President Joe Biden is expected to announce his reelection bid on Tuesday, despite polling showing that even fellow Democrats don't want him to run. It's not just the polling that's not on Biden's side, but The New York Times, which has ramped up its negative coverage of the president.
Last Friday, the outlet published "Biden Has Held the Fewest News Conferences Since Reagan. Any Questions?" This is not a new phenomenon, though, as the low amount of press conferences he had made news in October 2021 as well.
As the piece mentions:
And despite his press secretary pledging that Mr. Biden would “bring transparency and truth back to the government,” in his first two years, the president granted the fewest interviews since Mr. Reagan’s presidency: only 54. (Donald J. Trump gave 202 during the first two years of his presidency; Barack Obama gave 275.)
More than any president in recent memory, Mr. Biden, 80, has taken steps to reduce opportunities for journalists to question him in forums where he can offer unscripted answers and they can follow up. The result, critics say, is a president who has fewer moments of public accountability for his comments, decisions and actions.
But as Mr. Biden prepares to announce his bid for a second term as soon as Tuesday, he is accelerating the demise of traditions that have underpinned the relationship with the news media for decades. The president’s strategy of keeping the press at arm’s length is a bet that he can sidestep those traditions in a new media environment. And it is public evidence that Mr. Biden’s political strategists want to protect him from the unscripted exchanges that have often resulted in missteps and criticism.
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But those interactions between Mr. Biden and reporters are usually very brief, with shouted questions that the president often chooses not to answer. When he does, it is sometimes with a clipped, one- or two-word response.
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Mr. Biden has especially shunned interviews with major newspapers. Since taking office, he has not done a single interview with reporters from a major newspaper.
Every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, with one possible exception, has given interviews to the news side of The New York Times (historians could not locate one by Dwight D. Eisenhower, although they could not rule it out). Likewise, every president going back decades has spoken with The Washington Post.
(Mr. Biden has met with Times columnists, but never on the record. “President Biden invited me for lunch at the White House last Monday,” the Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote in May 2022. “But it was all off the record — so I can’t tell you anything he said.”)
News conferences and interviews always carry risks for politicians, who can perform badly or make gaffes. In the nearly two-hour session last year, Mr. Biden seemed to suggest that a “minor incursion” by Russia into Ukraine would be acceptable, forcing the White House to clean up his comment. In an interview in 2021 with the ABC host George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Biden said there was no way to have avoided chaos during the evacuation from Afghanistan, drawing harsh criticism.
