Joe Biden is * half * as many news conferences as Donald Trump did in his first year

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According to the American Presidency Project at the University of California – Santa Barbara, Biden has conducted only nine total news conferences so far in his first year.

That’s less than half the number that Donald Trump (22) made in 2017 and a third the amount held by Barack Obama (27) in his first year in office.

And it’s not just news conferences where Biden lags behind his predecessors when it comes to press engagement. Biden only made 22 press interviews until Dec. 31 of his first year in office, a dwarf total of the 92 interviews Trump made and the 156 (!) That Obama participated in in their first years as president.

(Those numbers came courtesy of Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project. See her full paper on the subject here.)

One measure by which Biden surpassed the men before him was in informal question -and -answer sessions – where he scored 216 versus 120 for Trump and only 46 for Obama.

Some of these differences are explained by the quirks of each president. Trump liked to conduct news conferences with a foreign leader in tow (a large portion of his news conferences in his first year were joint in nature) while Obama felt at ease in conducting sit-ins. conversations with journalists.

Biden is less quick on his feet but less formal, meaning it’s no surprise that he prefers impromptu question-and-answer situations to journalists versus scheduled press appearances. That’s also the remnant of the decades he spent on Capitol Hill, where most interactions with journalists were both informal and quick.

With all that said, it’s clear that in terms of overall media availability – especially in more formal settings – Biden is lagging behind the last two men to hold the presidency.

Asked in March 2021 about Biden’s relative lack of contact with the media, White House press secretary Jen Psaki cited the fact that he had “entered a period of historical crisis-two historical crises, a a pandemic that the country has not seen in decades and decades. and an economic collapse that has left 10 million people unemployed. ” In November, Psaki disputed the very notion that Biden was less available to the media than previous presidents. “It’s just not accurate to suggest he’s inaccessible or not answering questions,” he said.

The Point: The numbers don’t lie. Biden ignores the media but he has less contact with the Fourth Estate than any of his most recent two predecessors.

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