biden's policies are different, i get that, but reporters pressed its aides, but not the president who takes very few questions, about this grim situation. some journalists are buying the white house explanation the problem is complicated. that's obviously true, but the tone is drastically different. the old media narrative, trump was a heartless hardliner. the new narrative biden means well but faces a difficult challenge. no amount of sympathetic spin can change that joe biden is now responsible. this is "media buzz." i'm howard kurtz. journalists keep rising the border crisis at white house briefings while the pundits are pointing fingers. >> so, how are you say that's not a crisis? >> it doesn't matter what you call it, it is an enormous challenge. it's something front and center for the president. >> we're just seven weeks into the biden presidency and already he's facing a growing humanitarian crisis at the u.s.-mexico border. >> the difference here, a lot of these children are part of a problem that the biden administration inherited from the trump administration. >> let me be clear, what the biden administration is doing at the border is largely all self-inflicted. biden rolled back donald trump's remain in mexico policy. >> the media is fine with the border crisis because trump is gone, there is no crisis. >> joining us now to analyst this, ben domenech, the federalist and ben, white house officials do not want to call what is happening at the border a crisis, but even the press isn't buying that. >> you know, we can argue about what you're going to call this, but the fact is, that all along, i feel like the coverage of border issues has been lacking in terms of the depth needed and the understanding of what's really going on here. in terms of what we see at the border today, it's incentivized not just by the shifts in the biden policy toward the border, but also by an ongoing cartel war that's playing out in mexico, which the press really has not paid attention to. the people who are coming across the border are actually wearing even wristbands as reported both by us at the federalist and reuters this past week. they-- these wristbands actually have numbers on them in order to track who has paid the correct cartel in order to get across safely. this is a human trafficking situation the cartels are profiting from. profiting from enormously and incentivized and encouraged by biden policy at the border. frankly incoherent to my perspective. the media ought to be looking at this as the self-inflicted wound it truly is. >> that's an aspect that you mentioned. leslie, reporters at the white house briefings have brought this up many times they thought to bring out an official who says it's complicated. this is a big story. >> it is a big story. i don't think that the less press is pretending this is a crisis. and one thing that ben and i agree on, what do you do about it. when you have a main anchor at cnn sit there and say it's a crisis. and it is and i've said this on the network a number of times, this is a crisis. when you have a change of administration and change of rhetoric between the former administration under donald trump and the current administration under joe biden, of course there are going to be people who say, let's try it with this new guy. when you look at pure numbers, you had surges under the trump administrations in 2014 and 2019 and you didn't have back then the pandemic that we're faced with right now. you didn't have actual numbers going from 13,000 beds to 8,000 beds for children, and as we found out in the past 24 hours, the biden administration is using fema to implement this. you know what this spotlights and the press needs to cover more and people at the border are asking for, please, stop politicizing this. immigration is a problem for democrat and republicans. >> by its nature immigration is a political problem. there's no way to take politics out of it. ben, back to the coverage. times reporting on a tripling of migrants kids coming across the border and ap, hundreds of teens and children are housed in a tent in packed conditions and some sleeping on the floor. is the press doing its job here? >> i think they're starting to do their job, but they've been slow on the uptake. the reality is that these policies, as you know, happened both under the obama-biden administration and under the trump administration. under the trump administration, it was something inhumane and compared frequently to all types of fascist approaches to things when in reality, this is an issue that every administration has had to deal with, but dealing with it now is a much bigger problem given, again, cartel incentives in place in order to profit from this situation. unfortunately, i think that this had as been demagogued so much on a national level and without a real complexity of an unravelling of it from the press perspective, it's allowed to continue in this, just completely absurd way. where if you have any kind of border security at all, that's viewed as something inhumane. if you say come on over or come on over slowly and you have this kind of, you know, upsurge, that that's something where your motives are in the right place. howie: well, we don't know what president biden thinks about this because he's taken, i believe, one question this week, abc says he'll sit down later this week with george stephanopoulos. on this point, leslie, unlike in the trump administration, biden is not separating children from their parents and other differences, but test, because he favors comprehensive immigration reform thought to be sending a signal even though it's not the official policy that it's okay to come seek asylum in the u.s. isn't it because of the default position by the press during the last administration is not what we're seeing and hearing today? >> i don't know what everybody else is watching. when you hear and see aoc on networks, you know, screaming about what the biden administration is doing and saying that it's no different than what the trump administration was doing and other top democrats, well, i do think that the media is covering it. there are a lot of people, not just progressive faction and wing of the democratic party, but there are many democrats that are calling out the biden administration for hypocrisy, quite frankly, and for saying it's still not acceptable what he's doing any more than when donald trump is doing it. i think the press has been doing it and using big guns in the democratic party to get that message out. howie: ben, it's true there's coverage when alexandria ocasio-cortez