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WASHINGTON — In the 100 years since Calvin Coolidge was first elected, only Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, as occupants of the current Oval Office, have held few press conferences each year.
President Biden, who traveled to Ireland last week, abandoned the decades-old tradition of holding press conferences abroad. Colombian President Gustavo Petro met with Biden on Thursday, but the two did not hold a press conference together. After the meeting, Mr. Petro took questions from reporters alone at the microphone in front of the West Wing.
A press secretary said the president has allowed only 54 interviews since Reagan took office, despite Biden’s promise to “bring back transparency and truth to government.” His years in office; Barack Obama gave his 275.)
More than any recent president, Biden, 80, has taken steps to reduce the opportunities for journalists to provide unscripted answers and ask him questions on forums where they can follow up. As a result, critics say the president has fewer opportunities to be publicly accountable for his words, decisions and actions.
Biden is not accusing the news media of being “enemies of the people,” as his predecessor did during the four years the press documented thousands of Trump’s lies.
But as Mr. Biden prepares to announce his second term as early as Tuesday, he is accelerating the end of a tradition that has underpinned his relationship with the news media for decades. . The president’s strategy to keep the press at bay is betting that the new media environment can circumvent these traditions. And there is public evidence that Biden’s political strategists want to protect him from unscripted interactions that often lead to failure and criticism.
White House officials have not disputed their different approach. It’s part of a deliberate strategy, they say, to bypass traditional news media and connect with audiences “where they are” without being exposed to the filters of political and investigative journalists.
“Our ultimate goal is to understand where and how Americans are consuming media, whether it’s in briefing rooms or Washington-based news outlets,” said Ben LaBolt, White House communications director. And not just institutions: “The fragmentation of the media and the changing nature of information consumption require adaptive communication strategies to make news available to Americans.”
This often means low-risk conversations with celebrities and supportive internet influencers as the usual means of generating publicity.
In recent months, Mr. Biden has given long, one-on-one interviews with actors Jason Bateman and Drew Barrymore, weather forecaster Al Roker and YouTube beauty blogger Manny Moore. Barrymore’s first question during the interview was about whether Biden would make a good gift for his wife, prompting a lengthy conversation about the poem he wrote for the first lady each year.
Mike McCurry, who served as President Bill Clinton’s press secretary, said, “The president should all question those who question what he thinks are the great policies we’re enacting and the good things we’re doing. “But on some level, we have to have a process in the White House that respects that.”
McQuarrie said that in today’s news environment, the president feels less pressure to submit to those kinds of questions from journalists.
“It’s also a very real issue, because you can say, ‘I don’t have to react that much to this group of journalists that’s on their knees yelling every day,'” McCurry said. “And it’s too bad. Preparing and holding a press conference forces the White House and other agencies to come up with better answers and sometimes better policies.”
Since taking office, Mr. Biden has communicated with the public in a variety of ways. He wrote opinion essays, gave speeches, attended several televised town hall meetings, and improvised with Republicans on Social Security during his final State of the Union address.
White House officials say Trump has revived the tradition of daily White House briefings by press secretaries after a hiatus of more than a year. He cites what he calls “a series of question-and-answer sessions” as evidence of his desire to actively engage with journalists who regularly report on him.
An official said during the president’s four-day visit to Ireland, he answered 40 questions from reporters in five different interactions, including a brief early morning tarmac session after Air Force One landed near Washington. rice field.
“Since taking office, President Biden has held nearly 400 Q&A sessions with reporters, more than Trump, Obama and George W. says Rabolt.
But Mr. Biden’s interactions with reporters are usually very brief, shouting questions that the president often chooses not to answer. When he does, it is sometimes accompanied by a clipped, one- or two-word response.
Biden briefly answered questions about the possibility of unifying Ireland, the debt ceiling and the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, according to transcripts of White House correspondence after Air Force One returned from Ireland.He started talking to reporters at 2:43 a.m. and finished at 2:45 a.m.
