As President Joe Biden ended his news conference on Friday afternoon about the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan , a reporter called out an especially bellicose question.

Why do you continue to trust the Taliban , Mr. President? the reporter said.

Notwithstanding the militant groups poor human rights record and ultra-conservative Islamist ideology, multiple U.S. administrations have successfully negotiated with the Taliban. The Taliban have complex interests. As Biden noted on Friday, the organization is at war with the faction of the self-declared Islamic State (also known as ISIS), which is competing for power in Afghanistan.

But the reporters criticism-masquerading-as-query was the culmination of a weeks worth of dramatic finger-pointing and fretting from a Washington press corps that usually prides itself on neutrality.

Although the White Houses failure to foresee the rapid fall of the Afghan government and prepare accordingly has exacerbated the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal, Biden and his allies are furious with what they see as reporters and pundits unduly hawkish coverage of the exit.

The media tends to bend over backwards to both-sides all of their coverage, but they made an exception for this, said Eric Schultz, a deputy press secretary under President Barack Obama. They both-sides coverage over masks, and vaccines, and school openings and everything else. Somehow [the Afghanistan withdrawal] created a rush to judgment and a frenzy that we havent seen in a long time.

Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the de facto leader of the partys progressive wing and Bidens rival in the 2020 presidential primary, offered a similar assessment.

The extent to which the media is privileging voices who have gotten this wrong for years is ridiculous, he said. What were seeing is an attempt by the Washington foreign policy establishment to expiate its sins of over 20 years by putting this on the Biden administration.

Journalists who cover the Pentagon spend an inordinate amount of their time with current and former military officials, many of whom go on to lucrative gigs with military contractors that profited from the Afghanistan War. Its that kind of chumminess that contributed to the medias amplification of the specious case for the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003.

As The Intercept has chronicled, the problem of media bias toward foreign adventurism is especially acute among talking heads paid to discuss military policy on television. Former U.S. military generals often inveigh against the withdrawal on cable news with just their past military titles rather than their current careers as contractors who stand to profit from an extended presence in Afghanistan.

A source close to the White House identified this dynamic to HuffPost. They are elevating the Blob, whose members spent years lying about progress in Afghanistan (and who often have financial conflicts of interest), the source said, using the blob colloquialism that refers to the Washington foreign policy establishment. The result is that many in the press are left effectively endorsing the view that the U.S. should have sent more American service members into Afghanistan to fight and die to stop another Taliban offensive despite supposedly being impartial.

This president himself vented similar frustration Friday during remarks at the White House. People now say to me and others many of you say it on air Why did we have to move because no Americans were being attacked? Why did we agree to withdraw 2,500 troops when no Americans were being attacked? Biden said.