Chris Wallace defends Jill Biden: No one ‘made a fuss’ over calling Martin Luther King Jr. a ‘doctor’

Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday questioned attacks on incoming first lady Jill Biden for using the honorific “doctor,” noting that numerous other people without a medical degree who have done the same.

“There has been some criticism recently from conservatives, including some conservatives on Fox News, about the fact that first lady-to-be Jill Biden goes by the title doctor,” Wallace said in an interview with incoming White House press secretary Jen Psaki on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I wonder, what is the Bidens’ reaction to that, especially given the fact that so many people over the years — I think of Dr. Henry Kissinger, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King — have gone by the title doctor even though they’re not medical doctors and nobody seems to have made a fuss about that,” he added.

Psaki agreed the criticism was “a bit perplexing,” contrasting it with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crisis.

A Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier in December called on Biden, who has a doctorate in education, to drop the title. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson also attacked Biden’s use of the honorific, calling her “illiterate” and attacking her dissertation as “pure nonsense.”

“The whole thing is just incredibly embarrassing and not simply to poor illiterate Jill Biden but to the college that considered this crap scholarship, embarrassing in fact to our entire system of higher education, to the nation itself,” Carlson said.

Biden responded to the op-ed in an interview with CBS’s Stephen Colbert last week, saying, “It was really the tone of it. … He called me ‘kiddo.’ One of the things I’m most proud of is my doctorate.”