“In fact, it didn’t take 2 weeks to evacuate 50,000. It took 10 days,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) tweeted in response to Ward. “Lots of work still to do, but it might be time for a bit of a reassessment by the media of this operation given the actual results.”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for journalists to acknowledge that their assessments of Kabul have been badly undercut by the stunning evacuation success.

For the first 10 days of the refugee crisis, the media obsessed over "optics" and how they were "disaster" for Biden. Suddenly though, the press shows little interest dwelling on the optics of successfully extricating nearly 100,000 people without a single U.S. casualty. Instead, the press remains married to its narrative. (snip)

Eventually addressing the historic evacuation campaign, the Times seemed to downplay the success, framing the airlift as a “public relations” tool being used by a White House “eager to shift the narrative.”

Buried in the article’s final paragraph was the revelation that during the collapse of Saigon in 1975, the U.S. evacuated just 7,000 people, as the South Vietnamese capitol famously fell. That’s telling because at the beginning of the Kabul story 13 days ago, news outlets were obsessed with making the historical connection with Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. Turns out the U.S. has evacuated 100,000 more people from Kabul than the U.S. did in 1975. Suddenly, those Saigon comparisons don’t make sense.