President Joe Biden is setting records for his sparse outreach to the press, notching a fraction of the face time with journalists that his recent predecessors gave.
Reporters scored 18 media interviews with Biden by the start of the month, a small sliver of the 89 conducted by former President Donald Trump and the 141 by former President Barack Obama at the same point in their presidencies, according to data compiled by presidential historian Martha Joynt Kumar.
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Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton held more, with 44 and 53, respectively, while George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan held 46.
The Biden administration is wrestling with inflation, a new coronavirus variant, rising crime, and supply chain delays — all issues of significant public interest. Biden’s slimmed-down interview portfolio remains one area where the White House could quickly boost supply.
Still, the White House has extended few interviews with the president to reporters, telling journalists earlier this year that doing so was not a priority.
“I don’t know that the format, whether it is multiple shorter Q&As or a longer formal press conference, is at the top of the list of the American public’s concern,” press secretary Jen Psaki said in September.
The sparse access shows a White House fearful of the president veering from the program, presidential historian Craig Shirley told the Washington Examiner.
“How many ways do you spell ‘scared’?” Shirley said. “The White House staff is as scared as a cat in a room full of rockers. I think they regard every reporter as a terrorist carrying a nuclear device. Every reporter is a potential threat.”
Legacy media’s waning influence, coupled with a partisan media surge, could be blamed for Biden’s pared-down interview schedule, according to presidential historian and Rutgers University history, journalism, and media studies professor David Greenberg.
“Biden’s relatively few interviews might be attributable to the polarized media environment,” Greenberg said. “As the old ‘common carrier’ news organizations lose their influence and people rely on partisan media, internet sources, and so forth, the value of the freestanding interview may be less than it once was.”
The minimalist strategy served Biden well on the campaign trail last year.
While Trump’s team assailed then-candidate Biden’s “basement bunker” surroundings, it kept the Democratic nominee on message and largely skirmish-free. His advisers justified the effort by pointing to the spread of the coronavirus.
But nearly one year into office, and with the party facing sharp electoral headwinds, Biden has yet to drop the veil, leading Democrats to wonder whether the tactic is still serving him.
His approval numbers are below Obama’s at the same point in his presidency, according to a RealClearPolitics average of polls. In the midterm elections at that time, Democrats lost more than 60 House seats.
New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, House chairman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has criticized the White House for “not getting the job done on messaging.”
“Free Joe Biden,” Maloney recently told The New York Times, suggested the president “get himself out there.”
Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, a lead campaign adviser to Clinton, suggested Biden needs to make the case for his plan himself.
“What I believe in is sell, sell, sell,” Carville told the same publication last month. “What they’re missing is salesmanship. Everybody wants to be a policy maven, and no one wants to go door to door and sell pots and pans.”
Shirley, who is critical of Biden’s agenda, was doubtful such an effort would buoy Biden’s, or Democratic, numbers.
“Lincoln said, ‘You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.’ And that’s what they’re going to try to do,” he said. “They fooled some of the people during the campaign, but it won’t last for four years.”
Shirley added, “The modern American presidency demands that they interact with the national media.”
Biden has held only one interview with a prominent print publication, speaking by phone in May with The New York Times’s David Brooks. Only Clinton did fewer sit-downs with members of this 13 outlet cohort, which counts the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Time. According to Kumar’s tally, Biden has conducted two other print interviews, sitting down with People magazine and The Atlantic.
Trump, by contrast, sat down 23 times with legacy media during the same period in office, with seven of those interviews reserved for The New York Times. While Obama did one less interview overall, he bested Trump by one New York Times interview, with the outlet talking with him on eight separate occasions.
Biden has only done one local media interview, but Psaki told reporters last week there’s an effort underway to score more.
“I would very much like that to happen,” she said when asked about additional sit-downs. Trump, by this time, had done 11, Obama 17, and Clinton 35. “We are always competing with time on the schedule — I’m going to be honest. His schedule has been quite packed, but he would like to do it. We’re working to get it on the schedule.”
Greenberg said the number might be meager due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has limited Biden’s contact with reporters. While the James Brady briefing room returned to full capacity this summer, the White House continues to cite the virus to defend the limited access it provides White House reporters to Biden’s official remarks.
Biden’s interview tally shows a clear preference for television, with CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, Univision’s Illa Calderon, CNN’s Don Lemon, NBC News’s Craig Melvin, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, and ESPN’s Sage Steele all grilling the president. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos has interviewed him twice, as has CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
Greenberg suggested that Biden’s scarcity strategy may be a move to add weight to his words.
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“It seems possible, too, that Biden has realized he is more effective if he rations his words,” Greenberg said. “He is so naturally garrulous that it would be easy for him to cheapen the value of presidential rhetoric by going out there and talking too much.”
He added, “So he may be deliberately holding his fire in order to be more effective when he does give interviews.“
