WH Reporters Complain Biden Era a ‘Bore’ and ‘Jawing’ with Psaki ‘Makes You Look Like An A**hole’ in Politico Whinefest

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White House reporters aired a raft of revealing grievances about covering President Joe Biden’s White House, and being made to “look like an asshole” in contentious exchanges with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

Politico White House correspondent Max Tani took a deep dive into the minds of fellow WH press corps members in a piece entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Star White House Reporter” that’s one of the clearest examples of people telling on themselves that I’ve ever seen.

Here’s a sampling of some of the infuriating quotes from the piece, including from Tani:

• (D)uring the age of Biden, a perch inside the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room has become something altogether different. It’s become a bore.

• “I can’t think of any [stars],” said a well-known television news executive. “I don’t really watch the briefings.”

• Running for office against Donald Trump — the most theatrical, attention-seeking, Beltway-panic-inducing president in living memory — he pledged to make Washington news boring again. And, well, mission accomplished sir.

• “Jen [Psaki] is very good at her job, which is unfortunate,” one reporter who has covered the past two administrations from the room said. “And the work is a lot less rewarding, because you’re no longer saving democracy from Sean Spicer and his Men’s Wearhouse suit. Jawing with Jen just makes you look like an asshole.”

• Gone are the Tweets that sent newsrooms scrambling. So long to the five alarm Friday news dumps that had editors frantically rearranging weekend plans.

• “It’s a boring and difficult job. It’s tough to be a White House correspondent if you want to break news, they’re so airtight,” another reporter who covered both the Trump and Biden White Houses from the briefing room. “There’s no Maggie [Haberman]. Who’s the Maggie of the Biden administration? It doesn’t exist.”

There’s literally too much in here to know where to begin, but I’ll start by clarifying that while this gang feels like “Jawing with Jen just makes you look like an asshole,” that doesn’t stop them from doing just that. While Peter Doocy gets all of the attention for creating “drama” (as Tani describes it), there is no shortage of NBC News and other mainstream reporters happy to follow Fox’s lead — or get creative with their own brain-dead narratives.

But as Tani notes, only Doocy has come close to becoming a “star” — and is, coincidentally, the only reporter in this piece not whining. Why haven’t any other reporters been able to duplicate Doocy’s “success” (at least where media attention is concerned)? Because they don’t have the commitment to the bit that working at Fox News allows Doocy and his front-row partner Jacqui Heinrich.

Tani also takes a shot at CNN’s Jim Acosta by saying he “seemed to overtly relish his role as a Trump sparring partner — got his credentials revoked by the president’s press office and needed security guards when he reported live from Trump rallies,” and wrote that “It helped his standing at CNN, where he leveraged the notoriety into a weekend hosting position that he currently occupies.”

This, juxtaposed with Doocy, is revealing on several levels.

First of all, poor bored Max Tani forgets to mention that Jim Acosta was relentlessly targeted by Trump, and “needed security guards” because Trump supporters threatened to kill him — and one even sent pipe bombs to his network. Many of the quotes listed above elide the most important differences between “boring” Biden and Trump. There’s no “Biden’s Haberman” because there’s no Biden inciting terrorist attacks or the like.

And that’s the biggest difference between “stars” like Acosta and Doocy, and pretenders like Peter Alexander or Kaitlan Collins or a host of other reporters who made some noise under Trump, but can’t make a ripple under Biden: the latter group doesn’t believe in, or care about, anything.

Like Acosta or not, his reporting in the Trump White House was undergirded by strong beliefs and values, about journalism but also about society. And Doocy, whether he’s a true believer or not, is guided by an audience and a network with its own set of clear and very harmful beliefs — the same ones that Acosta ran up against.

I hate to pick on Collins, but she recently gave the most vivid example of the apathy that guides most White House reporters when she was asked by Wolf Blitzer to explain the biggest differences between covering Trump’s and Biden’s respective White Houses.

Her answer was two minutes of word salad to the effect that they’re both busy but different busy, and this baffling observation: That “they hold the same power that the last one did. And so that has really been something cool to see that kind of underlying connection in that sense.”

Collins is not alone in what seemed to me to be a very soulless approach to the job. I sat in that room for 9 years, talked to and interviewed dozens of reporters, and excluding a fine few who know who they are, they to a person have no clue the stakes involved in what they’re doing, or care for them. Most barely cared about the job and couldn’t wait to get off the beat, which is a major difference from the last 6 years. Just being a resister with a loud voice could make you a high-profile member of the beat like Brian Karem.

Now, thanks to Tani’s ironclad confirmation, we can see that they do care deeply about something: becoming a “star” and not looking like assholes. Magic 8-Ball says “Outlook not good.”

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.