says how is this from kids in cages? what don't see, this is a case of covering presidents different and surges under trump and biden. what i don't see is commentators saying joe biden is a bad person for allowing this to happen and we saw plenty of that with donald trump. >> can you imagine the scenario you had this type of surge last year and the trump administration was releasing people into the population without testing them for covid because that's happening today. the reason they're getting tested is because of local nonprofits and the like that the border patrol, the actual, you know, government entities that we have down there are not even bothering to test these people, many of whom turn out to be positive. this would be decried as something not just a failure of trump policy, but an example of incoherence and an example of failure of executive leadership and the like. instead, under biden, it's getting very short shrift in terms of the coverage of this issue. while i do believe there's attention paid to aoc and critics of the biden administration from the left, this is something that i think is going to turn into a widespread humanitarian issue of a scale that we've not seen before in very short order and that deserves attention. howie: let's hope it doesn't happy, but if it does it deserves attention. let me turn attention to the vaccine ramp up, we're happy about that, president biden ordered 100 million doses. leslie, there's question how much credit the media should give to donald trump for launching operation warp speed and whether president biden deserves his share of credit. the former president put out a statement saying i hope everyone remembers if i wasn't president you wouldn't be getting that beautiful shot for five years at best and probably wouldn't be getting it at all. that doesn't get much coverage. >> well, look, "the washington post," the new york times which are not known as conservative media outlets lambasted joe biden, the president, for not mentioning operation warp speed and donald trump. can i say something? maybe i'm vindictive or something, howie. if i were the president of the united states and my predecessor refused to actually acknowledge that i had won an election and continued to perpetrate lies about an election, lies about fraud within the election and technically not even concede, why would i give that person credit. donald trump gives himself enough credit, i don't think that joe biden needs to pat donald trump on the back. i don't think going forward we need to look back. >> it was striking those new york times and washington post stories saying, look, donald trump has done a good job and joe biden has built on it with the j&j. and on the verge of passing it now, what's your quick take? >> that's exactly my take, howie. they're saying it now, only saying it after the fact. you have to have the crisis in order to be able to exploit it and you can't actually give any credit to the previous administration for achieving something that frankly is a medical miracle and something that we should all be able to unify about praising this operation warp speed for having the kind of effect it did busting through regulatory burdens and actually delivering this jacque in record time. howie: i've been saying this for week. both presidents deserve credit and nice to see some of the media catching up. stand by. up next, more media trouble for andrew cuomo as the newspaper discloses an anonymous accuser and plenty of big name new york democrats want him gone. es. powerful 24-hour, non-drowsy, allergy relief plus an immediate cooling sensation for your throat. feel the clarity, and live claritin clear. this isn't just freight. these aren't just shipments. they're promises. big promises. small promises. cuddly shaped promises. each with a time and a place they've been promised to be. and the people of old dominion never turn away a promise. or over promise. or make an empty promise. we keep them. a promise is everything to old dominion, because it means everything to you. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> the media that lionized andrew cuomo is year ago are pushing for him to resign, jerry nadler, aoc, kirsten gillibrand say it's time for him to quit and the governor says he won't bow to cancel culture. >> politicians who don't know a single fact, but yet form a conclusion and an opinion, are in my opinion reckless and dangerous. howie: with the state assembly launching impeachment investigation, the turning point may have been an albany union story about a sixth accuser, saying that he groped her at the governor's mansion, and position equivalent to a supervisor. cuomo said i've never done anything like this, the details of this report are gut wrenching. joining us is charlie gasperino. most are saying why is he hanging on and more democrats calling for andrew cuomo's ouster. are they like sharks in the water smelling blood? what turned the tide here. >> i think when the democratic party turned against him it was like a light switch for the mainstream media to go after andrew cuomo. listen, i've known andrew for years, covered him when he was a housing advocate and created an agency called hope to help, it was called help, to help homeless. howie: that's when i met him when he was 25 years old. >> he was a smart policy guy. covered him at hud, the new york attorney general's office and governor. andrew cuomo was never perfect, but his media coverage was perfect. howie: understatement of the year. >> and fantastic. howie: so that raises the question, just to give the tone, the viewers the phone tone of it. new york coverage page, cuo-must-go. >> and there was a piece saying that he touched my arms, the small of my back, my waist and they'll known with his strong arm tactics, as a guy why was this such a secret so long. >> and i don't think that this was what people talked about. howie: he harassed people of both genders. >> just so you know, i always got along with him. and i mean, he could yell at me, i could yell back. it wasn't an issue with me and i never found him to be out of the ordinary compared to the wall street ceo's that i used to cover. and of course, no one is-- than covering eliot spitzer and he would light me up and andrew was no worse than he was. this comes down to the media and this is a case of media bias. andrew cuomo had big issues with his help program. they were putting essentially homeless people in middle class neighborhoods. not much coverage of that. he made huge mistakes at hud. he's one of the reasons why fannie mae and freddie mac, one of