White House Reporters ‘Rooting’ for Jen Psaki Gush About Her in Magazine Feature: ‘Professional, Pleasant, Lovely’
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Reporters say Jen Psaki has given them a White House press secretary they can champion.
Members of the White House press corps made the remarks for a Washingtonian report published on Wednesday, which honed in on the “awkward feeling of rooting” for the spokesperson reporters are general expected to scrutinize. “She takes questions from everybody,” chief ABC News Washington correspondent Jon Karl mused to the publication. “She doesn’t get rattled. She doesn’t lose her cool.”
“She’s a pro, you know?” chief New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker added.
“She’s like any other competent, professional, pleasant, lovely press person from any other era,” added a White House reporter who wasn’t named. The reporter said Psaki had a “sunny” demeanor that made reporters “feel good about their interactions,” adding, “She’s never going to be super-helpful, and that’s frustrating, but that’s kind of her job. It’s one of those weird things where you leave the process feeling good about it even though, when you hang up the phone, you realize: F—, she said nothing helpful.”
The comments suggest a marked change in tenor among members of the press corps compared to President Donald Trump’s term in the White House, when reporters routinely railed against his press secretaries — including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany — when they declined to answer questions. Those objections bordered on the theatrical on more than one occasion, with reporters — including Jess Bidgood and Jordan Fabian — sometimes even refusing to ask questions when they were called upon, deferring instead to reporters who felt their inquiries hadn’t been properly addressed.
Those controversies led Mike McCurry, a former press secretary under President Bill Clinton, to at one point call for an end to televised press briefings, telling Mediaite last year it could help the participants to become more “amicable” and professional.” Networks started acting on that advice only after President Joe Biden took office.
The Washingtonian report dedicated a brief mention to the T.J. Ducklo ordeal, which involved the former Psaki aide threatening to “destroy” a reporter who asked about his romantic relationship with a member of the press corps. However, the publication said, Ducklo was known as “one of Bedingfield’s” staffers, a reference to White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield.
Psaki also won praise from Jessica Goldstein, the associate Washingtonian editor who authored Wednesday’s report.
“In her first three months on the job, White House press secretary Jen Psaki has yet to be caught in an unhinged lie or spontaneous infomercial, and she does not refer to the reporters who sit before her in the briefing room each day as ‘the enemy of the people,'” Goldstein wrote. “The bar set by the Trump White House might be on the floor but, hey, so far she’s cleared it.”
