President Biden’s team knows that its national media honeymoon is coming to an end, so it is preparing to speak directly to the American people through local reporters and avoid distraction with its anti-Trumpian approach to ignoring Twitter.
Why it matters: The White House controlled the story for the first 12 days with daily themes and choreographed executive orders, but the communicators know they need to be innovative as the press force ramps up its independent scrutiny and tries to market initiatives as a coronavirus aid package.
- “It will be more difficult,” said Pili Tobar, deputy director of communications for the White House. “Discipline is the name of the game.”
The strategy: Vice President Kamala Harris inaugurated an approach last week by conducting interviews with newspapers and TV stations in West Virginia and Arizona. Those are two states where Biden needs the votes of Democratic senators to pass his $ 1.9 trillion COVID relief bill.
- But that ending is fraught with risk and may have backfired in West Virginia. Sen. Joe Manchin told a local broadcaster, “That’s no way of working together.”
Biden officials also plan to create more of their own content and revive a version of “West Wing Week,” a behind-the-scenes video series produced by Obama’s White House.
- The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, has already done so answered questions submitted by the public and followed by a crew from “The Circus”, a cable show popular with politicians.
- There are additional plans for outreach via Skype, YouTube and Twitter.
- “We’re going to have some fun new spins on some of the old traditions,” said Kate Berner, also the White House deputy communications director.
Message management: The White House is particularly careful with its most valuable communication coin: statements by Biden himself.
- Assistants spent that capital by putting the president at the center to sign executive orders and make written comments about their story of the day. This provides fresh images and sound bites for the evening news of the network.
- They get by by limiting Biden’s exposure to journalists. The president answered just five preselected reporters on Monday, but Biden herself called Fox News’s Peter Doocy and also made some new remarks to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins after meeting him in a West Wing corridor.
Between the lines: Psaki did not listen to reporters in the briefing room when they asked questions about controversial statements made by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
- Psaki said she did not want to “elevate conspiracy theories.”
- Berner added, “We didn’t let our eye off the ball by what’s going on on Twitter, or by what the press force in the Lower Press (in the White House) is doing to ask.”