One Year into the Biden Administration, Concerns About Press Access and Transparency Remain

In February 2021, I wrote a column in which I opined that better days for the press appeared to be ahead as the Biden administration pledged to usher in a new era of transparency and willingness to work with journalists and the news media. Indeed, early on, as I observed, “it seemed apparent that the new administration would distance itself as much as possible from the one before it.” The administration, often via White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, vowed to forge fruitful relationships with journalists, necessary actions that the journalistic community largely welcomed after four years of often combative relations with the Trump administration, which wielded the term “fake news” like a bludgeon and regularly denounced coverage it perceived as too critical of its policy goals.

Unfortunately, hopes that the Biden administration would do a complete about-face have been at least somewhat misplaced. According to a new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the Biden administration has limited access to the president and has been slow to respond to requests. Additionally, concerns about press access have persisted amid several public crises, including restrictions at the U.S. southern border and the administration’s failure to assist Afghan journalists following the drawdown of U.S. troops and the resulting Taliban takeover after the fall of Kabul, among others.

Despite the very obvious gulf between the administration’s rhetoric and its actions (to hark back to similar comments made by University of Georgia media and law professor Jonathan Peters, who is quoted in CPJ’s report) the Biden administration has continued to assert that its approach to press relations has been nothing less than sound, stressing the importance of mutual engagement and respect.

“Media was a big priority for him, and ensuring that there was respect even when there's a point of contention or a difficult conversation or back and forth, that is part of democracy, but our objective is to, has been to instill normalcy and engagement with reporters,” she said in one of her trademark measured responses, an indication of the style that made her, perhaps next to President Joe Biden, the administration’s most recognizable public face.

CPJ notes in its report that President Biden “relies more on prepared remarks that he has read on television from a teleprompter, taking few or no questions from reporters kept some distance away,” behavior mirrored by Psaki, who has rarely called on journalists who don’t work for prominent mainstream media outlets. This cycle has the consequence of complicating the work of foreign journalists, who are woefully underrepresented in press interactions with the Biden administration. It is inherently more difficult for foreign journalists, who must contend with issues of access and opportunity not necessarily faced by contemporaries working on their native soil.

Not helping this situation is the Biden administration’s very carefully choreographed relationship with the press. Conversations with senior administration officials, reports CPJ, often occur on deep background, and the carefully scripted nature of the public response, while apparently an effort to restore basic norms that were threatened by the Trump administration, risk compromising relationships with journalists with fewer connections to the president’s tightly controlled inner circle, and alienating the administration from a public still largely divided and privy to a wealth of disinformation predominantly disseminated via social media.

Consider, for instance, the fact that reporters must ask the White House press office for “quote approval” for anything said during on-background briefings and interviews, granting the administration the opportunity. “They’re approving content again for a second time,” Politico’s Anita Kumar tells CPJ, who noted the “discipline” of a White House so committed to a script that they do not want to give any impression that they are deviating from it.

The political scientist Martha Kumar, the director of the White House Transition Project during several administrations, believes that White House staffers minimize the president’s off-the-cuff remarks because of his tendency to misspeak, noting that he is most likely to make mistakes toward the end of a press conference.

According to Brookings, Biden differs from his predecessor in that he relies on “disciplined surrogates” to relay his administration’s messages. While we can certainly argue that former President Donald Trump’s notorious tendency to deliver edicts by tweet detrimentally impacted geopolitics (and we would agree with that assessment given how negatively this behavior, and his tendency to brand journalists “enemies of the people,” impacted our line of work) there is something to be said about how comparatively easy Trump made it, even inadvertently, for journalists to access him, even when the combination of his rhetoric and less than beneficial briefings from his litany of press secretaries said otherwise.

Psaki, for her part, has said that “tactics differ from administration to administration,” adding that the president “probably takes more questions overall.” However, many journalists are not satisfied with this explanation and are calling for more access to the president himself. Steven Portnoy, who leads the White House Correspondents’ Association, is among the journalists issuing more strident calls for more access to the president, writing in a tweet that “The historical record of a presidency requires more than fleeting Q&A.”

Transparency in governance, according to the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), “means that government officials act openly, with citizens' knowledge of the decisions the officials are making.” Given journalism’s responsibility to its citizens, there is no doubt that it has been difficult to fulfill this responsibility even if, as the Biden administration appears to wish to portray, government officials have the best intentions. At this juncture, the Biden administration needs to do more than make an about-face in rhetoric, it needs to satisfy both journalists and the public through its actions as well if it wishes to more actively repair the bonds that were frayed during the previous administration.