The other day some pundit featured in the Washington Post complained that President Biden hadn’t held a single press conference since he took office, claiming that it had been almost a hundred years since an incoming President had gone that long without a press conference.
How many press conferences a president holds – or doesn’t – isn’t a measure of accomplishment. That’s a metric set up by spoiled media types. The measure of accomplishment is what a President gets done, not how many questions from the press he answers.
The mainstream media has spent the last five years in “media paradise.” Almost every single day, they had something “newsworthy” or outrageous from Trump or his cabinet, sometimes both. Trump loved to get up and brag, usually misstating and often outright lying, but always providing red meat for the press.
Biden’s much more low key. Also to the point is the fact that, put bluntly, answering loaded questions fired at high speed isn’t his greatest strength. With Trump, it didn’t matter, because whatever he did was the “greatest” and he made so many misstatements and told so many lies that no one could keep track at the time he spoke of how many lies he uttered. According to that same Washington Post that criticized Biden, Trump issued 30,573 false or misleading statements during his presidency, averaging 21 a day.
Every president is different, and each can and should be expected to play to their strengths, not their weaknesses. Biden’s moderate and thoughtful. He’s not given to wild exaggeration or verbal pyrotechnics. He’s also been known to make media gaffes. These gaffes aren’t deliberate falsehoods or planned exaggerations, and from what I can tell, he’s tried to clarify when he’s made them. But it’s certainly natural for him to minimize the situations that cause such gaffes.
Besides which, Biden’s press secretary gives the press almost daily briefings on what the new administration is doing, where she takes questions and provides answers, or arranges for the department in question to provide an answer. The media isn’t really looking for answers when they want more opportunity to grill Biden. What they want is to put him on the spot so that they look good. Biden doesn’t have to play their game, and he shouldn’t.
For all their disclaimers, the media doesn’t really like a deliberate approach. They’re only interested in “news,’ particularly if they can make it. We don’t need more of that kind of news. We need careful and measured reports on accomplishment or lack of accomplishment.
Despite an impeachment process of his predecessor that Biden never asked for or endorsed, and an attack on the U.S. Capitol by right-wing insurgents, Biden’s already proposed, and Congress has passed, and Biden has signed into law a massive COVID aid bill, which he promised he would. He’s also accelerated the production and distribution of various COVID vaccines. Given how slowly the Congress works and a total lack of Republican support, that’s a fair amount for less than two months in office, and that doesn’t count undoing much of the damage done by Trump’s Executive Orders. All that is a far better measure of accomplishment than the number of press conferences.