Stop Blaming the Press Secretary

The job is necessary, not that important, and thankless, and they aren't the reason the Administration sucks or the voters don't like your side

Recently, former President Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, announced that she is leaving the Democratic Party. This immediately gave rise to an orgy of social media posts from Democrats denouncing her as an ingrate and trashing her communications skills. This in turn, led to Republicans “reminding us” of her role in the cover up of Biden’s age-related decline.

All of this reminded me of something I’ve long known— the White House press secretary is the most thankless position in the entire executive branch. The other side hates you because whatever “lies” they attribute to the Administration, they also attribute to you. The press hates you because the job often requires you not be fully honest with them. And your own side hates you because everyone blames their own political failures on communication, rather than admitting they might have to shift positions to appeal to the public. The press secretary gets it from all sides.

For the first few decades of the position’s existence, the press secretary was not even a well known member of the administration. That’s because the press secretary’s main job was as a publicist. Quick, how many celebrity publicists can you name? Like a Hollywood publicist, the press secretary would prepare press releases on good stuff the administration was doing, arrange for interviews with administration principals, and talk to the press behind the scenes about what was going on, answering their questions.

The press secretary still does those jobs, but the job has fundamentally changed in the television age. The first famous press secretary was Pierre Salinger, who worked for President Kennedy, right when the White House was starting to figure out how to use television.

But the first modern press secretary was probably Ron Ziegler, who worked for Richard Nixon. I say modern with a bit of tongue-in-cheek, because part of what Ziegler “modern” was he was the first press secretary to really get flayed by the press and the public for repeating his boss’ lies.

Ziegler, of course, like every press secretary after him, was caught in an impossible situation. His job was to go out there and defend his boss, and when your boss is caught in the middle of a scandal where he is lying about covering up criminal activity, “defending your boss” is going to mean repeating the lies he approves for you to say.

People can get haughty about this and say the press secretary should resign in this situation, but in reality I don’t think he should. First of all, the position of the Administration is important and should be communicated, even if it is a lie. What Nixon was saying about the Watergate break-in and cover-up was newsworthy, and it’s up to Woodward and Bernstein to expose that it wasn’t true (as they did, with the help of a congressional investigation). Second, it’s not like anyone didn’t understand and know what they were getting with Ziegler. His statements became the punchlines of late night jokes by Johnny Carson and others.

Since Ziegler, several things have happened that have made press secretaries more famous and, concurrently, have made the position even more thankless. The most important is the televised briefing. This may be hard to believe, but back in Franklin Roosevelt’s day even presidential press conferences were not broadcast live. Rather, the reporters would scribble his answers down and then report them on the radio and in newspapers. When that changed and presidential press conferences started being broadcast, they became theater. This is a common problem— I’ve written about it before in the context of Supreme Court oral arguments. It also applies to how congressional debate has changed after the advent of C-SPAN. In each case, point the camera at people and they start to grandstand.

And to be clear, it isn’t one directional. Obviously Presidents use briefings as theater, such as when President Trump started taking over the coronavirus task force briefings when he saw they were getting play on television. But reporters do this too— Sam Donaldson made his career as a television star by theatrically confronting President Reagan at press conferences; back in the day Dan Rather did much the same thing at a Nixon press conference. More recently, Jim Acosta turned himself into a star doing theater at Trump briefings.

With presidential press conferences, you can argue that this theatrical aspect is unavoidable— after, all, there’s a pretty strong public right to know what the President is doing in public, and in any event, presidential statements have always contained a fair amount of partisan and political BS’ing. But a few decades ago, cable news stations starved for live content started televising the press secretary’s briefings. At first it was sporadic— CNN would put on Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes’ briefing on a big news day. Eventually, every briefing was aired, though.

And it expanded further. Press secretaries used to have informal “gaggles” where they would answer questions from reporters more informally, usually early in the morning. These were the successor to the press secretary’s original role of answering reporters’ informal questions about what the administration was doing. But cable news always needs live content, and eventually the gaggles made their way onto TV too. And this all not only made the press secretary into a star, but made their briefings little different from presidential press conferences— full of theater and with less and less substance.

A nice example of this was the event that defined President Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer. President Trump had misstated how many people attended his 2017 inaugural. I’m not defending President Trump for doing this, but this was also completely unimportant and any journalist with any sense would simply ignore the story, especially since things like the Muslim Travel Ban were coming down the pike.

But Spicer was doing live televised briefings, and reporters had all the incentive in the world to get themselves on television with a big moment standing up to the administration. And of course they knew Spicer had to lie, because he couldn’t contradict President Trump. Thus, we were treated to a news briefing of attention starved reporters trying to get on TV by “grilling” Spicer about an unimportant issue we all knew the answer to, and Spicer standing firm and repeating his boss’ lies. This did not do anything for the country, but it shows you what happens when you insist on putting everything on TV.

So you put all this history together and we have now created a government position whose occupant has to repeat the lies of their boss on national television and get into fights with over-excited reporters thinking more about television time than the importance of a story. Press secretaries, of course, dutifully did repeat their bosses’ lies. Ari Fleischer told the world about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction; Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart reiterated that President Clinton had not had sex with that woman and had never technically lied about it.

And of course, this enrages the other party and its partisans. Back to Jean-Pierre: she, like basically all of the Biden administration, was required to stick to the party line that Biden was fit for the job. Again, you can be haughty about this and say there should have been a mass resignation, but come on. The people serving Biden felt they were protecting the country by doing their jobs to the best of their ability. And at any rate, you are not going to get deception out of politics. Do you think Trump never has senior moments in private? He certainly sometimes has them in public. It isn’t a “cover up” that the people who work for the President don’t talk a lot about his shortcomings with the press, instead emphasizing his strengths.

Jean-Pierre’s job, in the modern television age, was to present Joe Biden in the best possible light. But this, in turn, enrages her own side. Because in our partisan polarized country, partisans are obsessed with communication. You see, if you believe things strongly, the last thing you want to do is admit the public doesn’t agree with you. So everything becomes a communication problem. This is how guys like Frank Rich got rich— you say “death tax”, rather than “estate tax”, and it supposedly magically changes public opinion about inheritance taxation. But it’s also what a lot of partisans want to believe, because the alternative to everything being a communication problem is you have to be like Bill Clinton and present more moderate views to the public, which ideologues do not want to do.

Accordingly the press secretary, the primary public-facing communications official representing the President, always gets it from their own side. They are never communicating the message good enough. If they’d just say the right things and persuade the swing voters, we’d win all the time. It’s a fantasy, born of the fantasy that the American public never just disagree with you on something, requiring that you moderate.

One other thing about partisans is that they hate to blame the guy they voted for. They like him. (Indeed, one significant reason Biden was not forced out earlier is a lot of Democratic base types liked Biden and didn’t want to admit his age was taking his toll.) So if the White House is doing something dumb or (especially) dishonest, it is so much easier to put the blame on the press secretary than to admit that maybe the guy at the top who they are in love with and voted for screwed up.

Lastly, the one group that ought to understand the spot that press secretaries find themselves in, the media, don’t generally come to their public defense. To be sure, sometimes in one and one interviews, longtime White House reporters will admit that press secretaries are nice and forthcoming and crucial at letting them know what is going on and getting them access to events and officials. But in public, the press secretary is the punching bag. When do clips of the briefings and gaggles hit the evening news? That’s right, when a reporter “bests” the press secretary and leaves them stammering at the lectern.

The reality is we need presidential press secretaries, they do a fine job, and the job is basically thankless. And in our partisan, polarized, 24-7 news cycle world, they have become the whipping boys and girls for problems that are really the fault of their bosses.