Too many D.C. reporters have been obsessed lately with President Biden’s not having yet had a press conference.
To be as charitable as possible, this sort of is their job. Reporters are human and have their obsessions like the rest of us.
Anyone who does that job is in a unique position. They have the large responsibility to keep the rest of the country informed about what our elected officials are doing, and, when appropriate, to inform us about the doings of people who want to become elected officials. They did a spectacularly bad job of that in 2016, when they fed the ridiculous fixation on the hugely unimportant issue of Hillary Clinton’s email mistakes while failing to inform the public sufficiently what a lying, incompetent buffoon Trump was. They helped consign the republic to four years of President Trump. They do seem to have learned and corrected themselves since then.
The good part is that no one really needed to watch any press conference by President Trump because we could trust, if we were rational, the information about what he said that we got from reporters more than we could what he said directly from him. Especially when he was giving regular briefings on the pandemic, including the infamous suggestion that people might inject cleaning fluids as a prophylaxis against Covid-19, many people argued that the press should not provide a live feed of his, um, performances.
But feeding the obsession over Biden’s failure to hold a press conference yet encourages the worst sort of Trump hangover.
When you’re on the same side as racist chippee Kayleigh McEnany, you need to rethink your position. Or, again being charitable, when you are enabling cheap shots like this, you need to rethink your position.
The point is fairly obvious, but it merits stating. The failure of Biden to hold a press conference in no way amounts to any “lack of transparency.” That is tendentious in the extreme. McEnany only points up her own lying ineptitude as press secretary. Any rational observer can rest far more comfortable with the knowledge the public has about what President Biden is doing, even without a press conference, than we could with public knowledge of what Trump was doing, and the far superior job Psaki is doing as opposed to the rancid job McEnany did is part of the reason.
One aspect of keeping the public informed is being aware of what the public thinks is important. Most of the public does not much care if Biden has a press conference. A web search for “polling data biden press conference” produces only one response that directly addresses the question, from the notoriously “conservative” Rasmussen Reports, which is highly unreliable, under the headline, “Most Voters Concerned President Biden Hasn’t Held White House Press Conference Yet.” They asked two questions:
1* How concerned are you that President Biden has not held a press conference?
2* How confident are you that Joe Biden is physically and mentally up to the job of being President of the United States?
As we now know from quantum physics, what we observe only exists as such when we observe it. This is good “conservatives” sowing doubts about Biden’s ability to function as president after Trump tried to make that an issue last year during the election. We know that most U.S. voters were well able to discern that Biden is far more fit to serve as president than Trump ever was or ever could be, so they made Biden president.
Who knows what the political opinions of most reporters are? That is not the interesting question. Much more important is that Biden helped get a huge stimulus bill passed and signed it, and that people are now getting vaccines for Covid-19 at a much more rapid pace than they were under Trump. That is news. Reporters help shape public opinion with the questions they choose to ask. “When will Biden have a press conference” is not a purely Fox News level question, but it shades in that direction more than any reporter should be comfortable with.
Biden has a highly effective, honest press secretary, which should not be news, but is after the parade of fools who occupied that position under Trump. To be sure, having the job of official liar for a compulsive liar is difficult, but none of Trump’s horrible press secretaries much seemed to mind.
It is not at all clear why we need to hear directly from President Biden when the person he employs specifically to speak for him is doing an admirable job. As various observers have pointed out, Biden’s recent predecessors have held press conferences earlier in their terms than Biden has, but that should not be dispositive in itself. We are still stuck with the ridiculous obsession over the first one hundred days of any new presidential administration, which is a tired hangover from FDR’s first hundred days. That people in the past acted in a particular way is far from compelling reason for us to act the same way now.
The issue is now moot. For whatever reason, Biden has scheduled his first press conference, which should satiate his rational critics, while his irrational, “conservative” critics will continue to nitpick, as usual. Plus ca change….