BIDEN LIMITING MEDIA ENGAGEMENTS
News conferences, interviews infrequent during his first year
In what’s become a familiar scene, President Joe Biden lingered after delivering a recent speech on the pandemic as reporters fired a barrage of questions.
He bristled at a query about the shortage of COVID-19 rapid tests, answered another about Omicron-spurred travel restrictions and sidestepped a third about whether Sen. Joe Manchin failed to keep his word when he torpedoed Biden’s social services and climate spending plan.
“I’m not supposed to be having this press conference right now,” Biden said at the end of a response that didn’t directly answer the question about the West Virginia Democrat.
Seconds later, Biden turned and walked out of the room, ending what’s become the president’s preferred method for his limited engagements with the press.
As Biden wraps up his first year in the White House, he has held fewer news conferences than any of his five
immediate predecessors at the same point in their presidencies, and he has taken part in fewer media interviews than any of his recent predecessors.
The dynamic has left the White House facing questions about whether the president is falling short in pulling back the curtain on
how his administration operates and missing opportunities to explain his agenda to Americans.
Biden does more frequently field questions at public appearances than any of his recent predecessors, according to new research published by Martha Joynt Kumar, a professor emerita in political science at Towson University and director of the White House Transition Project.
He routinely pauses to talk to reporters who shout questions over Marine One’s whirring propellers as he comes and goes from the White House. He parries
with journalists at Oval Office photo ops and other events. But these exchanges have their limitations.
“While President Biden has taken questions more often at his events than his predecessors, he spends less time doing so,” Kumar notes. “He provides short answers with few follow-ups when he takes questions at the end of a previously scheduled speech.”
Biden has done just 22 media interviews, fewer than any of his six most recent
White House predecessors at the same point in their presidencies.
The 46th president has held just nine formal news conferences — six solo and three jointly with visiting foreign leaders. Ronald Reagan, whose schedule was scaled back early in his first term after he recovered after a failed assassination attempt, is the only recent president to hold fewer news conferences during his first year in office, according to Kumar. Reagan did 59 interviews
in 1981.
Former President Donald Trump did 92 interviews in his first year in office, more than two dozen of those with friendly interlocutors at Fox News. But Trump also held lengthy sessions with ABC News, The Associated Press, The New York Times and other outlets whose coverage he criticized over the course of his presidency.
Biden’s 22 media interviews have included one-onone sessions with journalists at three of the major television networks, two CNN town halls, an appearance on MSNBC, a trio of regional TV interviews via Zoom, as well as conversations with Jimmy Fallon and ESPN’s Sage Steele. He’s given just three print interviews.
The White House has fielded requests from media outlets — and complaints from the White House Correspondents’ Association —
for Biden to do more one-onone interviews and formal news conferences.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki has pushed back that journalists don’t need an “embroidered cushion” to engage Biden because he has not shied away from taking questions from reporters at public events.
But such exchanges often don’t lend themselves to follow-up questions. The president can ignore questions he might not want to answer.
“Fleeting exchanges are insufficient to building the historical record of the president’s views on a broad array of public concerns. We have had scant opportunities in this first year to learn the president’s views on a broad range of public concerns,” said Steven Portnoy, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association and a reporter for CBS News Radio. “The more formal the exchange with the press, the more the public is apt to learn about what’s on the man’s mind.”
Biden has answered questions at 55 percent of events where he’s delivered remarks or an address during his first year in office, more than Bill Clinton (48 percent) and Trump (41 percent).