Circling Back to Transparency Anytime Soon?

Is your head spinning yet from the amount of “circle-backs” that Jen Psaki has thrown at you? Well, your answer is probably no, because she hasn’t actually circled back on almost any of them. After the first 10 days of this spinning around she was clearly scolded behind the scenes for this go-to answer, and instead Biden’s team came up with three better options. Now you will either hear that she doesn’t have any comments for you or that she will talk to one of her specific teams. If you are lucky, you have a chance of getting the scripted “answer” that most likely only generalizes whichever issue she is asked about without actually sharing any information along with the frequent “ahhh” that makes her seem more like a high schooler doing a book report on a novel she hasn’t read.

At first, I would say that there is no way she lasts over a month in her position when she clearly does such a poor job. However, after giving it some more thought I realized it’s quite the opposite. Her employer must be loving the job she is doing. She is precisely continuing Joe Biden’s approach that lacks transparency and refuses to respond to any direct or controversial questions. Every topic has one pre-scripted general answer that basically tells you nothing, and follow-up questions remain unanswered. According to some reports, her team has already been requesting answers from the reporters ahead of time which would be quite disturbing news if true, especially less than a month into Joe Biden’s presidency.

Look, my argument is not that the previous administration was completely transparent and honest while the current one isn’t, that certainly wasn’t the case. My argument is that Joe Biden ran on, besides other things, transparency and being truthful and open to the public. In my opinion, so far, we have seen anything but a fully transparent administration.

Quite honestly this shouldn’t come as any surprise. Looking at his campaign, we have barely seen him live or engage with reporters. Unfortunately, that trend has spilled over into his presidency as well. Joe Biden continues to mostly stay in hiding. Since taking the office he has held only one press conference where he took questions and answered a total of 4 if you don’t count the very few slipped in after an occasional speech or a photo-op. 3 from reporters pre-selected by his team and one from the brave Peter Doocy when Biden went off-script despite his “handlers” very loudly demanding an end to the event.

I have a proposal: Why doesn’t the press secretary start every press briefing with a quick “circle-back” to those unanswered questions from previous days and then move on to answering the new questions? Or better yet, why doesn’t the “leader of the free world” come out of hiding and answer some questions himself instead of calling the lid on his 3rdday in the office? I’m sure many of us would appreciate to hear the thoughts directly from him from time to time rather than either through his weekly pre-scripted and vague speeches that last 10 minutes at most or through his executive orders, which quite honestly, he sometimes seems to read off like he doesn’t really know what they are about.

In the interest of objectivity, President Biden has attended a CNN townhall in recent days which was his first event where he answered questions from supposedly bipartisan pool of viewers. Although I do have some disagreements, I will say that he has done fairly ok answering mostly covid related questions despite some of the previously mixed and confusing messaging from his office. However, we cannot expect direct or controversial questions on the wide range of crucial issues from a selection of viewers currently mainly concerned with receiving the vaccine or opening schools. Unfortunately, neither can we expect that from the self-proclaimed “very objective, bipartisan and only truthful” CNN network.

Despite the rough start I don’t want to be overly critical of Jen Psaki since I realized she is doing her job well from the view of her employer. However, I will be critical of Joe Biden and his administration if he continues the trend of extremely limited, misleading and contradictory information. Jen Psaki truly has a difficult job if she constantly has to play clean-up for the team.

Transparency, ability to explain and validate your steps as well as admittance to things not always going as planned and swift response all play a role in gaining trust of the public and proving that you really are delivering on your promises. We are about 4 weeks into Biden’s presidency, and I would argue that he is not living up to his transparency promise and his actions either indicate far left agenda or lack of control of his own administration, which I will dive into another time. Despite my strong opinions, I’m certainly open to discussion and I genuinely wish my view changes for the better in the months to come.