Is the White House trying to protect Biden from reporters’ questions?

As people in Ireland will have seen this week, when the president of the United States goes anywhere, it is a big deal.

Weeks or months of planning and preparations take place before he leaves the White House for overseas trips. Everything is organised in advance; where he will go, who he will meet, what he will say.

In parallel, there are enormous security logistics, not least shipping in the armoured presidential vehicles and the helicopters that fly him and his party around.

And then there is the media.

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Virtually every day over a four-year term, whenever a US president steps outside the White House, he will be accompanied by a group of reporters and at least one camera crew. Even when he goes to church, which Biden does every Sunday, the White House press pool tags along. This pool provides details and TV footage on the president’s activities to the broader number of reporters who cover the White House.

In addition, the current White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre holds a full on-the-record, filmed briefing several times per week at which reporters can ask about issues of the day.

[ ‘This week, Ireland sounded like his true native land’: How US press is covering Biden visit ]

All of this would suggest a system that is a model of transparency. However, unlike Leo Varadkar in Dublin or Rishi Sunak in the UK, Joe Biden does not have to answer questions from his political opposition in parliament a couple of times each week on the controversy of the day.

In the US, media organisations see it as their role to hold the White House to account. And they are unhappy at the level of access they get are getting to question the president directly.

Following him around in a bus and shouting questions is one thing, but having access to structured press conferences where questions can be posed directly is another entirely.

Almost since the beginning of his presidency in January 2021, those covering the White House have voiced concerns about the limited opportunities provided to question Biden in formal settings.

In advance of the visit to Ireland, the issue once again raised its head.

The White House announced Biden would not be holding a press conference during his trip. And there would certainly be no joint event with Leo Varadkar like the fictional dual press conference between a US president and a British prime minister portrayed in the film Love Actually.

At a briefing in the White House last Monday, Jean-Pierre faced the obvious question: “Is the administration trying to protect the president from our questions?”

The unspoken suggestion was that the White House would prefer to have the president deal with the media on its terms rather than holding freewheeling press conferences where the potential for gaffes would increase.

The press secretary was adamant in rejecting this.

“Absolutely not. Absolutely not,” she said.

“Then why the lack of any interaction in a formal setting to have a press conference?” she was asked.

Jean-Pierre argued that the president did take “shouted questions” from reporters.

[ Miriam Lord: Joe Biden, giddy with Irish pride, serves up delicious gaffe ]

But the media argument is that shouting questions, often against the backdrop of a roaring aircraft engine as the president is about to board a helicopter or plane, is deeply unsatisfactory. Reporters argue that such a scenario simply allows the president to reply to the questions he wants to answer and to ignore others.

Of course, Biden’s relationship with the media is much more cordial than the one Donald Trump had when he was in office. Trump was openly scornful and even insulting about many of those who covered his presidency, coining the phrase “fake news”.

That said, the American presidency project at the University of California, Santa Barbara has looked at the numbers and says that Biden has held far fewer press conferences than Trump.

Arguments over whether the president should or should not hold more press conferences can be quite niche. Most members of the public probably could not care either way.

However, the issue of Biden not holding press conferences was this week taken up by Trump himself as a political attack on the president.

In an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he said: “He’s now in Ireland. He’s not going to have a news conference … when the world is exploding. I own property in Ireland and I’m not going to Ireland.”