The same goes for other sessions.
When Mr. Biden returned to the White House on Jan. 2 from his vacation in the Virgin Islands, he stopped to talk to reporters after walking through Marine One at 4:35 p.m. He responded to a question about his relationship with Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and when asked if the United States was discussing a joint nuclear test with South Korea at the time, he said “no.” White House records show that the exchange ended just one minute later at 4:36 p.m.
In September 2022, Mr. Biden stopped briefly to talk to reporters, but said “no” when asked to comment on negotiations on rail strikes. He answered his question about Ukraine and his two questions about inflation. The exchange lasted 2 minutes.
Biden hasn’t completely abandoned press conferences. After Democrats beat expectations in last year’s midterm elections, Mr. Biden spent 53 minutes answering questions during an official White House press conference. In January 2022, he held a marathon session with reporters, answering his 1 hour and 51 minutes of questions in his East room to mark his first year in office.
“Okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hang on guys,” Biden said at one point during that press conference. “It’s only been an hour and twenty minutes. I’ll continue. But I — let’s be clear about something here: How ready are you? Do you want to go for another hour or two?”
“Yes,” cried the reporters, adding one reporter:
It’s not all about the length of interviews and press conferences. Trump was notorious for spreading lies and misinformation during his lengthy question-and-answer sessions. During the coronavirus pandemic, he once used a press conference to suggest that people inject bleach into their bodies.
But data compiled by a professor studying differences between presidents shows that interactions with reporters are far less common than they used to be.
During his first two years in office, Mr. Biden gave an average of 10 press conferences a year, according to the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project. During the same period, Trump averaged 19.5. Obama averaged 23 and Clinton averaged 41.5. Herbert Hoover gave an average of 82 press conferences, while Mr. Coolidge gave an average of 90 press conferences each year.
Both Nixon and Reagan gave an average of seven press conferences in their first two years, but Reagan’s average was cut short after an assassination attempt in March of his first year in office.
The comparison is similar for interviews, according to a tally by Martha Joint Kumar, a longtime researcher of presidential communications. Compared to Biden’s 54 interviews since taking office (including those with celebrities), Trump has 202, Obama 275, Bush 89, Clinton 132, and George H. Bush gave 96 and Mr. Reagan 106 — all in his first two years in office.
Mr. Biden has avoided interviews with major newspapers in particular. Since his inauguration, he has not given a single interview with a major newspaper reporter.
Every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has given an interview to the news side of the New York Times, with one exception (historians were unable to find an interview with Dwight D. Eisenhower, could not be ruled out). Similarly, every president from decades ago speaks to The Washington Post.
(Mr. Biden once met a Times columnist, but there is no record of it. “President Biden invited me to lunch at the White House last Monday,” said the Times columnist. , Thomas L. Friedman wrote in May 2022. On the record — so I can’t tell you what he said.”)
Press conferences and interviews are always risky for politicians. During a nearly two-hour session last year, Mr. Biden appeared to suggest that a “small incursion” by Russia into Ukraine was acceptable, prompting the White House to sweep his comments. In a 2021 interview with ABC host George Stephanopoulos, Biden drew harsh criticism when he said there was no way to avoid chaos during his evacuation from Afghanistan.
Tamara Keith, NPR’s White House correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said she was pleased that Biden regularly answered questions posed at the end of meetings and events. Told.
“But between these informal brawls and formal press conferences prepared by the press and prepared by the president, where the public can gain insight into the president’s thinking and approach to policy, there is a quality difference. “There’s just a difference,” she said.
Keith called on the White House to return to the days when the president regularly met with reporters at formal press conferences. That way, journalists will have a better chance of pressing him for answers.
“With the question yelled, he chooses the question,” she said. “At press conferences, he can choose who asks questions, but he cannot choose questions.”
David W. Dunlap and peter baker contributed to the report.
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