Incoming White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said that she hopes to “rebuild trust with the American people” by telling the truth — a move that would represent a swift departure from the kind of false information peddling that has become routine in President Donald Trump’s administration.
“I think more than any point in history… part of the job of the White House press secretary is to rebuild trust with the American people,” Psaki told NPR’s Steve Inskeep in an interview published Thursday, adding that her goal from the podium would be to “be truthful and transparent” in peeling back the curtains for Americans.
Her comments come as President Trump has routinely attacked reporters, while calling leaked information that was unfavorable to him “fake” and accusing the press of acting as the “enemy of the people.”
The White House’s current press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany famously pushed false information to advance Trump’s election gambit in public appearances and dubiously took on the dual role as Trump’s 2020 campaign adviser.
“In a moment where people don’t trust the information they’re getting from most sources, is to be as steady and as fact-based as I can be,” Psaki said.
The incoming communications official declared she plans to reinstate daily press briefings and take questions from reporters, but added that she wouldn’t prop up efforts by right-wing networks that have pushed debunked conspiracy theories.
“We’re not going to allow the briefing room to be a platform for propaganda, and we will shut that down as needed as well,” Psaki said.
The incoming press secretary said that she also has plans to handle information leaked the press differently than her predecessors.
“Anybody who covered only the Trump administration who’s looking for a continuation of the Game of Thrones-style personnel sniping, they will be sorely disappointed,” Psaki said when asked about her plans for addressing potential leaks which became a defining characteristic of the Trump administration’s relationship with the press.
The incoming communications official pledged a return to briefings that allow policy experts to explain an array of issue ranging from COVID-19 response to immigration, noting that some leaks would likely be inevitable.
Leaks around people’s personal lives and national security would be more damaging, Psaki said.
The soon-to-be White House press secretary will join the ranks of Obama administration alumni set to take on top roles when Biden takes office in January — a former spokesperson for the State Department when John Kerry was secretary of state, Psaki later served as President Barack Obama’s communications director.
The incoming press secretary appeared to dodge when asked if the Biden administration would adopt the widely criticized approach during Obama’s tenure where leakers of classified information were aggressively prosecuted and the phone records of journalists were seized.
“I can’t get ahead of what that would look like and certainly not on behalf of any future Department of Justice,” Psaki said.
President Donald Trump is skipping his New Year’s Eve event at his Mar-A-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida on Thursday to return to the White House as several of his GOP allies plan to challenge Congress’ official certification of the Electoral College’s votes for President-elect Joe Biden on January 6.
The Secret Service is making some staff changes in the presidential detail that will protect President-elect Joe Biden, the Washington Post reported late Wednesday.
Two people familiar with the changes told the Post that the Secret Service is planning for the return of a group of senior agents who guarded Biden as vice president more than four years ago, including Darryl Volpicelli, who will become the second-in-command of President Biden’s detail as well as Brian McDonough.
According to the Post, the Secret Service also plans to name David Cho, second-in-command in Trump’s protective outfit, as the new special agent to lead the Biden presidential detail.
But amid concerns that some agency members had become politically-aligned with Trump’s agenda, some agents will no longer be serving in the White House detail. The Post said Anthony Ornato, a former detail leader who temporarily left his job to become White House deputy chief of staff earlier this year and helped coordinate Trump rallies — will not be on Biden’s immediate security team.
According to the Post, Ornato will return to the Secret Service to become the assistant director overseeing the agency’s Rowley Training Center, a post that while prestigious will not directly protect the incoming president.
Here’s an installment from the 20 for 20 Anniversary series about TPM’s business history. It’s by Joe Ragazzo, TPM’s publisher. I’ve told you that all the other pieces I read for first time when they were published. This is the exception. I read a draft and suggested a few changes. But this remains an example of how histories are best told by those who weren’t the primary actors in them. Joe is the right person to tell you this story because of his centrality to the story and deep knowledge about the operation. I hired Joe as my assistant almost eight years ago and he became publisher last year.
The votes are in! And, overwhelmingly, you’ve decided: The duke of dukes goes to Rudy Giuliani, once dubbed America’s mayor and of late America’s sinister buffoon.
During the course of 2012, the founder and editor of TPM, Josh Marshall, realized things weren’t working. The company had taken some investment money in 2009 with the intention of growing. However, by three years later, it was clear that the company was spending too much money and making too little. Without a serious “retrenchment,” the company’s future was in jeopardy.
