Under the guise of promoting her Know Your Value initiative (“an empowered community helping women to grow their career, form healthy habits and reach their full potential”), MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski sat down with First Lady Jill Biden for an event at the White House ostensibly dedicated to advancing Know Your Value’s mission.

Their conversation aired, in part, on Morning Joe Friday, where it was revealed to be a consummate act of anti-journalism.

Naturally, the event included the expected platitudes and banal pronouncements that would hardly merit amplification had they not come from the president’s wife.

“As I travel around this country, I see amazing young women doing amazing things,” said Biden.

After being asked what has brought her the most joy as First Lady, she replied that her “greatest joy has been, really the ability to travel around and, I don’t know, lift up people.”

“Do everything, because try everything, because why not?” she offered in another instance.

Biden’s musings constituted well-meaning, if unremarkable sentiments that befit the occasion. But Brzezinski, eager to give her largely progressive audience what it wanted, couldn’t help herself from trying to turn the event into a free, nationally broadcast Biden 2024 campaign rally.

She repeatedly raised the issue of abortion — an issue Democrats have leaned on with some success since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 — asserting that “it really feels like a lot of our hard-won progress has been erased.”

“Are you at all nervous, fearful, stressed about the next ten months?” asked Brzezinski, alluding to the lead up to Election Day.

“No, I feel confident, I feel confident. I know that the campaign is going to be tough, but I am confident we’re going to win,” answered the First Lady as MSNBC showed a slideshow of pro-choice protesters.

Brzezinski brought the conversation back to politics and abortion in short order:

BRZEZINSKI: I do want to ask you for some advice for women who are very concerned about the future of our country, especially since we have women in this room who are going to grow up in a world who, without the rights that we had. Yeah. Um, we seem to be going in the wrong direction. Not only what is your hope or inspiration for them, but what can they do? 

BIDEN: There’s so much they can do and so much they have to do. I mean, we have to start electing leaders to positions that, um, that will think the way that we think that we want the things we want. Roe v Wade, good education, universal, uh, preschool. We need childcare for everybody at every level so people can work.  You know, uh, we have to Fix the environment. I mean, there’s so much we need to do. So find your passion, whatever that is, whatever you want to be involved with, and then go for it. And even if you’re working in another job or whatever, find the time to change, to create change. Because that’s the only way we’re going to get to where we want to be.

BRZEZINSKI: Did you think we would ever be in an America where a woman is forced to carry-

BIDEN: No.

BRZEZINSKI: -a non-viable fetus? I mean, this is where we are. And so for women who are sort of in shock over this, what is your advice in terms of the immediate future? What can they do?

BIDEN: Elect Joe Biden.

This is the kind of exchange that would receive no shortage of scorn had it taken place between a Republican and a Fox News anchor, and justifiably so.

It is obviously unbecoming for members of the press to conduct interviews in such a manner, because conversations of the kind Brzezinski and Biden had are of no use to the public.

Brzezinski didn’t elicit any new information about what the Biden campaign or a hypothetical second term in office might look like. She didn’t challenge any of Biden’s assumptions or arguments. She didn’t even, for the benefit of her likeminded viewers, try to get Biden to explain how exactly her husband would push back on pro-life advancements. Did Brzezinski forget that voters had already done exactly as the First Lady asked and elected Joe Biden president over three years ago now?

The hollow, political objective of the event was further degraded by the dishonesty surrounding it. This wasn’t an event about empowering women of all stripes, it was an event about appealing to women who think like Mika Brzezinski and Jill Biden. If the network was insistent on boosting the Bidens, it should have just admitted to as much by branding the event as being about abortion rights rather than pretending it was a nonpartisan effort to guide and encourage American women.

If MSNBC wants to be taken seriously by anyone other than the most rank Democratic partisans, it ought to rethink allowing its talent to hold such thinly-disguised campaign rallies on air.

The post MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski-Jill Biden Lovefest Was a Thinly-Disguised Campaign Rally first appeared on Mediaite.

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