Right out of the gate, President Joe Biden’s press strategy has been a stark departure from his predecessor’s, a shift characterized by his deliberate effort to keep a low profile. Donald Trump defied historical standards throughout his presidency, particularly with his media presence. Before the former president was permanently suspended from Twitter, he used the medium to fire top officials and attack others; spread conspiracy-laden misinformation; contradict his own administration’s pandemic messaging; and foment violence, among other things. “Trump didn’t so much love the spotlight as he sought to totally consume it,” Politico notes, and he used television to do so, regularly calling into Fox News and Fox Business programs and, early on in his presidency, welcoming cameras into meetings, from union leaders and workers one day to America’s biggest automakers the next. According to Politico, Trump had done three TV interviews at this point in his presidency, while Biden hasn’t done one.
Biden’s media approach, rather, seems designed to keep him in the background. Veteran Democratic strategist Paul Begala told Politico that Biden is “not threatened by someone else being in the spotlight” and posited he may in fact enjoy it, as the strategy allows Biden to display the capable team he has assembled. “In just over a week, the White House has booked 80 TV and radio interviews with 20 senior administration officials, members of the Covid-19 response team and Cabinet secretary designates,” Politico reports. Biden campaigned on a promise to restore trust and rely on experts, priorities reflected in the new press shop’s initial media blitz: his team booked officials on every major network’s Sunday show in the first week and organized a CNN town hall with three doctors on the White House COVID-19 team to answer questions from the public.
White House aides say the move is less delegation than a “concerted effort to restore confidence with a public battered by the contradictory messaging and scorched-earth politics of the Trump years,” according to Politico. The question is how long the strategy will hold, and where the divide lies between relief at not having a president who’s everywhere all the time, and desire for regular access to him. Biden aides and staffers flooding the zone and promising to turn the page from the lies of the Trump administration might only be effective for so long if Biden continues to stay off air himself. Biden’s press team may soon face pressure from reporters for more access to the president, CNN’s Brian Stelter notes. According to Begala, Biden’s people “seem to be enormously aware of the fact that simply not being Trump is no longer enough.”
Still, his predecessor’s gross abuse of the megaphone provided by his office seems to have bought Biden some time. So far, his limited media presence has been somewhat welcome, especially in allowing doctors and health experts to communicate more information about the pandemic. “It is hard to overstate the magnitude of change that has taken place from the rampant disinformation and unhinged, politicized briefings of the last administration to the sober, professional communications we now see,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin writes of the three-times-a-week briefings held by members of Biden’s COVID-19 response team.
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