Biden press conference controversy, explained

While President Joe Biden signed a $ 1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill that is backed by a solid majority of Americans and that funds the distribution of coronavirus vaccines, among other things, Fox News focuses on something it doesn’t do: organize formal press conferences.

While he has answered reporters’ questions numerous times in informal settings and held a town hall on CNN, Biden has now spent 50 days without holding an official press conference. It would be ideal for him to do one, but there are many good reasons why he has not yet done so – the urgent health and economic crises he has inherited, a pandemic that is complicating logistics and management. legacy that former President Donald Trump left him from the presidential election. press conferences coupled with hate shows.

Yet it is starting to aggravate members of the press corps, with the president of the White House Correspondents Association telling Vanity Fair that full press conferences are “essential to educate the American people and hold the administration accountable.” And the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote that “it is high time for Biden to hold a press conference” – while acknowledging that more press availability does not equate to more truth or transparency. with the previous president.

The Post’s editorial board’s cautious wording illustrates how journalists need to re-evaluate relationships with power and what it means to do contradictory journalism now that the White House is not the home of a habitual liar who has regularly made journalists objects of hate, even if it was accessible to them with helicopter press availability and the best-remembered coronavirus media briefings for Trump who pitched the idea of ​​the disinfectant as a cure for Covid-19.

But on the cable network that has benefited the most from the Trump presidency, all that nuance is lost.

Fox News has done its best in recent days to explode the fact that Biden has yet to have an official press conference into a major scandal, with special graphics and coverage across the shows suggesting Biden is hiding something.

Thursday mornings only, Fox News anime mentionned things like “President Biden blows reporters’ questions as he spends 50 days without a formal press conference,” and “Here we are, 50 days – 50 days after Biden’s presidency – and we have a prime-time speech, but still no official press conference.”

While it is true that Biden broke with modern precedent by not holding a press conference in his first month in office, press secretary Jen Psaki answers questions from reporters every weekday at briefings. which illustrate one of the reasons Biden may not be in a rush to do so. make one himself.

Fox News’s Peter Doocy stood out at Psaki briefings by regularly asking loaded, gotcha-style questions on topics ranging from National anthem to the Olympic Games at energy policy when schools reopen.

One can understand why Biden, who has thrown Many times with Doocy during press availability in recent months, may want to spend his time doing more than helping Fox News create ready-made clips for Hannah to own. But his decision not to engage has fueled the narrative Fox is pushing from the campaign about him allegedly hiding something and being less forceful than former President Donald Trump.

“Your spectators remember when [Trump] was going out to board Marine One, he would just do these impromptu press conferences and he would answer all the questions, all the questions, sometimes he would just sit there for 30, 40 minutes, ”said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH ) during the Tuesday edition of Sean Hannity’s show. “This is what the American people deserve.”

What Jordan and Hannity won’t mention, of course, is that while Trump may have been more willing to engage with reporters than Biden himself has been so far, the interactions of the former president with reporters were the opposite of constructive.

Trump’s press conferences are nothing to be nostalgic about

No discussion of the controversy surrounding Biden and the press conferences (as it is) would be complete without recalling that during the Trump years, presidential engagement with reporters was more WrestleMania than sharing good faith information. – something Psaki tried and mostly succeeded. to do during its press briefings.

To be clear, political journalism that doesn’t hold the powerful to account is nothing more than public relations. A certain degree of tension between the press and elected officials is a good and natural thing. But during the Trump years, the relationship between the executive and the journalists who covered it turned into an abusive relationship.

For example, during Trump’s first official press conference – held on February 16, 2017 – he lambasted the press for accurately covering the circumstances surrounding the resignation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn amid the revelations, he lied to the FBI about his contacts with Russia, saying things. like “the report is false” and calling the journalists “dishonest”.

This press conference was such a disaster that Trump went for over a year before holding another. Yet some observers compare Trump’s cage match in February 2017 with the fact that Biden has yet to have a press conference as proof that Biden is somehow failing to succeed.

While Fox News would likely use a Biden press conference to create hard times, there are legitimate questions the president should answer. What is his strategy to increase the minimum wage, given that it was not included in the Covid-19 bill? What is his long-term plan to deal with the recent surge in undocumented immigrants at the southern border? What is his response to Democrats who criticized his decision to launch airstrikes in Syria?

Psaki recently told CNN that Biden plans to answer reporters’ questions at an official press conference soon.

“We look forward to having a full official press conference, but in the meantime the president regularly answers questions from reporters covering the White House, including this morning. [on March 3], “she said.” And his goal day after day is to bring the pandemic under control and get people back to work. That’s what people elected him for.

Indeed, when signing the Covid-19 bill on Thursday, Biden hinted that he would be holding a press conference soon, story journalists, he “will answer their questions” “in the coming days”.

Fox struggles to hit Biden

It’s fair to point out that Biden went without a press conference for a relatively long time. But Fox’s most pronounced tendency to explode the issue into a major scandal illustrates the difficulty they have in spilling blood on the Biden administration.

Before the squeeze-gate became a big topic, Fox News spent most of the week blaming Biden for Dr Seuss’ (fake) cancellation. Hannity pushed relentlessly Biden’s health conspiracy theories, while the “news side” of the network has been heavy-handed in stoking grievances from the right with endless talk about “canceling culture”.

In this case, as in so many others, Fox’s coverage echoes what prominent Republicans like RNC President Ronna McDaniel say:

It’s hard for Republicans to attack Biden on the merits right now, given that even a majority of Republican voters support the signing law he just signed. But it’s also worth noting that it’s not just Fox.

On Thursday, for example, ABC ran an article titled, “Biden Fail To Hold Press Conference Yet Raises Accountability Questions.” And CNN published an article on March 3 to this effect: “There are many ways to measure the accessibility of a US president. One solution is to count press conferences. Right now, by that calculation, President Biden appears invisible.

But if the Trump era has taught us anything, it’s not the volume of communications a presidential administration has with the press that matters – it’s their character and quality. Biden himself may have been less accessible to the press so far than Trump, but given what the country endured during the Trump era and the mess Biden inherited, the American people don’t seem embarrassed. that so far he has focused on more urgent things. .