Editorial | President-Elect Joe Biden’s New Senior Communications Team: Welcome Back, Competence and Integrity

President-elect Joe Biden’s appointments of his senior White House communications team is notable in (at least) two ways. First, it marks the return of integrity to the roles; the role that comes first to mind is that of White House press secretary. Second, it is the first senior communications team consisting entirely of women.

“Communicating directly and truthfully to the American people is one of the most important duties of a President, and this team will be entrusted with the tremendous responsibility of connecting the American people to the White House,” said president-elect Biden. “I am proud to announce today the first senior White House communications team comprised entirely of women. These qualified, experienced communicators bring diverse perspectives to their work and a shared commitment to building this country back better.”

Leading the new White House communications team as White House press secretary will be Jen Psaki. Psaki held various posts in the Obama White House, including deputy White House communications director during president Obama’s first term, and White House communications director during the final two years of Obama’s second term. She was also the primary spokesperson for the State Department from 2013 to 2015.

As White House press secretary, Jen Psaki will assume the role currently held by Kayleigh McEnany, who wasted no time in her efforts to attack the media for drawing attention to the fact that Biden’s White House press team would be all female, saying that President Trump, the Vice President, and the First Lady also have senior press staff who are women.

“The completely DISCREDITED @washingtonpost once again reveals their blinding propagandist Fake News proclivities,” tweeted McEnany, in the inflammatory style influenced by the tweets of Donald Trump.

Many Americans will find it refreshing when Jen Psaki steps up to the lectern for the first time (and thereafter) as the public face of the Biden White House. After four years of witnessing exaggeration, outright lying, disrespect toward the press and the public, cowardice, and sycophancy by the Trump administration’s various press secretaries, the country is ready to see standing before them in that role an adult who values truth.

Minyon Moore, a member of the Biden-Harris transition advisory board, says of Psaki, “When she (Psaki) steps to that mic, she brings not only a sense of gravitas, but fact, transparency and honesty, and even a sense of comfort.”

Jen Psaki has shown herself to be forthright and honest in her dealings with the public, and in how she has represented former president Obama. We can expect that she won’t use false and absurd claims to cover for the president’s false and absurd claims.

We should not look for her, for example, to exaggerate the size of the crowd at Joe Biden’s inauguration, as Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, did regarding Trump’s very small inauguration crowd (“The largest ever to witness an inauguration— period.”). Or, to make up cryptic stories to explain away the unexplainable, as Spicer did when the president tweeted out “covfefe,” attempting to reassure reporters that “the president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant.” (Who knows how that fueled QAnon’s “cabal” conspiracy theory?) Or intentionally mislead the public about a respected public servant, as Sarah Huckabee Sanders did when she said that “countless members” of the FBI had contacted her to complain about (former) FBI director James Comey (she later said that her claims were “a slip of the tongue”).

We can be reasonably certain that, unlike the press secretaries of the Trump administration, Jen Psaki won’t use gaslighting as a tool for communication. We can expect, for example, that she won’t repeatedly lie without batting an eye, or deny obvious facts, as, most recently, Kayleigh McEnany is wont to do, such as when she stated that “the president never downplayed the virus,” even though Trump’s downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic is well documented. It’s safe to assume that Jen Psaki won’t use tweets and interviews on news shows to push president-elect Biden’s falsehoods and conspiracy theories; (it’s also safe to assume that Biden does not deal in conspiracy theories or compulsive lying).

Judging from her reputation and past performance, we can expect that as White House press secretary, Jen Psaki won’t cower from truth, or from challenging or difficult questions. She is not likely, for example, to hide in the bushes, as Sean Spicer did in order to avoid facing questions about the firing of former FBI director James Comey. Nor do we expect that Psaki will hide from the press, as Stephanie Grisham, who went for more than a year without holding a single White House press briefing, did. (Sarah Sanders comes in second for the amount of time without holding a press briefing, setting three records for the most days between press briefings, prior to Grisham’s tenure.)

Incoming White House press secretary Jen Psaki does not have the reputation of disrespecting the press or the public, unlike her Trumpian predecessors. We can be confident, for example, that she won’t attack the media during press conferences, or refuse to say, when challenged, that the press is not in fact the enemy of the people, as her boss maintains it is.

And though Jen Psaki has expressed her admiration and respect for Joe Biden, we can expect that she won’t be a Biden sycophant. First, she has been successful on her own merits, and second, she will not be serving a president who expects complete fealty and threatens repercussions to those who cross him.

Each woman appointed to the Biden-Harris senior communications team, in fact, is known for accomplishment, experience, competence, and integrity.

    • Kate Bedingfield, who was Vice President Biden’s communications director, and served on several successful Democratic campaigns, will be communications director for the Biden White House.
    • Ashley Etienne will serve Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as communications director for the Vice President.
    • Karine Jean-Pierre, whose past roles include regional political director for the White House Office of Political Affairs during the Obama-Biden administration, and chief public affairs officer for MoveOn.org, has been appointed as principal deputy press secretary.
    • Symone Sanders, who was a senior advisor on the Biden-Harris campaign, and is the former chair of the Coalition of Juvenile Justice Emerging Leaders Committee and former member of the Federal Advisory Committee on Juvenile Justice, will serve as senior adviser and chief spokesperson for the Vice President.
    • Pili Tobar, who was communications director for coalitions on the Biden-Harris campaign, former deputy director for America’s Voice, former national director of Hispanic media and western regional press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, among other posts, will serve as deputy White House communications director.

