Wednesday’s dispatch from Puck’s Dylan Byers fetched some comical bits about the fallout from ABC anchor and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos’s hidden camera admission he doesn’t believe President Biden is fit to (or can) serve another four years, calling him a “consummate professional” who’s not only “ever-disciplined” and “often soft-spoken”, but an “institutionalist” disturbed by Trump.
Cue the laugh tracks for Byers’s lede in setting the table for TMZ’s sting operation against Stephanopoulos (emphasis mine):
On Tuesday afternoon, the ever-disciplined, often soft-spoken, and normally besuited veteran politico and newsman George Stephanopoulos was marauding up Fifth Avenue in a t-shirt and gym shorts when he was accosted by a passerby, who sought to extemporaneously follow up on the anchor’s recent newsmaking interview with embattled president Joe Biden.
After rehashing Stephanopoulos’s take that Biden wouldn’t make it through another term, ABC having denounced the take, and Stephanopoulos insisting he shouldn’t have engaged, Byers said one thing we can all agree on: Of course Stephanopoulos meant it.
Byers added it was “another meaningful vote of no confidence” for Biden as he had not only “recently sat down with him in person, but from a 30-year veteran journalist and former Democratic White House senior advisor and de facto press secretary who has deep respect for the office and the institution.”
“Deep respect for the office and institution”? Cue another set of laugh tracks.
Byers said he talked to “Stephanopoulos’s friends and longtime colleagues”, who “wondered whether this was a gaffe or simply his subconscious attempt to reckon with his frustrations as a concerned American institutionalist” with one saying this election “deeply upsets him” considering he deeply hates Trump as “a clear and present danger”.
Wait, isn’t Stephanopoulos a journalist and thus not supposed to be putting his thumb on the scales?
At any rate, the same source added Stephanopoulos obviously thinks “Biden is manifestly in decline and unfit...[w]hich is why the inner agony came out to a random person on the street. He couldn’t contain it. It matters too much to him.”
Ah, yes, the ole caring too much argument.
Byers returned to Stephanopoulos at the end of his piece to say that, separate from the newsroom drama at, say, CNN and The Washington Post, Stephanopoulos will “be just fine” as he spent the prime of his career “during the ascendant glory years in this business, when the paychecks were fat and the medium really mattered.”
In recent years, Byers noted, Stephanopoulos had already “ceded some of those duties and went back to writing history bestsellers and making Hulu shows” thanks to his own production company while still being “the perfect guy for these big interviews: a consummate professional and disciplined TV animal who maintains his figure.”
“[O]therwise,” he explained, Stephanopoulos will be able to “enjoy life with his very beloved wife, actress Ali Wentworth, sip a martini at East Hampton’s 1770 House just down the way from their Sagaponack summer home, and play golf”.
There aren’t enough eye roll emojis to full express the silliness.
One other nugget in his dispatch concerning the future of the national press in what could be a second Trump era thanks to the left finally acknowledging Biden’s cognitive impairment:
As I noted last week, the Biden press corps has the bit firmly between its teeth and is relentlessly pursuing scoops and chronicling developments on the Biden-in-decline beat with a collective tenacity and urgency unseen in years. In the process, they are pressing an evasive Karine Jean-Pierre for answers in a manner that has made the Brady Briefing Room once again a relevant theater for live coverage. “We are miffed around here!” CBS News’s Ed O’Keefe shouted at her the other day, calling to mind the tensions of the Sarah Huckabee Sanders era. (For what it’s worth, the vast majority of briefing room denizens I surveyed this week think Jean-Pierre has lost all credibility. Alternatively, one White House reporter said the press corps “looked like bitchy little babies who carried on about a story that had no basis in fact because they’re trying to fetch their way into a coverup.” In any case, it’s interesting again.)
“[L]ooked like bitchy little babies who carried on about a story that had no basis in fact because they’re trying to fetch their way into a coverup”?!?! Meeeow.
