I know what many of you were thinking when CNN moved Jim Acosta off of White House correspondent duty at the end of President Donald Trump’s administration: Who could fill his shoes? Who could be so nakedly partisan and woefully uninformed at the same time?
Thankfully, PBS’ Yamiche Alcindor has stepped into the void quite nicely. Not only is she taking your tax dollars; she’s asking the kind of questions not even Acosta would touch, like at the Joe Biden news conference where she asked the president if the border crisis was in part because of “the perception of you that got you elected as a moral, decent man is the reason why a lot of immigrants are coming to this country and entrusting you with unaccompanied minors.”
But don’t get the wrong idea: It’s not all sunshine and lollipops when Alcindor enters the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House. She’ll hold press secretary Jen Psaki’s feet to the fire — especially when asking whether the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines on vaccinated people being able to go maskless is actually racist.
Just so we’re clear what we’re talking about here, these are the CDC guidelines that state individuals fully vaccinated against COVID-19 “can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic” and “[f]ully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance.”
For over a year, we’ve been told to “follow the science” — the science, of course, being set by the fine people at the CDC. To Alcindor, however, some are saying that science might be racist:
