Ex-biden press secretary Jen Psaki to anchor new Sunday show on MSNBC
Rachel Maddow is teaching her to use a Teleprompter, so far with mixed results. Mika Brzezinski offered tips on pinning down squirrelly guests. Nicolle Wallace invited her to editorial meetings, and Andrea Mitchell is tutoring her on interviewing techniques.
Jen Psaki spent the last two decades jousting with journalists. She’s about to find out what it’s like on the other side of the anchor desk.
Less than a year after leaving her perch as President Joe Biden’s press secretary, Psaki will become the host of a weekly MSNBC talk show March 19, the network said Tuesday. “Inside With Jen Psaki” will air Sundays at noon, vying for the same weekend clout as political mainstays like “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation.”
It’s a quick transition to full-time anchor for Psaki, 44, whose deft defenses of the Biden administration — and feisty tête-à-têtes with Fox News’ Peter Doocy — made her a cult figure of sorts among liberals. She spawned the Tiktok hashtag #psakibomb and was gently parodied on “Saturday Night Live.”
Now she’ll take charge of an hourlong program on a Biden-friendly network, mixing policy and political discussions with lighter fare like human-interest profiles of politicians, celebrities and athletes. (One of her dream guests: Joe Burrow, the quarterback of her husband’s hometown Cincinnati Bengals.)
Psaki, who began appearing on MSNBC as an analyst in September, is the latest in a line of White House communicators — including George Stephanopoulos, Diane Sawyer and Dana Perino — who have left government for the more glamorous and better remunerated world of TV news.
Such arrangements raise sticky questions about journalistic ethics: When Donald Trump-era press secretaries Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kayleigh Mcenany joined Fox News, liberals cried foul about a “revolving door” and claimed the Murdoch-owned network was an extension of the Trump White House. Those voices have said little about Psaki’s migration to MSNBC, nor that of another Biden White House alumna, Symone D. Sanders, who also hosts a weekend show on the channel.
For her part, Psaki said MSNBC viewers can expect to see her authentic self — and that “I am not going on television to be a mouthpiece.”
“I’m very conscious of the fact that people know who I am because I was standing behind a podium speaking on behalf of Joe Biden,” she said in an interview from her new office in NBC’S Washington bureau, where a framed New York Times crossword (“___ Psaki, White House communications director under Obama”) followed her from the West Wing.
“I am not going to gratuitously attack him, nor am I going to gratuitously applaud him,” she said. “If he deserves applause, I will applaud him. If he deserves critique, I will critique him.”
MSNBC is undergoing a transitional moment. The network achieved record audiences in the Trump era, fueled by did-he-really-do-that monologues from Maddow and Wallace. But Maddow has since cut her appearances to once a week; her replacement, Alex Wagner, has struggled to find an audience; Brian Williams left; and ratings have fallen. Anchors and executives are hopeful that the familiar face of Psaki can lure some viewers back.