The linked article and video calling out White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki for her completely false claims, is actually pretty gentle on her given the records on Presidential press conferences.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki has gone round and round with reporters in the White House press corps for several weeks now on the issue of when Joe Biden will be holding his first formal press conference.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, CBS News’ Kathryn Watson, and other journalists have raised the issue with Psaki either directly during the daily briefings or have brought up the issue on social media.
Psaki then attempted to debunk the insinuation that Biden was avoiding reporters by droning on and on about how Biden had supposedly taken questions from reporters at least 40 times but was also very busy taking care of The People’s Business. But the AP reporter who questioned her continued to press the matter, pointing out that catching the POTUS on the fly for a question as he was walking out of a room was not the same thing as a formal Q&A.
It is also entirely different from what President Trump was in the habit of doing. He would not merely keep walking while answering a question or two, he would walk over to a group of press reporters, stop, address them and would take questions for as many as 20 to 40 minutes. It is intellectually bankrupt and downright dishonest for Jen Psaki to even attempt to suggest that Biden has been accessible.
Reviewing the records on the UC Santa Barbara, The American Presidency Project records on Presidential News Conferences – here’s the truth of the matter.
Donald J. Trump gave a total of 88 “formal press conferences” in 4 years. That an average of about 2 per month. Joe Biden has given no formal press conferences to date.
Furthermore, at least 6 times out of 10, as Trump made his way to Marine One, or was leaving the White House for a meeting, he would stop and take questions from a gaggle of media reporters.
According to Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project and emeritus professor at Towson University, Trump has racked up 568 “short question-and-answer” sessions over his time in office. Compare that to 147 for President Barack Obama, and 343 for President George W. Bush. “I think that it’s always good to have the opportunity to ask questions of the president,” says Olivier Knox, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
During the final months of the 2020 Presidential Campaigns, Trump answered a total of 1,141 questions from a Washington press corps that he maintains is openly hostile to his administration, while Biden responded to just 274 questions from local networks and liberal cable news channels like CNN and MSNBC. Furthermore, the questions given to Trump were much more pressing and critical subject matters, than the questions Biden received. Trump received pressing questions on the issues of the day, while Biden received questions about his favorite flavor of ice-cream.
Biden regularly dodged questions from embeds covering his campaign and rejected “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace’s request for an interview in July after Trump sat for a hard-hitting interrogation with him.
After formally introducing Kamala Harris as his vice president on Aug. 12, the septuagenarian candidate sat for just one interview with People magazine.
Even the uber-leftist Washington Post published an Op-Ed on the fact that President Trump was extremely accessible.
Here is a liink for more sources and the full story at RedState. Also, articles from North Carolina-based Sister Toldjah, a former liberal, has been writing about media bias, social issues, and the culture wars since 2003. You can find her here.