the reasons of the financial crisis, the submarine prime loans and pushed them to do this. howie: and let me get you to why, some of the blemishes were overlook, why did they do that. >> he came from democratic royalty and i knew his dad. howie: covered him, too. >> when you come from cuomo, from the kennedys, a lot of stuff gets looked over and i think that's what happened until now. and now it's game on because the entire democratic party establishment is against him. we should point out one other thing, there's a sort of a war going on inside the new york state democratic party between the far left progressives like aoc and people like andrew cuomo who are more moderate and they want to get rid of him. howie: he's not liberal enough rhetoric for new york state. unnamed accuser by the albany paper, and less coverage than charlotte bennett. in a way hers is the most troubling allegation, she says cuomo put his hands under her blouse. how should they treat her, they don't know the name. >> that's an interesting question. you have to try to verify the facts of what she said and if in fact can verify they turn out, and it should be a high level since it's, you know, it's anonymous and you should print it. one of the problems i remember with the matt lauer situation, so many of the stuff they said about him, if they checked it out. some of what they said about him didn't check out it probably wasn't worth running the way that ronan ferrell ran it. you've got to make sure with anonymous sources the story checks out at a high level. i'm assuming that albany times did that. i have not verified that, by the way. howie: and there's an investigation by the state attorney general and he disputes some of that and is sorry that he made women uncomfortable. and mention that crown publishing is not promoting more copies of his book on leadership about covid. some people say cancel culture? no, nobody is buying the book. charlie, great too see you. >> anytime. howie: ahead, jedediah bila on the furor over harry, meghan and oprah. and how is the president covering covid on the prime time speech. start the year smiling at aspen dental where new starts happen, every day. get exceptional care at every step, unparalleled safety at every visit, and flexible payment options for every budget. now, during the everyday smiles event new patients get a full exam & set of x-rays with no obligation. no insurance? no worries, it's free. plus, now all patients can get 20% off their treatment plan. find every reason to smile. every day at aspen dental. call 1-800-aspendental or book today at aspendental.com ♪ ♪ be right back. with moderate to severe crohn's disease, i was there, just not always where i needed to be. is she alright? i hope so. so i talked to my doctor about humira. i learned humira is for people who still have symptoms of crohn's disease after trying other medications. the majority of people on humira saw significant symptom relief in as little as 4 weeks. and many achieved remission that can last. humira can lower your ability to fight infections. serious and sometimes fatal infections, including tuberculosis, and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened, as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. tell your doctor if you've been to areas where certain fungal infections are common and if you've had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores . don't start humira if you have an infection. be there for you and them. ask your gastroenterologist about humira. with humira, remission is possible. >> all the networks carried president biden's first prime time speech hailing the passage of a nearly $2 trillion aid bell with zero republican votes and picking his plan for the future. >> i will not relent until we beat this virus, but i need you, the american people, i need you. i need every american to do their part and that isn't just how politics and politicians vote in washington, with the loudest voices say on cable or online, unity is what we do as fellow americans. >> vintage joe biden, taking the realities of people's humanity, the realities of what people need and want in their everyday lives. i promises a return to kind of normal, not really though, but threatens to take away the cookie if the little children don't behave. i found at that patronizing and frankly, embarrassing. >> this is obviously a major win for him the scope and scale of the legislation. i think it's really huge. >> the left has won a major victory. the 1.9 trillion dollar so-called covid relief package creates the most gigantic left wing slush fund america has ever seen. howie: ben domenech, a president always gets credit for his first major victory on capitol hill and this is the overriding issue that joe biden ran on. i'm sure it's not liking to a democratic president, but do you think the media are overpraising it? >> well, i don't know about over praising it, but howie, i want to say as someone who has written speeches for a president before i've never seen a bigger gap between the propaganda around this speech and what the speech actually was. the message that joe biden was sending to the american people was a lecture, it was a demand that basically said, you'll only be able to have a fourth of july if you go along with all the different things that i say you have to do, and he was promoting this bill that has nothing for the most part to do with covid relief, as obviously, it's less than 10%, really, related to covid relief. it's sending more money to states for increasing salaries on bureaucrats, spending on roads and different aspects of policy that are not going to have anything to do with covid and yet, this was sold in the media as being this unifying, come-together event, can't we all get behind this mono-partisan piece of legislation? and it was absolutely absurd. i think it's one of the reasons why people don't trust the media anymore because the spin completely collides with the reality of what americans saw on their television. howie: leslie marshall, there was not a sustained conservative media assault on this, one on fox prime time in days leading up to the final vote. what about ben's point this was hailed as a breakthrough to the country when it was passed on a party line vote? >> well, what unity doesn't just come within politics and inside the beltway in washington, howie, unity is about the nation. if you look at the polls, americans are united in supporting this. americans are united in wanting stimulus checks, want being money to help further reopen schools and even republican governors have praised