Biden skips traditional year-end press conference in favor of celebrity softball interviews

A version of this story appeared in the On Background newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive On Background delivered directly to your inbox each Friday.

President Biden came into office promising to restore relations with journalists after his predecessor’s four combative years, but Mr. Biden is again skipping the traditional end-of-year presidential press conference in favor of softball interviews with celebrities.

The year-end press conference was a staple of past presidents, who viewed it for decades as an opportunity to tout their accomplishments to the American people. Former President Donald Trump was the first to abandon the practice, a snub that Mr. Biden has continued. 

Mr. Biden has been less accessible to the press during his three years in office than any other modern president, according to data from the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

For Mr. Biden, a year-end press conference could be an opportunity to reverse his recent rut. He’s underwater in a slew of job approval polls, and other surveys show him trailing potential 2024 challengers — including Mr. Trump, the GOP front-runner — in key swing states.

Questions persist about his age and competence. Even Democrats wonder openly if he should be their candidate in 2024, and House Republicans are looking to impeach him.

“This is a missed opportunity to demonstrate that he’s mentally alert and with it, which I think he is,” said Robert Rowland, who teaches presidential rhetoric at the University of Kansas. “He needs to look for unscripted settings which demonstrate he’s on top of things. It’s a way for him to come across in a way that reassures people.”

But White House officials have said they are trying to keep Mr. Biden from unscripted exchanges that have often resulted in missteps or gaffes requiring cleanups. They say Mr. Biden is trying to go around the traditional news media so his message isn’t filtered by reporters with a political agenda.

“Our ultimate goal is to reach the American people wherever and however they consume media, and that’s not just through the briefing room or Washington-based news outlets,” Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, told The New York Times in April.

By keeping Mr. Biden away from reporters, it also keeps him from being grilled about unresolved problems such as the wars in Ukraine and Israel, the border crisis, the hemorrhaging of support among voters and his son Hunter Biden, who is defying a congressional subpoena.

John Wihbey, a journalism professor at Northeastern University who has studied presidential communication, said Mr. Biden’s team overreacts to fears that he may misspeak.

As he sees it, his staff is so worried a gaffe could fuel questions about Mr. Biden’s cognitive abilities that they shield him from such events, raising the same questions.

“They are probably smart to shield him from too many press conferences where he will almost inevitably misstep and maybe say something consequential they have to walk back,” he said. “At the same time, they need to balance that strategic interest by demonstrating that he can do the job cognitively and is capable of conducting on-his-feet-type thinking.”

Mr. Biden had space in his end-of-year schedule to hold a press conference. Last Wednesday, Mr. Biden briefly answered a couple of questions from the reporters who traveled with him to Milwaukee, where he traveled to promote his economic agenda.

“I think anytime the president travels and is in front of the American people, he does that,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said when asked why Mr. Biden doesn’t hold a year-end press conference to make his case to the American people. “We make an effort to do a press conference as often as possible whether it’s here, at home or abroad. We will continue to do that in 2024 — do as many press conferences as possible abroad and at home.”

Mr. Trump was antagonistic toward the press with angry rhetoric and labels of “enemy of the people” and “fake news.” Still, he was more accessible to the press.

Through Mr. Biden’s three years, he has held 32 press conferences, including joint conferences with other world leaders, according to UC Santa Barbara.

Mr. Trump held 52 press briefings in three years. In their first three years, President Obama had 66 press briefings, President George W. Bush held 65, and President Clinton had 111.

Mr. Biden waited longer than any other president in the past 100 years to hold his first press conference. When he faced off with the press on March 25, he had been in office for more than 60 days. By the same point in their administrations, Mr. Trump gave five news conferences and Mr. Obama had two.

The last solo press conference in which Mr. Biden fielded multiple questions from the press was in November 2022, after Democrats did better than expected in the midterm elections.

Mr. Biden also held a solo press conference in San Francisco last month after he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but only took four questions from pre-selected media outlets.

“Trump didn’t do the year-end presser and now Biden doesn’t do the year-end presser and I could see a couple of presidents down the road, the president doesn’t even do press conferences,” said Mr. Wihbey. “It weakens an important piece of democratic life when politicians do not have to be directly questioned by the press.”

Although he’s eschewing questions from traditional outlets, Mr. Biden did appear on comedian Conan O’Brien’s podcast this week, marking his first sit-down media interview since he appeared on “60 Minutes” in October.

Mr. Biden has skipped appearing on mainstream media programs in favor of more friendly, show-business-style interviews. He has yet to appear on Fox News, and last did a CNN town hall in October 2021. But he has appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “The Drew Barrymore Show.”

Those low-risk conversations with supportive celebrities have been a way of creating positive publicity for the president without running into the danger of a major gaffe. Mr. O’Brien, for example, asked the president about how fast he drove his Corvette and whether he’d be willing to swap hairstyles.

“I don’t think these appearances help Biden politically,” Mr. Rowland said. “There was a time when going on [“The Tonight Show” with Johnny] Carson had a lot of cultural import, but that was a long time ago.”

Mr. Wihbey said voters need to be wary of celebrity interviews of politicians because they are not journalists and may have agreed to conditions such as steering clear of a certain topic in exchange for the appearance — something reporters usually won’t accept.

Mr. Biden has granted a sit-down interview to one wire service outlet, The Associated Press. He is the first president in decades who has not sat for an interview with The Washington Post or The New York Times.

So far, Mr. Biden has participated in 74 interviews, the fewest of any president since Ronald Reagan, according to data compiled by presidential scholar Martha Kumar. In comparison, Mr. Trump had granted 273 interviews.