President Joe Biden and his appointees use “a pernicious, insidious, awful practice” to “control” media coverage of his administration, according to Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, as the Biden administration regularly demands the right to revise, rewrite, or remove any quotation made by its officials before it appears in a news story.
Numerous journalists confirmed the practice and admitted they often agreed to the Biden team’s terms, even while covering the 2020 presidential campaign.
The condition, known as “background with quote approval,” works as follows. The Biden administration (or, until seven months ago, its campaign) would speak to reporters on “background,” which lets a reporter use the information provided by someone in the administration without naming the official. But stories credited to a nameless functionary carry less weight than those with the speaker’s name and title. If the reporter wants something more authoritative than an anonymous-sounding source, he or she had to give the Biden administration officials (or campaign managers) the ability to approve the exact wording of the quotation before publication — even if their revision in no way resembles what they originally said.
The administration could also “veto” the inclusion of any quotation, according to Politico.
Suppose, for instance, that White House spokesperson Jen Psaki inadvertently called the ongoing Southern border imbroglio a “crisis.” She has studiously avoided that term to avoid getting “pulled down in the muck of right-wing-driven arguments about word choice” that would only “feed into this issue.” So, when the reporter asks for her sign-off, she simply changes the word “crisis” to “challenge,” and her original, truthful, candid assessment of the uncontrolled immigration emergency goes down the memory hole.
While these conditions are not new, the frequency of their application has reportedly exploded under the Biden administration. “The practice allows the White House an extra measure of control as it tries to craft press coverage,” reported Politico.
“The White House realized: ‘Hey … we can now control what is in [journalists’] stories by refusing to allow them use anything without our approval,’” said Peter Baker. “It’s a pernicious, insidious, awful practice that reporters should resist.”