Media figures complaining about the Biden administration’s liberal use of a tool many experts say limits government transparency shouldn’t be so surprised, former Trump administration officials say.
At least five White House reporters recently expressed concerns in a media report over the Biden team’s habit of only allowing officials to sit for “background with quote approval” interviews, where journalists must agree to allow the administration to review and edit transcribed conversations before getting cleared to publish approved quotes.
The same report noted that though the Trump administration sparingly used quote approval, its rate of doing so was easily outpaced by the current administration. The Biden team mandated quote approval for nearly every interview conducted throughout the 2020 general campaign and maintained that same frequency once entering office in January.
One former senior Trump official noted to the Washington Examiner that reporters easily should have anticipated this, given the number of Obama administration veterans currently staffing the White House.
BIDEN’S ‘UNCLE JOE’ MOMENT FEEDS CLAIMS SOMEONE ELSE IS IN CHARGE
The official further noted two specific instances in which the Obama White House forced two lengthy profiles of President Barack Obama to be conducted under quote approval status. The first was with Michael Lewis for Vanity Fair in 2012, and the second, David Remnick’s 2014 piece in the New Yorker.
Both items were retroactively revealed to be conducted with quote approval, and once the practice was picked up by Obama’s 2012 election rival Mitt Romney and a host of other interviewees, debates raged within media circles about the practice.
Claims that submitting to quote approval offered journalists what was perhaps otherwise unobtainable access were drowned out by concerns that the process was flat-out unethical and made journalists mouthpieces for their subjects.
Famed journalist Dan Rather claimed at the time that quote approval “nullifies, or at least seriously dilutes, reporters’ ability and duty to be honest brokers of information.”
“This is the officials or candidates regularly insisting that reporters essentially become an operative arm of the administration or campaign they are covering,” he wrote in a CNN column. “When the quotes are sanitized, then delivered intact with full attribution, the public has no way of knowing what the concealed deal was.”
Three other former Trump officials expressed frustrations at the idea that a Biden administration would be significantly more transparent and accountable in dealing with the media than the 45th president’s team, a claim President Joe Biden himself frequently made throughout the 2020 campaign.
The officials cited a number of recent headlines, including White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s concession that White House staff urge Biden not to take questions from reporters at public events, with one stating that “Trump would have two-hour long Cabinet meetings then do questions, Q&A at departure, and hold rallies, yet the media always wanted more.”
Hogan Gidley, a former principal deputy White House press secretary who became the Trump campaign’s national press secretary in 2020, was the only Trump official the Washington Examiner spoke with who agreed to voice his opinions on the record.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“I think we can all agree at this point that the promise from the Biden administration to be transparent was another in a long line of lies,” Gidley said in an interview. “I scratch my head when members of the media complain about access, considering Biden’s whole campaign was on a teleprompter where he had scripted questions and answers.”
“What did you think was going to happen?” Gidley asked, adding, “When Joe Biden stumbles back up to that microphone and says, ‘I shouldn’t be answering your questions,’ that is so ridiculous.”
“Of course you should be answering questions. You’re POTUS,” he continued. “The Middle East is on fire. Inflation is about to destroy this economy. If you’re not supposed to be answering questions, who is? You’re the leader of the free world.”
He further suggested that “other regimes” will lose respect for the United States “if the staff can just chastise the leader of the free world in private if he talks to the press.”
On the specific complaints voiced by White House reporters to Politico, Gidley simply chuckled.
“They weren’t shy about expressing their concerns about the Trump White House privately,” he responded, “so, spare me.”
