Team Biden talks truth, but it will be tested

Joe Biden is not the first president who felt the need to pledge to tell the truth. It tends to be a requirement for those coming in the wake of a scandalplagued, truthchallenged administration. Americans may remember Jimmy Carter promising a Watergateweary nation “I’ll never lie to you” in his 1976 campaign. Biden made veracity a central theme of his inaugural address.

“Recent weeks and months have taught us a painful lesson,” Biden said. “There is truth and there are lies, lies told for power and for profit. And each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, and especially as leaders, leaders who have pledged to honor our Constitution and protect our nation, to defend the truth and defeat the lies.”

He did not mention Donald Trump or the cable stations that parroted his propaganda by name. It wasn’t necessary. The message was clear: This was going to be a presidency that would at least try to forge a relationship with the facts and forge a working relationship with the journalists whose mission is to serve as a watchdog over government.

By nightfall, Americans tuned to cable news were observing something unimaginable over the past four years: a news briefing in which a spokesperson was performing for more than an audience of one in the Oval Office. It was, in a very refreshing sense, a return to normal. It opened with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki calling on a reporter for the Associated Press, a tradition of deference to the news service that had been abandoned in the Trump years. It ran 31 minutes, and she took questions from most of the assembled journalists, including one from Fox News. There was neither the shunning of CNN — “I don’t call on activists,” Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany recently scoffed — nor any sign of a conspiracy peddling OAN shill in the aisles.

It ended without a trademarked binder slam and McEnany lecture on “what you should have asked me” but with Psaki’s pledge to return to take

questions the next day and every weekday after that. The last briefing from the Trump press team was on Jan. 15.

“First nonweird White House Press Secretary in four years,” historian Michael Beschloss wrote on Twitter.

It was impossible to miss the contrast with the initial appearance of Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, at the White House lectern. He scolded the media for its “shameful and wrong” characterization of the inaugural crowd as significantly smaller than that for the President Barack Obama eight years earlier. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said, exiting without taking a single question.

It clearly, provably, was not. Spicer later said he regretted the lie, which obviously was pandering to his insecure boss, and his credibility never recovered.

Day Two of the Biden administration underscored the new tone. First of all, Psaki made good on her promise to return. More important, she brought along Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s preeminent expert on pandemics, who looked and sounded genuinely relieved to not need to worry about whether expressing his honest scientific judgment would get him exiled from the opportunity to inform Americans about what is going on in an outbreak that has taken the lives of 400,000 Americans.

“The idea that you can get up and talk about what you know, what the evidence is, what the science is,” Fauci continued, “it is somewhat of a liberating feeling.”

And in perhaps the most refreshing words of all for a nation that rolled its eyes while hearing about miracle cures, from bleach or hydroxychloroquine, or many months of assurances that the plague was about to magically dissipate, Fauci said a “new thing in this administration is if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess.”

In Psaki, Biden has picked a serious professional who is uncommonly seasoned for her 42 years, having worked on two Obama campaigns and served as chief State Department spokesperson and communications director.

None of this is to suggest Biden will be getting a free ride from the news media — nor should he. There will be tensions between any administration that wants to downplay or even suppress disclosures that will embarrass it — or challenge its desired narrative — and reporters who find otherwise. Biden’s pledge to be transparent and truthful will be tested.

The New Yorker’s deep dive into President George W. Bush’s fraught relationship with the press in January 2004 contained this savvy — and all too true, in my experience — observation about media bias from Mark McKinnon, Bush’s director of campaign advertising. He did not view the bias in a leftright prison, but one of the media’s gravitation to conflict. “I think the press is tough on everybody,” he said. “The nature of the news business is that conflict is news.”

The new president is not likely to avoid conflict or agree with his treatment by the media. What will be healthy for America is if that inevitable conflict at long last is focused on ideology and policy instead of between truth and lies, authoritarian rule and respect for election outcomes, rule of law and the value of a free press.

“We have a common goal, which is sharing accurate information with the American people.” Jen Psaki, White House press secretary