MSNBC Entirely Ignores News of Former Contributor Karine Jean-Pierre Leaving Democratic Party
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
As press secretary for the Biden Administration, Karine Jean-Pierre spent two years representing not only President Joe Biden but also the Democratic Party. It is huge news when she officially left the party and promoted a book that portrayed her as an “independent,” while casting aspersions on the Biden White House as “broken.”
Jean-Pierre revealed the news on Wednesday that her new book— Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines — will be released in October.
Since then, she has received a raft of very personal and harsh criticism from former Biden aides, who have dismissed her book as a “grift” and characterized her as effectively incompetent in her job as press secretary. The criticism resonates with anyone who paid attention, but oddly, also proves the thesis revealed in the title of her forthcoming book.
Cable news hasn’t been quite wall-to-wall with its coverage, but it’s been a big story on Fox News and CNN. One cable network, however, has deemed it not newsworthy and decided to ignore it entirely: MSNBC.
According to transcript searches for her name (and its many iterations), MSNBC has not mentioned Jean-Pierre’s name once on air since news of her political conversion broke Wednesday. By comparison, Fox News has mentioned her name 72 times in that period, and CNN has cited her name 44 times. Again: MSNBC? Zero.
Adding to the layer of curiosity to this editorial decision is that Jean-Pierre and MSNBC have long had a symbiotic relationship. Before she joined the Biden Administration, she was a contributor for MSNBC, appearing on various panel shows and representing a strong, progressive point of view, which the network loves to amplify. It’s entirely reasonable to believe that her rise to political prominence in Washington, D.C. was aided mainly by her frequent appearances on MSNBC. This makes the lack of coverage of this recent development all the more revealing.
It reminds me of the point I made a few weeks ago about the national conversation about former President Biden’s apparent cognitive decline and alleged cover-up reported on in Original Sin, co-authored by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. During the first week of coverage, the book, which was featured prominently on CNN and Fox News (though for different reasons), was virtually ignored by MSNBC.
Why? Because talking about it cast a very harsh and revealing spotlight on the insistence by many of MSNBC’s leading opinion hosts that Biden was sharp as ever in their effort to help get him re-elected. Even after he bowed out following his disastrous debate performance, Biden’s elderly mien was largely ignored. When the issue came to the forefront, MSNBC pretended not to hear the conversation, apparently over fear that it would make their talent look bad.
I think the same phenomenon is happening here. Jean-Pierre received a lot of criticism from the chattering class, and yes, most of it was partisan and largely unfair. But as we’ve learned from the raft of anonymous insults revealed in daming reports in Politico and Axios, she was not held in the highest esteem at the Biden White House. Her maneuver to burn the place down in the effort of reinvention and book sales probably does little to help her career plans in the realm of political media.
It’s a fascinating story, almost of Shakespearean levels. The fact that MSNBC is still ignoring the story (as of 1:15 pm Thursday) reveals that the editorial direction at the left-leaning network is not yet ready to cover political news that may not align with their past comments and positions. And until MSNBC hosts and analysts are willing to address this issue, I fear their viewership will continue to dwindle.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
