She expects Wednesday’s press conference to mark the beginning of a more public phase for the White House, as it tries to build support for Biden’s agenda before next year’s midterms.Īsked about Biden’s relative lack of one-on-one interviews and formal news conferences, White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, pushed back, arguing that the president interacted with the press frequently and questions from reporters multiple times per week. “And for Biden, he has wanted to use his time negotiating privately on his policies.” “For the president, it is a question of how do you use your time?” Kumar said. These impromptu exchanges with reporters often follow scheduled remarks or public appearances. Many of those interviews were with friendly outlets, but they also included the major networks and media organizations he frequently impugned, such as the New York Times and ABC News.īiden does field questions more frequently than his predecessors, but takes fewer of them, according to Kumar’s tally. Trump, who labeled the media the “enemy of the American people” and once praised a congressman who assaulted a reporter, did 92 interviews during his first year. But Reagan did 59 interviews that year, compared with Biden, who has only done 22. Only Ronald Reagan, whose public appearances were scaled back following an assassination attempt in March 1981, held fewer press conferences during his first year. Trump had held 22 and Barack Obama 27 at the same point in their presidencies. As he ends his first year, Biden has held fewer press conferences and participated in fewer interviews than nearly all of his recent predecessors.īiden has held just nine formal news conferences during his first year, according to research compiled by Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project. Yet the report criticized the president for his limited availability to journalists. Titled Night and Day, the report praised the Biden White House for an “almost complete reversal of the Trump administration’s unprecedentedly pervasive and damaging hostility”, which it said “seriously damaged the news media’s credibility and often spread misinformation around the world”. Last week, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released a report grading the president’s approach to the media at home as well as his administration’s support for press freedom globally during his first year in office. Yet press access to the president has been limited. In a sharp shift from Donald Trump, Biden has said journalists are “indispensable to the functioning of democracy”, which the president has repeatedly warned is under threat at home and abroad. The goodwill Biden enjoyed early in his presidency has mostly dried up, as his approval rating has fallen to 42% from 53% when he took office, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of public polls.īut it also comes amid the growing calls from journalists and press freedom advocates for Biden to engage more directly with reporters. His domestic agenda is stalled in the Senate, where his push on voting rights legislation has also hit a wall inflation is the highest it has been in nearly four decades and the supreme court rejected the administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate, a key part of his plan to combat the pandemic, now in its third year. When Biden steps up to the lectern, he does so facing myriad challenges and setbacks – and a press corps eager to ask him about all of it. It was scheduled for Wednesday, on the eve of his first anniversary as president. The next day, the White House announced that Biden would hold the 10th press conference of his presidency, far fewer than any of his recent predecessors during their first year in office.
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