Jen Psaki Recalls Her Briefing Room Showdowns With Fox’s Peter Doocy, Reveals She ‘Didn’t Hate Him at All’
Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who is now a host on MSNBC, said she didn’t “hate” White House reporter Peter Doocy and took pity on him for what must be the “traumatizing experience” of working for Fox News.
Psaki joined former Clinton Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers for a forum hosted by The Ankler titled, “President and the Podium.”
Psaki discussed her new book, Say More: Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World.
Moderator and media executive Janice Min brought up a section on Doocy, saying, “You talk in the book about how Peter Doocy, son of Fox and Friends’ Steve Doocy, was a constant thorn in your side in the press room.”
“People often ask me, ‘How much did you hate that guy?’ And I’m always like, ‘No, I didn’t hate him at all,’ Psaki said, continuing:
I feel like it would be a real mind-bend to work for Fox. It feels like a traumatizing experience he has to live through every day. That aside, it’s quite predictable what they were going to ask — if there was a winding roundabout [on Fox News] of, you know, “migrants at the border, here to kill all of you,” you knew they were going to ask about immigration that day. So I didn’t see it as necessarily winning the argument with him as much as using it as a forum to provide what our points were, right? When I came in, we followed Trump and an administration that was like, “inject bleach, you’re all liars, we hate the media.” So there was a very low bar for me.
Sitting down with @jrpsaki and Dee Dee Myers is like being plunked onto the set of The West Wing: 2024 — you’re immersed in a Beltway-shorthand barrage of political commentary, insights and laugh-out-loud moments. @janicemin excerpts their conversation:https://t.co/FYZTdvgoBo pic.twitter.com/cUSrgKpEyN
— The Ankler (@TheAnkler) May 18, 2024
On a 2022 broadcast of Pod Save America, Psaki was asked, if “Peter Doocy is a stupid son of a bitch or does he just play one on TV?”
Psaki answered at the time, “He works for a network that provides people with questions that, nothing personal to any individual including Peter Doocy, but might make anyone sound like a stupid son of a bitch.”
Fox News responded that Doocy was a “terrific reporter” whose job is “to elicit truth from power for the American public.”
Read The Ankler interview with Psaki here.
