In an Intelligencer article published last week about how the White House “polices language” to further its agenda, the outlet’s Olivia Nuzzi reported she had spoken with someone who claimed the Biden administration counts on people to brush off his radical policies and to instead focus on his more cordial past.
As a matter of strategy, the person cited by Nuzzi claimed Biden’s team relies on misdirection of who the president is at this point, now that he has pivoted to the far left.
The source, who was not named, was noted to be “close to the White House.”
“One very real possibility is this strategy works,” the source explained. “They may get criticism in think pieces about it, but at his hundred-day mark, Biden is the most liberal president we’ve had — and the public thinks he’s a moderate.”
“That’s a winning strategy to me. They’re willing to accept that you’re gonna write this piece as long as they know that swing voters in Colorado aren’t gonna read it,” the source concluded.
In essentially deceiving low-information consumers of media, the White House, per the source, expects them to ignore details and simply remember Biden once had a track record as a moderate.
Nuzzi, prior to quoting the source, cited a “gaffe” Biden uttered last month after playing a round of golf at a Delaware country club. That gaffe was to serve as Nuzzi’s evidence of how the White House has put a stranglehold on language that surrounds controversy.
“We’re gonna increase the numbers,” Biden told reporters when addressing the crisis on the border. “The problem was that the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up on the border with young people, and we couldn’t do two things at once.”
The issue for Biden’s advisors was that he used the word “crisis” to describe the deteriorating situation on the country’s southern border. That was in spite of the fact his administration had taken a hardline stance against referring to the crisis as a “crisis.” Biden’s “gaffe” generated some headlines, but his “crisis” admission was quickly forgotten, despite the fact it generated a storm of mainstream media coverage.
The saga and its coverage by Intelligencer did give a window into how the administration reportedly and intentionally manipulates policy messaging with linguistics to appear benign and seize the narrative.
Nuzzi commented that White House press secretary Jen Psaki explained away Biden’s crisis “gaffe” last month in a way that gave the administration wiggle room through the clever use of vague language.
“Reporters and opponents were quick to call this spin ‘backtracking,’ an incremental and mildly interesting development that passes for high drama in the new boring season of Washington,” Nuzzi wrote.
The reporter concluded that by redefining the language in cleaning up after Biden, the White House essentially succeeded in controlling the message, which is that “crisis” is a relative term and that the president had simply misspoken or not been clear.