CNN gives Psaki a pass after admitting WH urges Biden not to take questions from reporters

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CNN appears to be giving White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki a pass over her stunning admission that her team urges President Biden not to take questions from reporters. 

Appearing on David Axelrod's podcast, Psaki boasted to the CNN commentator how often Biden takes questions, even holding what she's called "mini press conferences," but revealed that isn't exactly what the president's communications team actually wants. 

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"That is not something we recommend," Psaki said in the podcast published Thursday. "In fact, a lot of times, we say, ‘Don’t take questions,' you know? But he's going to do what he's going to do."

"Yeah," Axelrod responded. 

Psaki, a former CNN commentator herself, has gotten zero pushback from CNN, a network that prided itself as an advocate for press accessibility during the Trump administration. 

"I’m sure President Xi of China and President Putin of Russia and our adversaries from Iran to North Korea are taking note that the Leader of the Free World in Joe Biden has a team around him who has zero confidence in his ability to speak outside of scripted remarks," Fox News contributor Joe Concha reacted. 

Concha insisted there would be an uproar of prominent CNN journalists like Jim Acosta, a former showboating White House correspondent who became a media star for his battles with President Trump, if such comments were made by the previous administration. 

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"CNN has almost no interest in holding President Biden accountable. That would require being an actual news organization," Concha said. "Instead, it serves at the pleasure of the Democratic Party. Shame. It wasn’t always this way."

Brian Stelter, CNN's staunch defender of the media, at least under the Trump presidency, did not appear alarmed by Psaki's comments, highlighting it in his report as one of the "takeaways" from the interview with Axelrod but is not sounding the alarm. 

NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck suggested CNN would have a far different reaction if a Trump White House official made such comments. 

"CNN would be running snarky commentaries day and night talking about this horrible precedent and how it was doing damage to our democracy by keeping a President of the United States from answering questions," Houck told Fox News. "Instead of speaking truth to power, the liberal media in 2021 have made the pivot to speaking truth for power."

Cornell Law School professor and media critic William A. Jacobson knocked the unethical nature of the interview itself since both Psaki and Axelrod were colleagues at CNN as well as in the Obama administration. 

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"CNN and Jen Psaki both work for Joe Biden, in their own ways," Jacobson told Fox News. "There is no expectation that CNN would call out Psaki on anything, so it's no surprise that its senior political commentator Axelrod did not do so."

Jacobson continued, "It also shows how much Team Obama still is running the show - a former Obama administration spokeswoman now serving a former Obama Vice President is being interviewed by a former Obama campaign advisor."