The White House has been plagued in recent weeks with negative reports about President Biden’s press office coinciding with a series of messaging gaffes, and mainstream news organizations typically friendly to Biden have taken notice.
“It has been most interesting to see the establishment media try to adjust its coverage of the Biden administration. Mainstream media helped run cover for Biden in the 2020 campaign and for the early months of his administration,” DePauw University journalism professor Jeffrey McCall told Fox News Digital.
“But the media narrative that Biden was a unifier and that any national problems were just Trump leftovers just had to disintegrate in the face of cold reality,” McCall said. “Even the left-of-center media have had to grudgingly acknowledge that the Biden administration is struggling.”
McCall believes media credibility is “already quite dismal” and continued promotion of Biden has become unworkable when public opinion polling indicates that Americans see the administration’s problems.
“In a sense, the mainstream media is just now figuring out what the public has known for months,” he said.
New White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has frequently stumbled since taking over the podium last month when Jen Psaki left the administration. When grilled about a questionable claim made by the president during a speech to graduating Navy midshipmen last month, Jean-Pierre claimed she “did not hear” the part of the speech and declined to defend Biden’s claim that he was appointed to the academy in 1965, the same year he graduated from the University of Delaware.
“I can’t speak to it right now,” Jean-Pierre said.
Jean-Pierre has also developed a reputation for reading scripted answers from her notebook that conflict with Biden’s statements. Many reporters have already grown frustrated with Jean-Pierre, and NBC News reporter Kelly O’Donnell essentially told the press secretary how to do her job during a heated exchange last week on who briefed Biden on the baby formula crisis.
“To say there is no specific person is not a satisfactory answer. When you have senior assistants to the president, there’s a paper trail, I’m sure, about briefings to the president. There is a domestic policy council. There’s a chief of staff. At some point we need to know who would have been the most likely person to talk to him,” O’Donnell said.
Jean-Pierre continued to dodge the question and the NBC News reporter fired back, “It just looks like it’s evasive” to not have senior White House aides come forward and admit they briefed the president on the baby formula shortage.
“We’re also trying to understand the information flow in this White House, and it’s important for us to get that answer, which is where we’re going to keep asking it until we get that answer,” O’Donnell said.
Jean-Pierre declined to identify anyone who discussed the issue with Biden despite the plea from O’Donnell. But O’Donnell isn’t the only reporter to appear annoyed by the new press secretary in her short time on the job, as Washington Post reporter Tyler Pager and CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe have had similar exchanges with Jean-Pierre in recent memory.
Others who feel Jean-Pierre is off to a rocky start have pointed to an exchange she had last month with Fox News’ Peter Doocy about a tweet Biden made suggesting higher taxes on wealthy corporations is the answer to combat inflation.
McCall admits “trying to put a happy face on so many administration problems” is a difficult task for Jean-Pierre, but she’s “coming off as overmatched while trying to rationalize policy failures.”
“Saying ‘I did not see that part of the speech’ or ‘I can’t speak to that’ just won’t cut it in front of a press corps that might finally be awakening to its responsibility to thoroughly scrutinize the Biden White House,” McCall said.
The Biden administration is beginning to brace for a potentially brutal midterm election cycle as Republicans are expected to retake the House and potentially the Senate, but messaging from the White House has been widely criticized in recent weeks. Biden’s staffers have attempted to blame soaring inflation and gas prices on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, pushing a “Putin’s Price Hike” narrative despite how both were becoming issues for the Biden administration months before the global conflict.
Biden also recently unveiled a new insult for Republicans, referring to them as “ultra-MAGA,” an alteration to former President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. The slogan wasn’t particularly popular among Democrats, and some Republicans have embraced the moniker – particularly when Biden referred to Trump as “The Great MAGA King.”
“The Five” co-hosts Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters took turns roasting Biden for the botched messaging.
“You can’t burn someone with ‘king’ in the nickname,” Watters said. “It’s like calling me King Fox. OK, I’ll take it.”
“Biden has such difficulty communicating that even his nicknames, his smears, are ineffective,” co-host Geraldo Rivera added.
Meanwhile, the White House initially claimed the new moniker was created by the president, but the Washington Post since revealed it was the result of a six-month liberal-funded focus group project.
Biden was hit with a plethora of damning reports last week alone that shed light on turmoil erupting in the White House, followed by a Politico piece Sunday night about White House fears that Jimmy Carter comparisons to Biden will “stick.”
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