As we reported earlier, Jill Biden was at the NFC Championship game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the San Francisco 49ers. But she wasn’t with Joe Biden. She was sitting with Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL.
Joe Biden went to their home in Wilmington on Sunday afternoon after spending most of the weekend in Camp David as I reported, raising questions as to why was he only going there for the evening when presumably he’s just heading back to the White House on Monday.
I’m surprised that she’s back given that she was booed the last time that she was there. That may explain why Joe Biden wouldn’t show up because he may get a greeting that he isn’t going to appreciate.
But once again as we’ve seen in the case of Jill Biden, there’s now a requirement for the media to constantly refer to her as “Dr.” Jill Biden.
First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and Roger Goodell are in attendance at today's NFC Championship game pic.twitter.com/QIe2OS6o4L
— FOX Sports: NFL (@NFLonFOX) January 29, 2023
That prompted a reaction from journalist Megyn Kelly that drove people on the left insane.
Announcers for this Eagles-49ers game just spotted the First Lady in a box and of course call her “Dr. Jill Biden.” Wonder if she realizes what a wannabe she looks like insisting on this fake title. Get a real MD or just work on your self-esteem.
— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 29, 2023
“Announcers for this Eagles-49ers game just spotted the First Lady in a box and of course call her ‘Dr. Jill Biden.’ Wonder if she realizes what a wannabe she looks like insisting on this fake title,” Kelly said. “Get a real MD or just work on your self-esteem.”
Yes, let’s start with the principle that if you have earned an Ed.D., you have a “doctorate.” Even if you have a poorly written, inconsequential mess of a position paper that earned you that degree from a school connected to your husband.
But normally outside of academia, it was considered pretentious to insist on people calling you “Dr.” and that’s what I think Kelly is saying there.
The funny thing about this is that it was the general policy of much of the media in the past not to refer to anyone even with a Ph.D. as a “Dr.,” much less an Ed.D. That was reserved for medical doctors, dentists, and the like.
As the Los Angeles Times wrote back in 2009 when they were writing about Jill Biden (but could still be honest about her and Joe):
Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific “Dr.” unless the person in question has a medical degree.
“My feeling is if you can’t heal the sick, we don’t call you doctor,” said Bill Walsh, copy desk chief for the Washington Post’s A section and the author of two language books.
As the Times noted, they wrote how Joe said Jill wanted to get the doctorate because she felt she was “second-class” when the mail was addressed to “Sen. and Mrs. Biden.” That says so much about her right there. It wasn’t to achieve more in her field, it was to ease her psyche about feeling inferior. Which is why she wants everyone to call her the title now.
But folks on the left and in liberal media flipped out at Kelly for daring to question the edict to call Jill Biden “Dr.” Many responses revealed the problem — they didn’t even understand what degree Jill had, with most claiming she had earned a Ph.D., which would require far more research scholarship than what she did for her degree.
Hey @megynkelly, on behalf of everybody who has a phd, or knows somebody who has one and can appreciate the tireless years of work it takes to research, write, and defend a dissertation, go f*ck yourself. https://t.co/OP6lapFn6a
— David Shuster (@DavidShuster) January 29, 2023
Let me be REAL clear: @megynkelly is TRASH for this tweet. NO CLASS. A PhD IS a real title. In journalism, we typically only call medical doctors by that title. But elsewhere, it is used. I guess Megyn is such a hater that she likely wouldn’t say Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. https://t.co/X6eWXdHwPz
— rolandsmartin (@rolandsmartin) January 30, 2023
It’s sort of quietly hilarious that Jill Biden insists everyone call her “Dr.” and that they need to flip out to defend her. Yet, they can’t even be accurate. Although at least they aren’t as wrong as when Whoopi Goldberg suggested Jill in the past for Surgeon General.
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