Biden’s Journalist Cheat Sheet: The New Collusion Scandal

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 27, 2023

 

If you’re like the 70 percent of Americans who don’t want to see Joe Biden run for president again, 79 percent of whom cite to some degree his advanced age as the reason for their trepidation, the president is eager to allay your concerns.

 

“What do you say to them?” one reporter asked. “What do you say to those Americans who are watching and aren’t convinced?” To this, Biden replied mechanically. He redirected reporters’ attention away from the polling on voters’ discomfort with the president’s empirical decrepitude to his job-approval numbers, which Biden defended as middling and, therefore, unremarkable compared with past presidents. “Number two,” Biden replied, glancing down at the lectern, “when the same polling asked whether they think what kind of job I’ve done, it gets overwhelmingly positive results.”

 

“With regard to age, I can’t even say I guess how old I am,” Biden added extemporaneously. “It doesn’t — it doesn’t register with me.” He concluded: “I feel good.”

 

It was a practiced response, which makes sense considering the White House press shop probably had plenty of time to practice a response to this reporter’s inquiry.

 

Enterprising reporters armed with telescopic lenses attending that press conference captured the stack of cards the president was holding at the time, one of which featured the name and image of the reporter slated to ask “question #1.” Moreover, that card included the contents of the question that was to be posed to the senescent president.

 

This revelation led some political observers to wonder whether the White House had been soliciting reporters’ questions ahead of time to prepare the president’s response, which, of course, they had. Indeed, this presidency has been soliciting reporters’ questions from its outset.

 

Just two weeks after Biden’s inauguration, the Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani revealed one such solicitation, which occurred during “an informal White House Correspondents Association Zoom call.” At the time, however, reporters bristled at the request. One unnamed reporter spoke for all those who one of Tani’s sources said were “pissed off” by the implication that media would collude with the White House they were covering: “The press can’t really do its job in the briefing room if the White House is picking and choosing the questions they want,” the unnamed reporter objected. “That’s not really a free press at all.”

 

Apparently, the Fourth Estate has managed to overcome the objections to this practice when the lessons learned during the Trump administration were still fresh in its members’ minds. As Tani observed, Trump-era White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “was known to have asked certain news outlets about their questions in advance” of high-profile pressers — overtures that were summarily rejected.

 

Tani also cited Obama-era deputy White House press secretary Eric Schultz, who insisted that the Biden administration’s conduct was all part of their attempts at “restoring normalcy.” White House communications professionals often seek out a general sense of what their likely questioners are working on, he said, and pre-select which reporters will be called on and which won’t.

 

That assertion contrasts with the indignation directed at Donald Trump for what the New York Times described in 2017 as filtering out “tough questions” during press conferences.

 

Amid the scandal engulfing Trump’s first national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, Trump was accused of steering “formal questions to two conservative-leaning news organizations,” which avoided the controversy of the day in favor of “general queries about trade and immigration” — the ostensible subjects of his press conference alongside Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. “The lack of questions about that or Mr. Flynn drew protests from journalists, both inside and outside the East Room,” the Times noted. Indeed, the Times’ write-up of the event appeared to share their indignation over the president’s effort to use reporters as a shield in order “to avoid scrutiny on a major running story.”

 

How would the Times describe Biden’s successful effort to draft journalists into the effort to dispel voters’ concerns about the doddering president? We can’t say. The paper of record avoided making a note of the White House’s apparent solicitation of reporters’ questions in its Wednesday dispatch from the Rose Garden. Reporter Katie Rogers gave a workmanlike account of the president’s defense of his capabilities, providing context only by citing Trump’s meandering review of Biden’s performance — thereby establishing the contrast Biden himself drew with his predecessor to justify his pursuit of a second term.

 

This episode puts into stark relief the aggravation journalists have displayed toward Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who has come under fire for elevating local reporters and niche venues over mainstream reporters and legacy media outlets. Indeed, the unstated but discernible subtext in coverage of DeSantis’s media strategy is the fear that his conduct is rapidly emerging as best practice, particularly for office seekers on the right. Maybe DeSantis won’t be answering the questions that preoccupy newsrooms in the Acela corridor, but at least he won’t be cribbing off a cheat sheet.