Allow the tough questions
Britain’s rumpled Prime Minister Boris Johnson has plenty of reasons to fear the press. He was fatally slow to respond in the early weeks of the covid-19 crisis. His former aide, Dominic Cummings, has already offered up a Shakespearean level of vitriol in his revelatory tome about the shortcomings of his boss. There is that fight with the French. Lots of criticism on Afghanistan. Gas bills. Brexit fallout. Cabinet reshuffling chaos.
Plenty of reason, then to hide in the corner. But there was a relaxed Johnson at the White House, looking like he was having a great time in one of his favorite countries, calling on British reporters to ask questions and engaging in the time-honored democratic practice of riposte and retort with the assigned representatives of his bosses, otherwise known as the electorate.
No wonder, then, that President Joe Biden was heard to say “good luck,” when Johnson announced his intention to take questions from the media.
Conservatives often say that reporters have treated Biden with kid gloves compared with the prior administration, and any rational, nonpartisan thinker can see they have a point. Few East Coast columnists rose up in indignation over the drone killings; had that been on Trump’s watch, newspaper opinion sections would have been ablaze with fury, fingers all pointing in the same direction, toward the White House.
What happened at that august residence Wednesday was not on that level, but still shameful.
Johnson took care of his nation’s media as he should. But when U.S. reporters tried to question their own leader, Biden’s communications team, in this instance better understood as a non-communications team, basically drowned out their own boss and hustled reporters out of the room with all the condescending customer service skills of ambitious Soviet apparatchiks.
At that point, the Biden administration’s lack of transparency and the president’s unwillingness to hold a news conference became too much even for sympathetic reporters. All over New York and Washington, the righteous indignation of a trained journalist trying to do a job crucial to American democracy kicked into gear. The memory of Biden not taking questions after major addresses on Aug. 16, Aug. 18, Aug. 31, and Sept. 9 started to smart, and many reporters took to Twitter to say, in essence, why the heck is this administration so afraid of questions?
On Thursday, Biden administration communications director Jen Psaki tried to blame Johnson, of all people, for disrupting her careful control of the event. He took questions without announcing that intention in advance!, she complained. That is a ridiculous argument. Reporters in the presence of world leaders are supposed to ask questions, especially at staged events.
In fact, the Biden communications team’s hustle served only to make their boss look worse, to play into any negative perceptions about his acuity and leadership. No chief executive should let himself be hustled out of a room like that for any reason other than a security concern. The optics don’t look so good, and democracy is not served.