White House Communications in an Era of Alternative News Universes
Handling communications for the White House at this point is tricky, because, in an effort to be fair, the ultra-right-wing media, e.g., Fox, OANN, and Newsmax need to be invited to the table. But at the same time, they live in an alternate universe where Trump is the legitimate president and Biden is a Chinese operative, which gives rise to conversations like the one below, where Newsmax’s John Gizzi challenges White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki:
GIZZI: “The other thing on the infrastructure package, there is a private memo that’s being circulated in the business community and to some Republican senators that said that the $2.25 trillion price tag is $1 trillion off, and that there’s many things in there that were omitted in the initial discussion of the bill, notably the $300 billion energy tax credit, the $100 billion for the green bank, and that these things would add $1 trillion to it. This is being circulated on the Hill. Do you have any response to the charge that the president lowballed the price tag on the infrastructure bill?”
PSAKI: “Sounds mysterious, the memo. The secret memo. Is it, are you saying, just so I understand your question, are you saying there are things the president didn’t put in his proposal people think he’s going to add to his proposal?”
GIZZI: “No, there’s things there that somebody went through it or is claiming to have gone through it and added it up and came up with $1 trillion more than the president listed as the price tag, so it is actually $3.25 trillion as opposed to …”
PSAKI: “Well, we laid out very specifically each component of the package and how much we’re proposing, so I would encourage you all to get your calculators out and charge that up and see how it compares to the secret memo.”
Seems like a good handling. I might have yielded to the temptation that sarcasm offers, and demand that he produce the memo, along with a decoder ring that would enable us to make sense of it.
If we are to allow the admissibility of “secret memos,” we’re really in Marjorie Taylor Greene territory, where we have wildfires started by space lasers that identify as Jewish.
