WaPo writer laments media jumped to conclusions on Biden over Afghanistan: 'Too quickly to the blame game'

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan criticized the media for rapidly assigning blame to President Joe Biden over the unfolding Afghanistan debacle, calling it a "stretch" and claiming they offered "nuance-deprived, overstated coverage."

"If ever a big, breaking story demanded that the news media provide historical context and carefully avoid partisan blame, it’s the story of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban," Sullivan wrote in a Monday column. "Instead, what we largely got over the past few days was the all-too-familiar genre of 'winners and losers' coverage. It’s coverage that tends to elevate and amplify punditry over news, and to assign long-lasting political ramifications to a still-developing situation."

"And when news consumers have been tuned out of a story — as they are, unfortunately, with most international coverage — this quick-take journalism can be damaging and misleading," she added. 

Biden has indeed come under the sharpest media criticism of his young presidency for the chaos in Afghanistan as the administration struggles to extract Americans stranded there, the repressive Taliban regime seizes power and U.S. military equipment, and the U.S. is castigated abroad as weak and unwilling to stand by its commitments.

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The left-leaning Sullivan gave examples of the various takes in reporting on Afghanistan from places like The New York Post, The Atlantic, Axios and The Buffalo News, and lamented they all were critical of Biden, with predictions the fall of Afghanistan could leave an "indelible stain" on his legacy. 

"The truth is quite a bit more complicated than all of that, and once you get past the headlines, some of the coverage … reflects that," she said. "But for an American public that largely ignores serious international news short of a bona fide crisis, this will be the enduring takeaway." 

Sullivan agreed that the situation in the war-torn country was tragic, but that blame needed "to be spread much more evenly," citing the Post's "Afghanistan Papers" reporting that revealed the public was misled for years about the country's military operations there.

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"Biden has been in office for just over seven months; the always untenable Afghan war — and its sure-to-be-terrible ending — has been a disaster for decades," she said. 

Sullivan admitted that Biden "badly handled" the end of the conflict, and that it "deserves to be pointed out unsparingly," but that it wasn't fair for false ideas to be allowed to take root because there wasn't enough "context-rich news" to counter the negative narratives towards Biden.

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"As always, the media moves too quickly to the blame game, allowing the most extreme punditry to carry the day. When history is in the making, as it surely is here, that’s far from the best approach," she said." Maybe the pullout from Afghanistan really will go down as Biden’s Waterloo. But maybe deciding that should take more than a few hours."