It was with good cause when the Biden White House evicted the dog, Commander, last fall. After all, the dog had a bad habit of biting White House staffers. Now the Biden administration has its sights on disciplining another, albeit figurative, dog — the lapdog press.
It is hardly a secret that the establishment media have given the Biden White House a relatively soft ride with their coverage. The preferential treatment began during the 2020 election season, in which the basement campaign strategy was generally unchallenged, culminating just days before the election when the Hunter laptop story was buried. The sympathetic press has been less than aggressive during the Biden White House years, with perfunctory coverage of the Afghanistan debacle, lingering inflation and the border crisis, not to mention routine Biden gaffes on the public stage.
But not satisfied to let a sleeping dog lie, the Biden administration is now channeling Donald Trump’s anti-media antics, ripping into the media for “significant errors,” “misreporting” and “false content.”
Much of the media bashing is coming from White House counsel spokesman Ian Sams. He is currently upset about how the media reported the findings of Robert Hur’s special counsel report on Biden’s handling of classified documents. Last fall, Sams wrote to news executives complaining about the media coverage of House Republicans and their preliminary look into a Biden impeachment inquiry.
Biden campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo has also joined the media-whining parade, criticizing the press for focusing on the president’s age. Ducklo might check out multiple recent polls that confirm the president’s age is, indeed, a legitimate news issue on the minds of voters.
The Biden administration media-scolding not only suggests the White House has a thin skin, but an obliviousness to how well the media already treat Biden.
It’s not as though the establishment media are out to get the White House. A recent study by the research organization AllSides indicates that 63 percent of articles cited in the Google News aggregation are from left-leaning sources, while only 6 percent are from news outlets that lean right. Given this sort of home field advantage, it is a wonder Biden operatives would want to rattle any establishment media cages.
The Biden handlers have every right to criticize and bully the press. They have First Amendment rights to work their mouths, just like all Americans. Beating up on the press, in fact, has been a United States presidential tradition going back to the early days of the republic.
John Adams signed the Sedition Acts into law in 1798, making it illegal to publish “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government. His successor, Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote he would prefer “newspapers without a government,” nonetheless changed his tune and used much of his second inaugural address to berate the press. He accused the press of “demoralizing licentiousness” and of spreading “false facts.” Other noteworthy anti-press presidents include Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon and the reigning champion of chief executive anti-press fervor, Donald Trump.
A main question for the Biden White House to ponder is whether this new press-bashing strategy can work. Odds are it can’t.
The Biden 2020 campaign made a concerted effort to differentiate itself from all things Trump, and the Biden White House works tirelessly to contrast itself to the “former guy,” as Biden has called Trump on occasion. To now stoop to complaining about press coverage and hassling reporters comes off as clumsy and, well, Trumpian.
Such complaining about the referees could also be rhetorically interpreted as a signal of White House paranoia and desperation. A White House that is confident in its messaging and electoral prospects would trust American news consumers to sort out the news on their own, independent of the administration’s attempted media manipulation.
The White House has the biggest megaphone in the world at its disposal. Instead of hectoring the media, Biden’s handlers would come off as more rational to just use the levers already at its disposal to push its preferred narratives. The president himself has an opportunity every day to make his own news agenda and put his preferred spin out there with public appearances or, dare it be suggested, an actual news conference. Sadly for Biden, his stand-ins, such as press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and even Vice President Kamala Harris, have proven unable to move the ball.
If the president can’t fully utilize the messaging tools at his disposal, then the current White House administration and the Biden ’24 campaign have bigger problems, and the jig might be up. In that scenario, no amount of media bashing will save the day.
Jeffrey M. McCall is a media critic and professor of communication at DePauw University. He has worked as a radio news director, a newspaper reporter and as a political media consultant. Follow him on Twitter @Prof_McCall.