It doesn’t look like the White House feels any pressure to reinstate regular press briefings and thank God for that.
Those events were the absolute worst part of President Trump’s first term (and that includes the time Trump signed his “prison reform” legislation).
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said on Sunday that even with several of her predecessors calling on her to resume the briefings, she had no plans for it.
“The press has unprecedented access to President Trump, yet they continue to complain because they can’t grandstand on TV,” she told Axios. “They’re not looking for information, they’re looking for a moment.”
This is the absolute truth, and every journalist in Washington knows it. The briefings served no other purpose than for reporters to look brave on camera by asking incisive questions such as, “Does this administration think slavery was wrong?”
A briefing would ideally be useful for getting answers to questions on policies, plans, and governing as it relates to the White House. But we already get those answers, live, on camera and frequently from Grisham’s boss, the president himself.
It was standard during the Obama years for reporters to ask the press secretary when the president would do an interview or take questions directly from the press pool.
ABC News, Jan. 14, 2010: “Obama Gives Speeches, Interviews But Few Press Conferences.”
No White House reporter can with a serious face say that they don’t get a billion opportunities to ask Trump himself their questions, something they didn’t get with Obama.
Veteran White House correspondent Julie Mason, a former board member of the White House Correspondents’ Association, acknowledged this in a column for Variety back in 2018, declaring, “Trump has proved more accessible than Obama.”
Last year in June, Trump engaged in an hourlong phone interview with Fox News.
On a sweltering day the next month, he answered questions outside the White House for almost 30 minutes, appearing to have almost melted under the blazing sun.
He does this all the time, but we’re supposed to care that a press secretary doesn’t give briefings anymore? When the White House hosted them, all that liberal journalists did was complain.
After Sarah Sanders left her role as White House press secretary last year, the Atlantic’s Megan Garber said she had made the briefings “seem silly and pointless and sad.”
Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple summed up the vital need for press briefings under Sanders, stating that she “stood at the White House briefing room lectern and lied.”
On his CNN show last year, Brian Stelter said, “I think our viewers might be thinking, ‘But Sarah Sanders just lies anyway, what’s the point of a briefing?’”
Don’t ever bring back the White House press briefings. They really are useless when a president is as available to reporters as Trump is.
