Now, as Biden’s first press conference approached, a whole lineup of talent at Fox began rooting openly for the young correspondent. Sean Hannity, on his prime-time program, expressed little faith in the rest of the White House press corps. “I’m not expecting tough questions,” Hannity said, “except maybe Peter Doocy.” The Federalist’s Chris Bedford, appearing on Fox, said, “I’m hoping that [Biden] gets a few hard ones — at least from Peter Doocy.” Brian Kilmeade, another co-host of “Fox & Friends,” told me he was keeping his fingers crossed for Doocy. “I know they have their list” — the names of the reporters White House staffers instruct the president to call on — “but I hope that they’re gonna call on him,” Kilmeade said.

But it didn’t happen. Instead, the date of the press conference arrived, March 25, and over 62 minutes in the East Room of the White House, Doocy looked on eagerly, signaling for Biden’s attention, as the president summoned others.

Almost instantly, Fox — which had more than 3.2 million viewers tuned in to the event — seemed to decide Doocy himself would become the story. “BIDEN SNUBS FOX DURING FIRST NEWS CONF,” one Fox chyron read. On air, Doocy leafed through a thick, black binder he said was full of questions he had prepared for Biden, about everything from his “green jobs” agenda to the origins of Covid-19 in China. “Sorry you didn’t get a question,” Fox anchor Sandra Smith told him. The network’s Dana Perino, a former White House press secretary for George W. Bush, said she would have instructed the president to call on Doocy had she been there. “Why make Peter Doocy a story?” she asked. “Just take his question and move on.” Joe Concha, a media and politics columnist at the Hill and a Fox News contributor, dismissed the whole episode as a disgrace for the press corps and for Biden, whose handlers needed to answer for why they were “so afraid of a rookie White House press correspondent.”

The Fox-getting-ignored subplot finally reached its climax the following afternoon, when Doocy himself pressed Psaki in the James S. Brady briefing room. Arching over a front-row seat, he asked about immigration and the Senate filibuster before arriving at his final question: Is ignoring Fox News official administration policy?

Psaki’s answer was no: She shot back that she was conversing with Fox’s reporter at that very moment. She reminded Doocy that she regularly took questions from him, and that Biden had done so in other settings, too. Fellow reporters in the room knew Biden had skipped over plenty of other big news organizations at the press conference, even the New York Times. Psaki soon moved on to another reporter, though not without complimenting Doocy on his “awesome” argyle socks. The exchange predictably ricocheted around the internet and was featured on Fox.

In one sense, the Doocy saga can be seen as a distillation, in a single reporter, of the challenge facing Fox in the Biden era. Everyone expects the network to be a source of irritation for the new White House, as it was in the Obama years. Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch recently said ratings would improve as the network became Biden’s “loyal opposition,” borrowing a phrase from European parliamentary politics, which didn’t go unnoticed among Biden’s aides. But Fox also faces some competition for its conservative viewership from the likes of Newsmax and One America News Network, stridently right-wing networks that made a point of questioning the validity of the 2020 election. Fox needs to keep the Trump-friendly, anti-Biden end of its demographic watching, at a time when “opposition” and “loyal” are more often seen as contradictions on the American right — while also protecting its position as a news network with a big reporting outfit. Fox wants a seat in the room, but many of its viewers also want to see a fight.

That conflict is embodied in Doocy: a smooth yet aggressive, social media-savvy correspondent who might feel like a fresh face on TV, yet is indisputably of, by and for Fox.

Jim Acosta, the former CNN White House reporter, embraced a version of this role during the Trump era by jumping into loud, heated sparring matches with Donald Trump and his spokespeople. That isn’t Doocy’s style. He rarely raises his voice. “He’s not yelling at them. He’s not jabbing his finger in the air,” says Bryan Boughton, a senior vice president and Fox’s Washington bureau chief. “He’s presenting a question to answer, and how they choose to respond is totally up to them.” Supporters within Fox also praise him for being willing to challenge an administration they believe most rival outlets show too much deference to, and his colleagues describe him as having an innate sense of what makes a good story on their airwaves.

Doocy himself maintains he’s just a straight news reporter doing his job, which he mostly views as getting officials to say newsworthy things on camera. He even revealed, and a White House official confirmed, that when he’s planning to ask about a story that isn’t leading national news, he runs the topic (though not the question) by Biden’s press aides in advance. Doocy says he genuinely wants to understand the president’s thinking — plus, “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” a common Psaki refrain, doesn’t make for a useful soundbite. Reflecting on the press conference snub, he noted that Biden aides had left Fox off their list of reporters for the president to call on for months, going back to the campaign and the transition. He said it finally felt like the right time to have Psaki answer for that on camera. “There are bigger problems in the world than Fox not getting called on,” Doocy acknowledges. “However, there was an interest just by me in trying to get to the bottom of it.”

But many other media-watchers and TV rivals see his sharp-edged, juxtaposition-heavy questions as veering dangerously into bad-faith trolling. Doocy, these critics charge, is a functionary for an agenda-driven network, and more concerned about personal slights than actual news. Ultimately, they view Doocy’s elevation as a sign of just how partisan Fox, even its more traditional news division, has become. During the Trump years, veteran Fox anchors like Bret Baier and Chris Wallace sought to draw a line between their reporting and the fawning coverage of the network’s opinionators. To Fox’s detractors, Doocy’s style feels more in line with the latter, and it doesn’t help that he’s the son of a network host beloved by Trump.

Within the Biden White House, all this raises the question of how to handle Doocy. Some liberals, including alums of the Obama administration, have publicly pressed Biden’s team to ignore Doocy, arguing that Fox is an arm of the Republican Party, not a serious news outlet, more so than ever before. But there are perhaps more compelling arguments for staying engaged with Doocy that have traction inside the president’s orbit, according to White House aides. For one thing, Biden’s team wants to avoid the combative, disruptive attitude his predecessor took toward the media. They also acknowledge that Peter Doocy is a proxy for a huge audience, or a sizeable slice of it anyway, that still might be reachable with Biden’s message. By engaging with Fox, a president who campaigned on unifying the country stands a better chance of getting through to voters he wants, and ultimately might need.

On a chilly March morning at the Willard hotel café near the White House, Doocy arrived wearing an overcoat and took a seat on the mostly empty patio. He scrolled through his phone and sipped coffee with half and half, pausing between measured answers about his work at Fox. Depending on his shift, he gets up at 4 or 7 a.m., reads emails he missed overnight and scans his note from the Fox “brain room” that includes international headlines and big opinion pieces. He clicks around through show rundowns to see when his TV hits might be. If he’s in the briefing room that day, he starts figuring out what to ask. He arrives at the White House about an hour before he goes on air and does a round of hellos with folks on the grounds.

Anticipating Biden’s big infrastructure push, he had recently picked up Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s latest book, mostly out of curiosity, after getting to know the former mayor a bit during the presidential campaign. He scanned it for inconsistencies or flip flops — a Doocy reporting trait — but he didn’t spot many.

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