Jen Psaki: How will Joe Biden’s new press secretary differ from her White House predecessors?

Joe Biden’s arrival in the White House means he is being joined by a new press secretary tasked with answering to the American people on behalf of his administration and its policies from behind the famous lectern in the James S Brady Briefing Room.

Mr Biden’s choice for the role is Jen Psaki, who made her first appearance on the podium on Wednesday following his inauguration and was quick to promise a more respectful, less adversarial relationship than the assembled reporters had become accustomed to under her Trump administration predecessors.

“When the president asked me to serve in this role, we talked about the importance of bringing truth and transparency back to the briefing room,” she said.

“There are a number of ways to combat misinformation. One of them is accurate information and truth and data and sharing information even when it is hard to hear.”

“Rebuilding trust with the American people will be central to our focus in the press office and in the White House every single day,” she pledged.

Ms Psaki, who struck a refreshingly relaxed and personable tone throughout, even ended her 30-minute debut appearance with an unfamiliar offer to the correspondents sat before her. 

“Let’s do this again tomorrow.”

She has since told MSNBC that she plans to bring Dr Anthony Fauci back into the fold to take questions on the coronavirus pandemic after he was sidelined by a jealous President Trump, who envied the veteran epidemiologist’s popularity with the public.

Her genial start marks an astonishing contrast with that of Sean Spicer exactly four years ago, who lambasted the press for daring to doubt his claims about the size of the crowd that attended Mr Trump’s drizzly swearing-in ceremony, rubbishing the evidence of aerial photographs provided by the Parks Service and insisting, falsely, that the celebrity-free event had attracted “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration”.

“These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm for the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” he huffed, his combative performance setting the tone for everyone that would follow in his footsteps, from Anthony Scaramucci to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham and Kayleigh McEnany.

The latter famously tried to reset relations by promising at her first session on 1 May 2020 that she would never lie to reporters, before doing so repeatedly over the coming months, losing all credibility as the voice of a government apparently uninterested in reining in a pandemic that has since cost more than 400,000 American lives.

McEnany was last seen waving sheets of paper on Fox News night after night, claiming they amounted to “evidence” in support of the president’s bogus claim that November’s election was “stolen” from him by a complex “mass voter fraud” conspiracy that he entirely failed to prove, losing all but one of more than 60 court cases intended to overturn the outcome and badly undermining faith in democracy in the process.

“Kayleigh, isn't it hypocritical for you to accuse others of disinformation when you spread it every day?” she was asked by CNN’s Jim Acosta on 15 December as she left a briefing, not answering the question from a respected reporter who was once famously and falsely accused by the Trump White House of shoving a West Wing aide as a pretext to revoke his press pass.

The case against Mr Acosta - who had simply held on to a microphone the staffer was trying to wrestle from him as he attempted to ask a question of a belligerent Mr Trump - was even made using a doctored video, a disturbingly totalitarian tactic from an administration whose head bellowed “fake news” so often it became a catchphrase.

Mr Acosta’s dismissal followed the administration barring the likes of the BBC, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Politico and BuzzFeed from attending White House briefings in the first months of Mr Trump’s term as the president grew increasingly frustrated with a “mainstream media” that dared to question his narratives and refused to ignore the issue of his campaign’s possible ties to Russian operatives, even as the matter was under investigation by the FBI.

Mr Trump’s White House would soon abandon daily briefings altogether, allowing the lectern to quite literally gather dust because the 45th president preferred to communicate beneath the whirring helicopter blades of Marine One on his way out of town or via Twitter, through which he disseminated untruths and insults, announced policy and even fired cabinet members without warning or mediation until the social network finally suspended his account two weeks ago for inciting an attempted insurrection at the US Capitol.

Aside from Mr Biden setting a more responsible example online and in person, one of the key reasons Ms Psaki is already looking more comfortable in the post than her frazzled predecessors is that she’s done it before.

She was White House communications director for the concluding half of Barack Obama’s second term and before that a spokesperson for his State Department and a deputy comms director and deputy press secretary to his administration.

Raised in Stamford, Connecticut, the 42-year-old mother of two is an English graduate from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, at which she was also a competitive backstroke swimmer.

She got her start in politics as an aide to Iowa Democrats Tom Harkin and Tom Vilsack, who ran successfully for the US Senate and state governor’s office respectively, after which she went to work as deputy press secretary to John Kerry’s unsuccessful 2004 presidential run.

Between the Kerry and Obama years, Ms Psaki worked for veteran New York Democrat Joe Crowley, who was famously ousted by the more progressive and youthful Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the 2018 midterms.

One lesson she would do well to learn from Mr Spicer is never to wear green on camera.

He did so for St Patrick’s Day 2017, hailing his Irish roots with a fetching emerald tie that internet wags wasted little time in using as an ideal greenscreen backdrop upon which to project a variety of absurd and surreal images, rendering him extremely difficult to take seriously ever again, assuming you ever could.

Avoiding being impersonated by Melissa McCarthy on Saturday Night Live would also be a good idea.