No news conference. No Oval Office address. No speech to a joint session of Congress. Only one national address.
President Joe Biden is the first executive in one hundred years to reach this point in his term without holding a formal question and answer session — and after 55 days of silence, even his media allies are starting to get upset.
Biden is clearly hiding to limit his errors from a historically gaffe-prone politician.
It has gone on so long, though, that even The Washington Post — an outspoken ally of Democratic politicians — is now demanding Biden start answering questions.
The same newspaper that just made up fake quotes about former President Donald Trump won’t even cover for Biden anymore.
“It’s past time for Biden to hold a news conference,” The Washington Post‘s editorial board wrote recently.
“Avoiding news conferences must not become a regular habit for Mr. Biden,” the editorial board wrote. “He is the president, and Americans have every right to expect that he will regularly submit himself to substantial questioning.”
Biden only takes one or two informal inquiries from the press at a time, usually in a hurried setting at the end of an event. He then quickly departs.
It’s a sharp contrast with the previous administration, where staff are only allowed to speak with caution. Recalling both Biden’s largely leak-free campaign and the buttoned-up Obama administration, the new White House team has carefully managed the president’s appearances, trying to lower the temperature from former President Donald Trump’s first term.
The message control may serve the president politically but it denies the media opportunities to directly press Biden on major policy issues and to engage in the kind of back-and-forth that can inform American voters beyond the administration’s carefully packaged talking points.
Other modern presidents took more questions during their opening days in office.
By this point in their terms, Trump and George H.W. Bush had each held five press conferences, Bill Clinton four, George W. Bush three, Barack Obama two, and Ronald Reagan one, according to a study by Martha Kumar, presidential scholar and professor emeritus at Towson University.
Biden has given five press interviews as opposed to nine from Reagan and 23 from Obama.
The new president had taken informal questions 39 times, according to Kumar’s research — just one or two shouted inquiries from a group of reporters known as the press pool at the end of an event in the White House’s State Dining Room or Oval Office.
Those exchanges can at times be clunky, with the cacophony of shouts or the whir of the blades of the presidential helicopter idling on the South Lawn making it difficult to have a meaningful exchange.
“Press conferences are critical to informing the American people and holding an administration accountable to the public,” said Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. “As it has with prior presidents, the WHCA continues to call on President Biden to hold formal press conferences with regularity.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Friday defended the president’s accessibility to the media and suggested that a news conference would happen… but only at the end of the month.
The president’s first address to a joint session of Congress — not technically a State of the Union address but a speech that typically has just as much pomp — is also tentatively planned for the end of March, aides have said. However, the format of the address is uncertain due to the pandemic.
Famously long-winded, Biden has been prone to gaffes throughout his long political career and, as the oldest president in American history, has occasionally struggled with off-the-cuff remarks.
That’s no excuse, says the normally Democrat-leaning media.
“Patience is wearing thin among the press corps, and the fact that he has waited longer than any president in the last 100 years to face reporters in that setting has triggered a growing debate about presidential accessibility and accountability,” Seattle’s KOMO News wrote.
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The Associated Press contributed to this article