“I let myself be influenced and took some guidance from people, sort of ‘upward or bust’ and ‘you gotta spend money to make money — it will come together,’” Josh told me recently. “There were a lot of expectations built up in the organization, and I had built a lot of them up, and had allowed them to build up in me.”
It’s not an unfamiliar narrative: Invest a bunch of money into the company, get way bigger and “take it to the next level.” Sometimes it works out. But more often, it does not. For TPM, it was not.
And so, in 2012 and into 2013, Josh committed to a new approach that required cutting spending, including cutting a couple staff positions, which is never easy. And it required a sober explanation to the staff.
“It’s very hard to tell an organization collectively that we need to pull back a bit, that we need to retrench a bit, this idea that we’re going to be twice as big next year, and the year after that — it’s not going to happen,” Josh recalled.
Several people left the company around this time, and Josh admits it was one of the most, if not the most, difficult periods in TPM’s history.
But, the retrenchment worked. And now, roughly eight years later, as TPM is celebrating its 20th anniversary, Josh says he is more proud of emerging from this period intact than he is of starting the company in the first place.
The origins of TPM as a money-making business were modest, and likely familiar to anyone traversing the web in the early aughts — tip jars and referral links. It was only a couple hundred bucks a month, but it supplemented Josh’s income from freelancing for other news outlets.
The first real breakthrough came in 2003 with a company called Blog Ads, created by Henry Copeland. Blog Ads was a sort of proto-programmatic digital advertising company that paired publishers with advertisers.
“It was Blog Ads that got me out of being dirt poor and barely being able to support myself, to where I didn’t have to do other things besides TPM,” Josh told me.
While Josh was blogging and beginning to make some real money, Millet Israeli, his then-girlfriend and now-wife, was working behind the scenes to make TPM a real “business.” Formerly a general counsel at Dow Jones, she incorporated the business, and, over time, put in place the nuts-and-bolts processes we still use today — payment processing, bookkeeping, a 401(k) plan, various compliance and legal frameworks.
She also developed TPM’s first “direct” sales strategy — reaching out directly to publishers and explaining to them why TPM’s audience was a perfect fit for the books they were trying to sell.
Israeli was the mastermind behind one TPM’s most creative ad campaigns, for the DVD release of the 2005 American geopolitical thriller, Syriana. The movie poster featured George Clooney in a blindfold, so TPM put its own spin on it, blindfolding Josh.
“This was my big idea to the marketing company, the production company — let’s put a blindfold on Josh,” Israeli said. “They loved it, they said ‘that’s awesome.’”
This sales strategy — persuading potential advertisers that what TPM lacked in sheer size, it made up for in a dedicated, trusting and intelligent audience paired with innovative and engaging advertising “products” — became a cornerstone of TPM’s business strategy.
While Blog Ads was critical to TPM’s early success, it was the direct sales market that would take TPM to the next level and enable its early growth. In parallel to the direct sales market, a new form of advertising was quickly becoming ubiquitous — programmatic advertising.
Programmatic (also known as remnant or third-party) advertising is when a company sits between advertisers and publishers and matches ads with websites. The most prominent programmatic advertiser is, of course, Google’s AdExchange. Programmatic advertising rates are much lower than direct advertising rates, but because there is little-to-no sales process (no cold calling, no pitching, no creative development) they are less resource-intensive. The income from them is also highly predictable.
For the next several years, TPM’s income was split pretty evenly between direct ad sales and programmatic advertising. However, in 2010, the two income sources started to diverge and in 2011, income from direct sales accounted for nearly twice that of programmatic advertising.
Though direct sales numbers were high, they weren’t nearly as high as they needed to be to cover increased spending. So as the first part of retrenchment, the company did a crash course refocus on programmatic advertising, which had been left more or less on autopilot while the company focused on building direct sales. Although programmatic revenue nearly doubled, the increase in spending that was intended to fuel growth resulted in TPM losing more money than any other year in TPM’s history. This was also the year TPM launched TPM Prime.