America looks forward to the next four years with Joe Biden as president for many reasons, not the least of which is great optimism that the White House communications team will bring back not only high competence, but also transparency, respect for the press and for the public, and, what we’ve perhaps missed the most: integrity.

President-elect Joe Biden announces all-female communications team |
Reuters [2020-11-30]

Sarah Huckabee Sanders Memorable Moments Defending President Trump | The New York Times [2018-08-08]

Editorial: With the Trump Administration in Control of COVID-19 Data, Will the Virus Disappear “Like a Miracle”?

The Trump administration has seized control of hospital data related to COVID-19, prohibiting hospitals from sending their data to the CDC. Hospitals are now required to send their data directly to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) instead. No doubt, we can expect to see an astonishing and fast drop in the number of positive cases, hospitalizations, and deaths related to COVID-19.

We should prepare to see numbers so low that schools will scramble to open, the economy will be better than ever, and churches will be packed once again. Heck, we may even see evidence that hydroxychloroquine is effective against COVID-19, after all.

The federal government claims that it will use the data from hospitals “to inform decisions at the federal level, such as allocation of supplies, treatments, and other resources. We will no longer be sending out one-time requests for data to aid in the distribution of Remdesivir or any other treatments or supplies. This daily reporting is the only mechanism used for the distribution calculations, and the daily is needed daily to ensure accurate calculations.”

Translated, this directive means that in order for hospitals to receive federal aid, supplies or access to certain drugs used to treat COVID-19, they must comply with the Trump administration’s directive. The directive also prohibits hospitals from sending data to the CDC in addition to sending it to HHS.

Donald Trump, in his continued efforts to not only ignore science, but to bend it to his will, has now found the perfect way to make science work for him (or at least, manipulate scientific data to work for him). Now that the Trump administration will get to the data before the CDC does, the health experts will stop with their bothersome statistics, guidelines, and warnings. They’ll stop disagreeing with Trump when he says the virus is under control, that the U.S. has done the best job in the world at testing, and that the virus is disappearing “like a miracle.” They won’t be able to correct him when he makes statements like, “Ninety-nine percent of cases are harmless,” because they won’t have the latest hospital data to prove otherwise.

Jen Kates of the Kaiser Family Foundation says, “Historically, CDC has been the place where public health data has been sent, and this raises questions about not just access for researchers but access for reporters, access for the public to try to better understand what is happening with the outbreak.”

No doubt, this is exactly what Donald Trump has hoped for.

Americans are already confused about COVID-19. There is no national plan for dealing with the virus, though the Trump administration has indicated that those pesky guidelines the CDC created are getting in the way of  holding church services and bringing students back to schools in the fall.

Various parts of the country are responding to the pandemic in various ways, and state and local responses are often governed by the dominant political party there (and where they get their news). With data coming from the White House instead of the CDC, however, perhaps all states will look to Florida (would it be surprising if Florida’s numbers soon improved sharply?) and emulate Florida’s reopening success story.

With the CDC out of the way, at least for the purposes of receiving and analyzing data so that they can create sound recommendations, maybe people will stop harping on wearing those tyrannical masks. Maybe we won’t have to worry any more that more testing will produce more cases.

One has to wonder if Donald Trump got his inspiration from another authoritarian wannabe, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro’s administration removed almost all COVID-19 related data from government websites, and barred researchers from access to the data. In the case of Brazil, however, its Supreme Court just two days later ordered that the public data be restored. Can we have faith that our Supreme Court might act similarly?

Michael Caputo, HHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement earlier Wednesday the new coronavirus data collection system would be “faster.”

Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, said, “We at CDC know that the life blood of public health is data,” he said. “Collecting, disseminating data as rapidly as possible is our priority and the reason for the policy change we’re discussing today.”

If only anything else—anything at all—about the Trump Administration’s response to the pandemic to date demonstrated that we could believe Caputo and Redfield that data collection and analysis by the same administration would be faster and more efficient. Trump downplayed the coronavirus from the beginning and now simply doesn’t speak of it, let alone lead a response in any way. He has denied that states lacked equipment. He has blamed China for the virus, though it’s preposterous to blame them for the COVID-19 tidal wave resulting from Trump’s incompetence. He has done all of this while the CDC’s data, guidelines, and warnings were staring him in the face. So, faster and more efficient response to the pandemic if the Trump administration controls the data? Not a chance.

The U.S. has more than 3.5 million reported cases of COVID-19, with more than 70,000 new reported cases per day, and more than 138,000 COVID-19 related deaths, as of July 17. The CDC, based on its data, estimates that there are 10 times the number of cases in the U.S. than reported. (But we can get those numbers down, as long as the CDC stops getting that data.) No wonder the Trump administration wants to get to the data before the CDC can.

Doctor weighs in on Trump administration stripping CDC of control of COVID-19 data | CBS News [2020-07-15]

Trump Cuts Off CDC From Coronavirus Data | HuffPost [2020-07-15]