Meet the White House Staffer in Charge of Good News

Though publicly President Donald Trump has consistently bashed the media, behind the scenes, the White House is promoting all the positive press they receive from the same outlets that the president tries to discredit.

Andy Hemming’s job as the White House director of rapid response is to constantly scan mainstream media, cable television, and Twitter to find positive stories about the president, which he then sends to more than 1,000 influencers — reporters and television talking heads.

It is a role that seems out of sync with Trump’s constant attacks on the press, writes Politico, who spent his first day of his summer break tweeting about the major news networks and papers from Bedminster, N.J.

Hard to believe that with 24/7 #Fake News on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NYTIMES & WAPO, the Trump base is getting stronger!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2017

Trump also later tweeted directly about The New York Times and how it was “failing.” But a Times spokesperson told Politico that the business is actually “growing in profit, income, revenues and paid subscriptions.”

How much longer will the failing nytimes, with its big losses and massive unfunded liability (and non-existent sources), remain in business?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2017

The same month that Trump posted a video of himself wrestling to the ground a man with a CNN logo obscuring his face, Hemming highlighted clips from CNN, including one of California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein saying she saw no evidence of collusion between Russian operatives and the Trump campaign.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, said that the mainstream media don’t always get it wrong.

“But for every one good story we push out, there are probably 150 really bad process stories, or hit pieces, on the administration,” she said, according to Politico. “We think a lot of times, the stories that we push out have been given very little coverage.”

The president frequently participates in interviews with reporters from the news organization that he mocks, which seems to undercut his assaults.

Hemming is paid $89,000 a year and is a career Republican campaign operative. He worked for Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign before going to the RNC. He spent the final 100 days of the general election embedded in the Trump Tower.

According to Politico, the White House administration thinks that Hemming is “helping to slowly change the course of the coverage it gets.”