I came onboard Jan. 7, 2013 and was tasked with increasing programmatic revenue by as much as possible. I heard whispers that TPM was in trouble. I was told by some that I was joining a sinking ship. Maybe I was naive, but it didn’t feel like I was joining a sinking ship. Over the next few years we hired several people who were critical to the change in strategy. Amanda Hale came on and was eventually our sole ad seller. Derick Dirmaier (now TPM’s head of product) joined toward the end of 2013. Gayatri Surendranathan began as a publishing associate and Christine Frapech joined as design fellow (and remains as senior designer). A few years later, Jackie Wilhelm (who is now our associate publisher) joined. In a lot of ways, this group was the core of TPM’s business-side “retrenchment” for several years
In 2013 and 2014, our primary focus was building our direct ad business and our programmatic business. And we were good at it. In 2014 we hit new highs in both areas, reaching a company high in revenue and profitability. Critically, by this point, the company’s expenses were dramatically lower than they had been in 2012.But, we weren’t resting on our laurels because we all knew how quickly things can change.
So, in 2015, we began spending more time on TPM Prime. It was baby steps at first — making the simple pitch to readers that memberships would improve our journalism and help us survive. The readers responded, and we more than doubled our membership revenue in 2015 — which more than offset slight decreases in advertising revenue — making it another record-setting year for TPM.
Around this time, the programmatic industry was booming. Money was pouring into ad tech and third-party advertising. The reader hears a lot about Google and Facebook, but you probably didn’t hear as much about smaller programmatic ad sellers such as SayMedia, Martini Media and a slew of others. The combination of increasing programmatic revenue, membership growth and an election year audience surge pushed us over the $3 million revenue figure in 2016 for the first time. Our membership revenue doubled again and programmatic revenue reached a new peak. The time invested in building Prime in 2014, 2015 and 2016 turned out to be pivotal because it positioned the company for the tech platform-driven crisis in ad revenues which began to hit with a vengeance in 2016-17 and cratered numerous publications.
From 2016 until now, our focus has been almost exclusively on membership growth and everything that goes with it. We still sell direct ads, and we still drive programmatic revenue, but it was clear that memberships were the core of our company ( not just for financial reasons, but also for philosophical ones, which I’ll get to in a minute). We made a lot of difficult decisions along the way such as abandoning the custom CMS we had been building and moving to WordPress. We skipped over a lot of trends — we never “pivoted to video,” for example, as so may other digital media operations did.
From its beginning, TPM has been a reader-centric publication. This informs all of our decisions. From 2013 to 2020, possibly the most consequential decision we made was to eschew scale — which is inherently an avenue to maximize profits for investors — to build a sustainable business that is laser focused on serving its readers. Would we like to get bigger? Sure. We believe in our journalism, and therefore we’d like as many people to read it as possible. But the journalism comes first, and when journalism really, truly is the most important thing, it aligns the interests of the readers and the employees.
This is why, in so many ways, the shift toward memberships felt natural for us. A critical aspect of TPM’s culture is that everyone either was a journalist or loved journalism. This extends all the way to our developers. Matt Wozniak read TPM in college, Jacob Harris worked at another publisher before TPM. This is not to say driving memberships is easy — it’s not. But now, everyone’s incentives were aligned. Our “business” was no longer about selling ads — it was getting people to pay for the journalism itself. That meant the whole of TPM — those on the business team, the writers, and the editors, shared a goal: making great journalism and figuring out how to justify to our readers that it was worth paying for.
The falling ad market and lessons about the unpredictability of market trends factored into the decision to focus heavily on memberships. But so did something more psychological about what focusing on memberships means as a company.
“Advertisers couldn’t care less if you go out of business,” Josh said. “Your readers, if you do a good job, care greatly if you stay in business…. [We wanted] to make our financial well-being dependent on things that we could be good at and have some control over.”
In other words, the work everyone does at TPM contributes to the organization’s success, and thank God for that because it has taken each and every person at TPM to get us to where we are today.
We now have 35,000 members. In 2013 when I started, we had around 3,500. In 2021, we’re projecting to have more reader revenue than we had total revenue in 2013. Along the way (with help from the TPM Union, no doubt), we raised our salary scale, we increased benefits and we’ve invested more in journalism.
Again, because it’s so important, this means: Our interests are all aligned from reader to worker to founder.
