Free Form Friday: No Swing at All— Missing the Message in the White House Briefing
Free Form Friday is my weekly non-Bowie post. For more David Bowie, come back tomorrow. Note that the bolded words below link to sources such as transcripts of relevant press conferences and news accounts of the matters I reference. Click on those links for more information on the topics.
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It was the perfect setup for the White House to link various news topics and highlight the contrast between the Biden Administration and a potential Trump Administration. However, instead of taking advantage of the opportunity, it wasn’t so much a swing and a miss as no swing at all.
During the July 9, 2024, press briefing, a question was raised about the Department of Justice’s operation against a Russian state-sponsored bot network that used AI to denigrate U.S. politicians, including Biden himself. Make no mistake, the Russians want Trump. While press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre acknowledged the announcement and emphasized the administration’s ongoing concerns about AI and foreign interference, she deferred specific details to the Department of Justice and mentioned she would check in with the team for further information. Then she moved on to the 756th question about whether Biden would drop out of the race.
This question came while the NATO Summit was taking place in the United States, the day after the Russians bombed a Ukrainian hospital, and while almost all the other questions during the news briefing were about the state of Biden’s health and the health of his candidacy. To me, it seemed like the press secretary didn’t anticipate the question. It also seemed like this is what she should have led with.
The DOJ had just dismantled a Russian state-sponsored bot network that utilized artificial intelligence to spread propaganda with the intent of hurting the prospects of officials, like Biden (especially Biden), who opposed Russian aggression. That aggression takes the form of an actual war in Ukraine (for now, just Ukraine), violent suppression of dissent at home (like Trump wants to do here), and also sneaky and systematic interference in elections in democratic countries designed to undermine democracy itself so that Putin can expand unfettered.
The DOJ operation involved the takedown of over 1,000 fake accounts on Bond-villain-wannabe Elon Musk’s Twitter, highlighting the increasing sophistication of foreign interference tactics and the U.S. government’s ongoing efforts to combat them. The types of disinformation that bots push apparently cover some of the same topics as Jean-Pierre was being asked about at that very news conference. I say, “apparently,” because she didn’t make this point.
This all amounted to further evidence that the Russian war is evil (bombing the hospital), that they are trying to manipulate us into electing Trump, who would not only turn Ukraine over to Putin but pull the US out of NATO, and that Biden stands in the way of Putin’s world domination. All this is objectively true. The Biden Administration just didn’t seize the opportunity to point it out.
Sigh. OK, so I’ll do it. That’s this post. Maybe the number of people who read it will cross into the double digits. As to why Karine Jean-Pierre wasn’t pushing this message instead? No clue.