10/12/23
10/12/2023How long since you’ve read a story from an actual news conference with the United States President or the Iowa Governor? Or since you’ve viewed one on TV?
Probably quite a while, and If you remember one, it probably took place quite a while after the one before that.
It used to be customary for a chief executive to hold regular press conferences, at which reporters were allowed to ask questions, including followups. Not anymore. Today what passes for a “press conference” is usually a staged event where the executive reads a statement, maybe delivers a one-liner to one of the many shouted questions, and then exits stage right.
One source of the press conference decline, of course, comes from the rise of social media at the expense of traditional media. An increasing number of government officials, especially those at the top of the heap, have decided they no longer need to answer to the press, since fewer of their constituents appear to read newspapers or watch television today.
It’s the same reason that some candidates refuse to sit down with editorial teams to discuss their positions on important issues of the day. It’s easier to put out something catchy on social media, without having to answer followup questions.
President Joe Biden is a case in point. In the past 100 years, only Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan have held fewer actual press conferences than Biden. A study by The American Presidency Project, a university-based research effort, found that Biden averaged only 10 news conferences a year during his first two years as President. Trump averaged 20, Obama 23, Bill Clinton 42, Herbert Hoover 82, and Calvin Coolidge (“Silent Cal”) averaged 90. Nixon and Reagan (“The Great Communicator”) each averaged seven.
Press interviews, as opposed to press conferences, show the same contrast. Biden gave 54 interviews in his first two years as President, including some with celebrities rather than bona fide journalists. Trump gave 202, Obama 275, George W. Bush 89, Clinton 132, George H.W. Bush 96, and Reagan 106 in their first two years.
Biden has sometimes met with New York Times columnists, but nearly always off the record.
Tamara Keith, a National Public Radio White House reporter and president of the White House Corespondents’ Association, notes that Biden usually responds to shouted questions at the end of meetings or events. But that’s a sorry replacement for organized news conferences, where reporters ask thoughtful questions and get thoughtful answers.
Keith summed up Biden’s preferred practice: “With shouted questions, he chooses the question. With a press conference, he can choose the questioner but he can’t choose the question.”
It’s a sad comedown for Biden. In 2008 he brought his then-presidential campaign to Jefferson, and held forth for about 1 1/2 hours, answering every question posed to him by the crowd, showing intimate familiarity with the issues of the day. I would think he could still do that today, or something close to it.
It’s a similar story with Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. Her regular open press conferences are few and far between. Some Des Moines journalists who cover Capitol Hill report that the Governor’s last true news conference was this past July. It was not announced until the day before, and not all media outlets were notified.
Before that event, the most recent Reynolds stand-alone news conference was reportedly in July 2022, a year earlier. She held a conference this past spring, but it was done jointly with the Iowa Department of Public Safety, with the subject mostly about a project of that division. Not many journalists’ questions were answered, according to the Capitol Hill reporters.
Governor Bob Ray, who served five terms in that office from 1969 to 1983, held daily press conferences Monday through Friday when he was in Des Moines until the mid-1970s, when he reduced them to three times a week. Governor Terry Branstad, who succeeded Ray, held Des Moines press conferences twice a week, and also out in the state on a regular basis during his frequent travels.
Neither former Iowa chief executive was reluctant to respond to reporters’ questions, and consequently the people of Iowa could keep up to speed on the progress and glitches surrounding important current state issues.
Whether at the federal or the state level, a so-called “news conference” where the executive reads or recites a statement about a topic of political interest and then abandons the microphone after a couple of minutes is not particularly edifying. They might just as well simply hand out a press release and call it a day.
Very few important issues should slide through to the action stage without some Q and A exchanges with journalists familiar with the issues’ ins and outs. That’s where true news conferences come in, and the public is the poorer when they don’t happen. ♦
