“The debacle of the US defeat and chaotic retreat in Afghanistan is a political disaster for Joe Biden, whose failure to orchestrate an urgent and orderly exit will further rock a presidency plagued by crises and stain his legacy,” opened a CNN analysis from August 16, 2021 titled, “Biden’s botched Afghan exit is a disaster at home and abroad long in the making.”

And while it’s nearly impossible to quantify exactly how much of that extensive one air and print coverage was entirely negative, it’s easy to understand that most of it was scathing criticism of the Biden administration.

On August 21st, ABC News’ Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl reported on air, “This remains very much a disaster, and one of the contributing factors here is when you listen to the president, he is saying things that simply do not comport with the reality that we are seeing with our own eyes, that you hear Ian Pannell (ABC’s chief foreign correspondent) describing, for instance. When he says that every American can get to that airport, there hasn’t been an issue with that, that doesn’t comport with the reality that you heard Ian describe.”

CNN’s Brianna Keilar offered a similar take a few days earlier, reporting, “The rapid fall of Afghanistan, stunning the Biden administration and this nation, quite frankly, and many of the promises, predictions, and the words of the president and his White House are coming back to haunt them.”

Keiler then played a clip of Biden promising a Taliban takeover was not “inevitable’ and added, “Well, they own the whole country now, the Taliban does. When Biden made those comments on July 8th, just about a month ago, the Taliban had already started gaining ground in the country. Biden said for months that it was going to be up to Afghan leaders and security forces to maintain power.”

While ignoring the actual tone of the coverage, Vance’s take also completely memory holes the nature of the story, which was slow moving over the course of several days and included various viral video clips that the media played over and over again – including the horrifying scene of Afghans jumping onto a U.S. military aircraft as it took off to leave the country. The mainstream media not only made no effort to hide these images, but, to the contrary, seared them into the minds of the American public.

The term “Abbey Gate,” where a suicide bomber killed the 13 U.S. service members and some 170 Afghans near the airport, also quickly entered the zeitgeist and was covered extensively in the media. The New York Times mapped the tragedy for its readers and wrote:

Abbey Gate had been used by U.S. forces in the past week to screen people trying to flee the country before the American evacuation stopped. Early Thursday, U.S. officials issued urgent warnings for Americans to stay away from the entrances to the airport because of security threats. But the gate remained an extraordinarily vulnerable target on Thursday.

A quick search of the Washington Post, Time Magazine, NPR, and a handful of other publications shows that in August and September of 2021, the media pulled no punches in calling out the Biden administration’s failure in Afghanistan. “Joe Biden’s Botched Withdrawal Plunges Afghanistan Into Chaos,” blared a Time headline, while Max Boot wrote in the Washington Post, “Twenty years of Afghanistan mistakes, but this preventable disaster is on Biden.”

The final and perhaps most crucial piece of evidence to rebut Vance’s claim is how quickly Biden’s approval rating dropped following the withdrawal.

NPR, a current GOP target to defund, reported in early September 2021, “Amid the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden’s approval rating slid to just 43% in the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.” The summary of the poll noted that “the decline is principally due to independents — just 36% of them approve of the job he’s doing, a 10-point drop.”

If the media truly “ran cover” for Biden, as Vance claimed, the likes of CNN and ABC News would not have been accusing him of misleading the public, and his approval rating certainly would not have dropped as quickly as it did – to never recover. Furthermore, Vance’s knee-jerk whataboutism in bringing up Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, while nonsensical, also feels like a miscalculation as he’s inadvertently drawing an equivalence between the importance of the two scandals — which seems unwise given how badly it wounded Biden’s presidency.