The White House sent an online thank you to Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy after he mentioned President Biden’s tough work schedule while in Asia this week.
“He has basically been working all through the night,” Doocy said while reporting from Hanoi, Vietnam, where Biden is meeting with the country’s leaders. “The equivalent of an all-nighter Eastern Time. So, he’s probably pretty tired, pretty jet-lagged.”
Critics of Doocy and Fox had circulated the clip online late Monday, pointing out the routine criticism of the president’s age and mental state that have become a regular staple of Fox News’s programming since Biden took office.
“Thank you Peter,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, early Tuesday morning.
Jean-Pierre’s message to Doocy comes just hours after the White House rolled out an online pushback campaign regarding the way Biden’s age — 80 — is covered by mainstream media outlets.
“Here on Earth, we saw the President start his day in India at the G20, end the day in Hanoi with a substantive & detailed 40-minute press conference at 9pm, and continue to answer questions—including from @cnn—as he departed. What will be enough?” one top aide wrote on X recently.
The relationship between Doocy and Fox and the White House more generally has been a fraught one for years.
Biden infamously called the journalist a “stupid son of a b—-” after he asked a question about inflation last year; he later called Doocy to apologize.
More recently, the White House condemned comments made by Greg Gutfeld, a popular Fox host, about the Holocaust in which he said that “you had to be useful” to survive a concentration camp.
Biden has not sat for an interview with Fox, the top-watched cable news channel, since taking office but has regularly responded to questions from Doocy and other Fox reporters during his first term in office.