As Biden’s first press conference approached, a slew of talent at Fox began to openly advertise the young correspondent. Sean Hannity expressed little confidence in the rest of the White House press corps in his prime-time programming. “I don’t expect difficult questions,” said Hannity, “except maybe Peter Doocy.” Chris Bedford of the federalist who appeared at Fox said, “I hope so [Biden] gets a few tough ones – at least from Peter Doocy. Brian Kilmeade, another Fox & Friends co-host, told me he was keeping his fingers crossed for Doocy. “I know you have their list” – the names of the White House reporters direct the president to come in – “but I hope they call him,” Kilmeade said.
But it didn’t happen. Instead came the press conference date, March 25th, and for over 62 minutes in the east room of the White House, Doocy watched eagerly, signaling Biden’s attention when the president urged others.
Almost immediately, Fox – with over 3.2 million viewers – seemed to be deciding that Doocy itself would become history. “BIDEN SNUBS FOX DURING THE FIRST NEWS,” read a Fox Chyron. In the air, Doocy leafed through a thick black folder that he said was full of questions he’d prepared for Biden, from his “green jobs” agenda to the origins of Covid-19 in China. “I’m sorry you didn’t get a question,” Fox presenter Sandra Smith told him. Dana Perino of the network, a former White House press secretary for George W. Bush, said she would have directed the president to see Doocy if she was there. “Why make Peter Doocy a story?” She asked. “Just take his question and go on.” Joe Concha, a Hill media and politics columnist and contributor to Fox News, dismissed the entire episode as a disgrace to the press corps and Biden, whose officials had to answer for why they were “so terrified of an inexperienced White House press Correspondent.”
“He’s not yelling at her. He doesn’t poke the air with his finger. He asks a question to answer, and how you answer is entirely up to you. “
Bryan Boughton
The subplot in which Fox was ignored culminated the following afternoon when Doocy himself pressed psaki in James S. Brady’s briefing room. Arching over a front row seat, he asked about immigration and the Senate filibuster before moving on to his final question: is he ignoring official Fox News administrative policies?
Psaki’s answer was no: she replied that she was talking to Fox’s reporter. She reminded Doocy that she regularly took questions from him and that Biden had done the same in other settings. Co-reporters in the room knew that at the press conference, Biden had skipped many other major news organizations, even the New York Times. Psaki soon switched to another reporter, but not without complimenting Doocy on his “fantastic” Argyle socks. The exchange predictably ricocheted off the internet and was featured on Fox.
In some ways, the Doocy saga can be seen in a single reporter as a distillation of the challenge Fox faced in the Biden era. Everyone expects the network to irritate the new White House as it did in the Obama years. Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch recently said ratings would improve if the network became Biden’s “loyal opposition,” borrowing a phrase from European parliamentary politics that did not go unnoticed among Biden’s aides. However, Fox is also facing competition for its conservative viewership, including from Newsmax and One America News Network, right-wing networks that have questioned the validity of the 2020 election. Fox needs to maintain the Trump-friendly, anti-Biden end of its demographic watch at a time when “opposition” and “loyalty” are more often viewed as contradictions of the American right – while protecting its position as a news network with a large amount of news coverage -Outfit. Fox wants a seat in the room, but many of his viewers also want to see a fight.
That conflict is embodied in Doocy: a lithe but aggressive, social media savvy correspondent who may feel like a fresh face on television but is undeniably made by, for and for Fox.
Jim Acosta, the former CNN White House reporter, took on a version of this role during the Trump era by jumping into noisy, heated sparring games with Donald Trump and his spokesmen. That’s not Doocy’s style. He rarely raises his voice. “He’s not yelling at her. He doesn’t poke his finger in the air, ”said Bryan Boughton, senior vice president and head of Fox’s Washington office. “He asks a question to be answered, and how you answer is entirely up to you.” Fox supporters also praise him for being ready to challenge a government they believe most competitors are showing too much respect, and his colleagues describe him as having an innate sense of what makes a good story on their radio waves .
Doocy himself claims that he is just a pure news reporter doing his job, which he mostly sees as an invitation to officers to give the news on camera. He even revealed, and a White House official confirmed, that if he plans to ask about a story that doesn’t include national news, he’ll get the issue (if not the question) upfront by Biden’s press secretary. Doocy says he really wants to understand the president’s thinking – and also, “I have to come back to this,” a common Psaki chorus, isn’t a useful soundbite. As he thought about the nudge of the press conference, he noticed that Biden Fox’s aides had crossed their list of reporters so the president could call him for months getting back to the campaign and transition. He said it was finally the right time to have Psaki respond on camera. “There are bigger problems in the world than not getting Fox calls,” Doocy admits. “But there was only one interest of mine to get to the bottom of it.”
Other media watchers and television competitors see his sharp, juxtaposed questions as a dangerous departure from malicious trolling. Doocy, according to the critics, is a functionary for an agenda-oriented network.
But many other media watchers and television competitors see his sharp-edged, juxtaposed questions as a dangerous departure from malicious trolling. Doocy, critics say, is an official for an agenda-based network that cares more about personal issues than breaking news. Ultimately, they see Doocy’s uprising as a sign of how partisan Fox, even its more traditional news division, has become. During the Trump years, veteran Fox anchors like Bret Baier and Chris Wallace tried to draw the line between their coverage and the scrappy coverage of the network’s opinion leaders. To Fox’s critics, Doocy’s style feels more in line with the latter, and it doesn’t help that he’s the son of a network host loved by Trump.
All of this begs the question of how to deal with Doocy at the Biden White House. Some liberals, including members of the Obama administration, have publicly urged Biden’s team to ignore Doocy, arguing that Fox is an arm of the Republican Party, not a serious news broadcaster, more than ever. But there are perhaps more compelling arguments for keeping in touch with Doocy that White House aides say play a role in the president’s orbit. On the one hand, Biden’s team would like to avoid the combative, disruptive attitude of its predecessor towards the media. They also acknowledge that Doocy is a proxy for a large audience, or a sizable portion of it, that could still be reachable with Biden’s message. By working with Fox, a president who campaigned for the unification of the country has a better chance of getting through to the voters he wants and ultimately needs.
On a cool March morning At the Willard Hotel Cafe near the White House, Doocy arrived in a coat and sat on the mostly empty terrace. He flipped through his cell phone and sipped half-and-half coffee, pausing between measured responses about his work at Fox. Depending on his shift, he gets up at 4 or 7 a.m., reads e-mails he missed overnight, and scans his note from Fox’s “brain space,” which contains international headlines and major opinion pieces. He clicks through show rundowns to see when his TV hits might be. If he’s in the meeting room that day, he’ll start figuring out what to ask. He arrives at the White House about an hour before it airs and does a round of hell with people on the premises.
In anticipation of Biden’s big infrastructure boost, he’d recently picked up Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s latest book, largely out of curiosity, after getting to know the former mayor a little during the presidential campaign. He checked it for inconsistencies or flip-flops – a characteristic of Doocy – but didn’t see many.