“Today,” Dana Perino told Fox, “will be Joe Biden’s most important public service speech.”
Later, commentators said he cleaned the bar easily.
Fox News Sunday moderator Chris Wallace said Biden’s speech was “partly sermon, partly stimulating conversation” and “the best opening speech I have ever heard”.
Conservative commentator Karl Rove said on Fox that it was “a sincere plea for unity” and “authentically Joe Biden”.
“It was not a partisan speech,” Abby Phillip told CNN. “It was an invitation not only to cross the corridor, but to get back on track. It was an invitation to decency, to civility. It was the basic foundation of democracy and not so much of politics.”
At NBC, Andrea Mitchell called the speech and the general ceremony “very important and optimistic, hopeful, but confrontational”.
Ed O’Keefe of CBS said that Biden “may have given a title to what we are going through” when talking about an “uncivil war” in the United States.
Biden told the nation that “the answer is not to turn inward, to retire to rival factions, to be suspicious of those who don’t look like you, or adore like you, or don’t get the news from the same sources as you. We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue. Rural versus urban. Conservative versus liberal. We can do this if we open our souls, instead of hardening our hearts. “
A visual difference
Washington shone in live photos from dozens of cameras, in what is known as “pool” coverage shared by all major networks. The post-riot security measures and health precautions of the Covid era made coverage of the inaugural news even more surprising than usual.
The Capitol contrast between January 6 and January 20 was also a cross-section of the morning’s special reports.
While CNN was showing live photos of the Capitol, Jake Tapper said: “Two weeks after the same site was desecrated by a domestic terrorist crowd that was trying to stop democracy on its way, the United States and, in fact, the world was treated with a beautiful demonstration of the firmness of that democracy. “
It is a “symbolic message for the country and the world: America has embraced reality and science,” commented CNN’s Bianna Golodryga on Twitter.
Lowry’s Take
Brian Lowry writes, “There will be no discussions about the size of the crowd for this inaugural, which reflects the clever way this inaugural was produced as an event made for TV. Trump may have been classified as a ‘reality show presidency’, mas de Biden The response to the pandemic was evident in the way he campaigned and now in the way it was inaugurated: Using the medium of TV as a means of shaping the message, in the same way as other live events, from sports to talk shows, did to adapt to this new reality. “
Defeating the lies
“There are truth and lies – lies told to have power and profit,” said Biden during his speech.
“I think that, especially for all of us, journalists, it was resonant to hear the president say that it is about defending the truth and defeating the lies,” Margaret Brennan told CBS.
At ABC, Jon Karl also mentioned Biden’s appeal to the truth: “The phrase in Biden’s speech that caught my attention was when he said, ‘there is truth and there are lies’ … if he can convince Americans of this once again, he will go a long way to accomplish what he needs to accomplish. “