Michael McCurry, who served as press secretary to former President Bill Clinton, said that President Trump is likely more accessible to reporters than his old boss or Barack Obama.
“He is more accessible in doing the exchanges and you are the master of the data on all this. He’s probably been more accessible than either Obama or Clinton,” McCurry said during a panel discussion Tuesday night hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association and the White House Transition Project.
“Clinton in the first year, before you got there,” Martha Kumar, the WHTP director and panel moderator, said in response.
“President Trump does do a lot of short Q&As,” she noted later.
Former Clinton Press Sec. @mmccurry said tonight that he believes @realDonaldTrump has been “more accessible” to the press than Obama or Clinton. pic.twitter.com/ykSOVM3Xq9— Cameron Cawthorne (@Cam_Cawthorne) February 21, 2018
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders also participated in the panel and defended Trump, who has been an outspoken critic of the media. She said because Trump has been accessible to the press, he has been held accountable by them as well.
“By the definition of the fact that he spends as much time interacting with the press as he does, I think it is hard to argue that he isn’t open to answering those questions and being held accountable by the press, so I think that’s a very big difference and one of the things that’s regularly left out of conversations is how accessible this president is and how often he interacts with the press, but also how often he interacts with the American public in a variety of different ways,” she said.
Trump has long made it a habit to criticize the media — particularly outlets that publish stories critical of him, casting them as “fake news.”