Josh has said that the first decade or so of TPM felt like the company was in an updraft, that basically history and the trends were so much on TPM’s side that everything just worked. Then, for a few years, it felt like everything was against TPM from a business perspective. This is why, if you ask Josh what he’s most proud of professionally, he won’t say starting TPM — he’ll say emerging from the darkest time in the company’s history and navigating us to where we are now, something he didn’t think was the logical or even likely outcome.
And yet here we are, about to begin 2021, emerging from the retrenchment as a strong, profitable company with a solid foundation and full of optimism about the future.
“I can really say the company is in better shape than it’s ever been,” Josh said.
There’s a fascinating and perhaps ominous article this morning in the LA Times about health care workers who are refusing to take or at least reluctant to take the COVID vaccine. There’s a range of reasons from reasons from things that might strike some of us as irrational to the general hesitancy of not wanting to be first to other things that have some logical basis. One nurse the reporters interviewed is six months pregnant and noted (which I believe is true) that the vaccine hasn’t yet been tested on pregnant women. I don’t know if there’s any clinical reason why this vaccine could operate differently in pregnant women. But I certainly know that many pregnant women and expectant fathers are highly cautious about anything that can disrupt a pregnancy.
I think we fool ourselves, are less than honest with ourselves, if we treat COVID vaccine hesitance or resistance as just a new version of the anti-vaccine activism we’ve seen for the last couple decades. It’s clearly connected to that phenomenon and is fueled by the climate of doubt it has created. But this is a new vaccine and (in the case of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines) uses a novel vaccine approach. Being wary of going first in such a case is simply not the same as refusing vaccines which have been administered literally billions of times and have track records of short term and long term safety going back decades.
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse (NE) on Wednesday night rebuked an effort by a ragtag group of fellow Republicans who have said they intend to object to the results of the Electoral College votes when Congress meets for a joint session next week to reaffirm the victory of President-elect Joe Biden.
“When we talk in private, I haven’t heard a single Congressional Republican allege that the election results were fraudulent – not one,” Sasse wrote in a Facebook post explaining his decision not to go along with the desperate effort. “Instead, I hear them talk about their worries about how they will “look” to President Trump’s most ardent supporters.”
The statement points at an enduring perception of President Donald Trump’s inflated political influence in spite of his dwindling days in office and comes after a fledgling group of Republican lawmakers reportedly met with Trump at the White House earlier this month to discuss the last-ditch move.
Members of that group, which includes some of Trump’s most loyal followers and conspiracy theorists, have since pledged to play along in President Trump’s wildly unsuccessful effort to overturn the election results by objecting to the Electoral College vote next week.
Sasse called the effort a “dangerous ploy” which he said he has been urging his colleagues to reject.
“The president and his allies are playing with fire,” Sasse wrote. “If you make big claims, you had better have the evidence. But the president doesn’t and neither do the institutional arsonist members of Congress who will object to the Electoral College vote,” he added.
Sasse’s statement affirmed Biden’s win and laid out what has become a repetitive exercise in debunking some of the conspiracy theories surrounding what even Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr called an election that was free from the kind of fraud that would overturn Biden’s win.
“Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government,” Sasse wrote.
While President Trump has praised members of his party who have pledged to object to the electoral votes during the traditionally routine ceremony on Jan. 6 where sealed certificates with a record of electoral votes from each state are opened and counted, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and others have discouraged GOP senators from what would likely be an effort that would be quickly rejected.
The blistering statement was not the first time Sasse has broken from his party in the past in condemning Trump and the efforts of his most loyal supporters.
Weeks before the election, Sasse criticized the President’s bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic, and tore into the President’s for “kissing dictators’ butts” while appearing to “flirt with white supremacists” in an Oct. 14 telephone town hall with constituents.
“All the clever arguments and rhetorical gymnastics in the world won’t change the fact that this January 6th effort is designed to disenfranchise millions of Americans simply because they voted for someone in a different party,” Sasse wrote in the Wednesday statement. “We ought to be better than that. If we normalize this, we’re going to turn American politics into a Hatfields and McCoys endless blood feud – a house hopelessly divided.”
President-elect Joe Biden’s inaugural committee on Thursday announced plans to hold a national memorial in remembrance of the more than 340,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19.
BEIJING (AP) — China authorized its first homegrown COVID-19 vaccine for general use Thursday, adding another shot that could see wide use in poorer countries as the virus surges back around the globe.
