Ruth Bahinsky writes for DailyMail.com about interesting statistics related to the president’s availability for the media.
President Joe Biden has been slammed for holding the fewest number of press conferences since Ronald Reagan’s reign in the eighties.
Biden averaged only ten news conferences per year during his first two years in office, while Ronald Reagan averaged seven, Donald Trump 19.5 and Barack Obama 23, research by The American Presidency Project revealed.
He has also conducted far fewer interviews, giving just 54 in his first two years compared to Trump’s 202 and Obama’s 275 respectively, according to figures by scholar of presidential communication, Martha Joynt Kumar.
He has also conducted far fewer interviews, giving just 54 in his first two years compared to Trump’s 202 and Obama’s 275 respectively, according to figures by scholar of presidential communication, Martha Joynt Kumar.
The findings come after Biden’s four-day trip to Ireland last week when the 80-year-old skipped the decades-old tradition of holding a news conference while abroad.
And following the president’s meeting with the Colombian President on Thursday, Gustavo Petro found himself fielding questions from reporters at the West Wing alone as Biden was MIA.
As Biden prepares to announce his bid for a second term as early as Tuesday, it’s led many to question why the current occupier of the Oval Office is so eager to keep the media at arm’s length.
White House officials claim this is part of a deliberate strategy to go around the traditional news media to connect with audiences ‘where they are,’ without being subjected to the filter of political or investigative journalists, according to The New Yor Times report.
But, others surmise that Biden’s camp are doing this to protect him from unscripted exchanges that have often garnered criticism and missteps.
White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt said: ‘The fracturing of the media and the changing nature of information consumption requires a communications strategy that adapts to reach Americans where they get the news.