Unlike President Trump’s Marathon Right-Wing Talk Show Binges, Here’s Where Joe Biden Gets His News From

At the moment, the Joe Biden news cycle is dominated by a whirlwind of cabinet announcements and other top-tier government postings that the President-elect and his team have been incrementally rolling out, giving everyone an early look at who will populate the ranks of the Biden-Harris administration come January. On Monday, for example, the Biden team announced their picks for key health postings, including Biden’s plan to nominate Vivek Murthy as Surgeon General and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as Biden’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. They’ll join other experts that Biden has likewise tapped to round out his health care team, including Dr. Anthony Fauci as the Biden administration’s chief medical adviser.

Meanwhile, a salient point that arguably reveals a great deal about the incoming president was also made public in recent days and arguably didn’t get the attention it deserves — especially since it’s the kind of thing that can say so much about how the 46th president will make decisions and sift through information to arrive at those decisions. We’re referring to President-elect Biden’s media diet, including the news outlets that he peruses on a regular basis and the sources of information that comprise the inbound slew of facts (and opinion) which will no doubt inform his decision-making process.

The same way that President Trump’s marathon binges of Fox News and other right-wing talk programming have remained at the white-hot center of the current free-wheeling and MAGA-themed presidential administration, to the point that some of the opinion show hosts (like Fox’s Tucker Carlson) have been able to influence administration policy. Almost as if they’d become de facto cabinet officials.

But while Trump started out as a Fox News devotee, eventually migrating away from it as coverage got less favorable and came to instead rely on and elevate the profile of fringe outlets like Newsmax and that of OAN news anchors, Biden is a fan of much more traditional media institutions. Oh, and Apple News
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The latter, in case you weren’t aware, is the news aggregation mobile app that comes pre-installed on iPhones and iPads, representing a play by Apple to capture more recurring revenue from consumers. Apple News has a subscription tier, as well as a free option, but both work roughly the same way — users “follow” news topics and media outlets within the app, making it a one-stop-shop for keeping up with a wide and disparate stream of news.

CNN and Politico have both produced reporting in recent days about the incoming president’s news consumption habits, and they include the following, in addition to the fact that he keeps up with a lot of news at once via Apple News:

Other than watching MSNBC’s Morning Joe regularly, Biden is not really a big TV news guy. That’s according to Jay Carney, who worked for a time as Biden’s communications director during the Obama administration — and Carney even added, in an aside to Politico, that he in fact can’t remember Biden ever paying much attention to a TV set in his office during those years. That, alone, stands in marked contrast to the nation’s current TV-obsessed chief executive.

Biden also reads the national outlets that you’d expect on a regular basis — publications like The New York Times
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, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and The Atlantic magazine. He also does something else that not enough Americans do these days: He pays attention to local news, with Politico reporting that he also regularly reads the Delaware News-Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Can we start to make some assumptions about what kind of president that Biden will be from habits like these? Perhaps, especially on the basis of the latter. For starters, one would imagine that it’s a certain kind of American who keenly follows local news and local newspapers — one who takes an interest in their fellow man and in the community around them.

Here are a few other takeaways we can surmise from Biden’s media diet:

Biden, as president, will apparently act as something of a sponge when it comes to making decisions, comfortable as he seems to be with consuming news from an abundance of sources. Again, in strong contrast to President Trump, who acted less as a sponge and more of a blunt instrument whose deeply committed base swept him into office to enact specific policy goals — and for whom the news media came to be something that’s a cross between a foil and the fount of the only currency that matters in Trumplandia (ratings).

It stands to reason, meanwhile, that someone who makes a point of seeking out information from far-flung corners and sources is also just as likely to be a good listener, or at least open to a spectrum of viewpoints. Also, that Biden, once he’s ensconced in the Oval Office, is not likely to lash out at members of the Fourth Estate anytime soon with insults like “fake news” and “enemy of the people.” Four years of Trump are apparently going to be followed by a president who, dare we say it, cultivates relations in the press, the members of which, in turn, will no doubt return to the halcyon days of yesteryear — back before the White House was covered by journalists as ground zero of a reality show, from whence one too-outlandish-to-be-true scandal after another has emerged, gripping news consumers in the process. Political news, in other words, sounds like it’s going to get comparatively boring again in short order, which will no doubt suit millions of Americans just fine.