The media's urge to say that everything is worse than Richard Nixon and Watergate reached peaked absurdity on Friday as Andrea Mitchell Reports guest host Geoff Bennett and former assistant Watergate special prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks discussed the current administration's "credibility gap" on the coronavirus.
Bennett asked Wine-Banks, "How does an administration like this one mitigate this credibility gap?" He then asserted, "And that's not a partisan statement. That's just a statement of fact, this credibility gap exists."
Wine-Banks declared that, " It's a serious problem and part of the problem is that we don't trust the administration." She then falsely claimed, "they haven't shown us any way in which they are really in control of the situation." Back in January, when the world was focused on other things, the White House had already formed a coronavirus task force, while not making the front pages, other media outlets' takeaway at the time was that it was not diverse enough.
She then moved onto the Nixon comparison, arguing that, "You know, if we go back to the era of Nixon, he wasn't very trustworthy either except we did trust him to run the government and we would have trusted what his administration said, we would have trusted that they would have put in charge the right people, they would have let the doctors tell us what to do and what was being done." The administration has not prevented doctors from telling "us what to do."
Wine-Banks concluded, "They would have been prepared. They wouldn't have let people go to Travis Air Force Base without the proper protection and that's the difference between then and now is we trusted Richard Nixon even though he obviously was involved in a similar scandal."
Here is a transcript for the February 28 show:
MSNBC
Andrea Mitchell Reports
12:34 PM ET
GEOFF BENNET: Jill Wine-Banks, how does an administration like this one mitigate this credibility gap? An that's not a partisan statement. That's just a statement of fact, this credibility gap exists.
JILL WINE-BANKS: It's a serious problem and part of the problem is that we don't trust the administration and they haven't shown us any way in which they are really in control of the situation. You know, if we go back to the era of Nixon, he wasn't very trustworthy either except we did trust him to run the government and we would have trusted what his administration said, we would have trusted that they would have put in charge the right people, they would have let the doctors tell us what to do and what was being done. They would have been prepared. They wouldn't have let people go to Travis Air Force Base without the proper protection and that's the difference between then and now is we trusted Richard Nixon even though he obviously was involved in a similar scandal.
