A new White House Briefing Room study finds that President Obama has fallen far behind former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in hosting press conferences, with his 274 overshadowed by Clinton’s 989.
As a result, White House reporters are demanding more press conferences, especially impromptu sessions where they believe presidents offer frank and sometimes shocking answers.
Obama, however, has chosen another path to reach Americans through the media: individual interviews, according to the study from Martha Joynt Kumar, a professor of political science at Towson University and the author and co-author of several books on the media and presidency.
President Obama isn’t a fan of press conferences, choosing individual interviews instead. AP Photo
Writing on the RealClearPolitics site, she revealed that Obama has conducted 872 individual interviews. “Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush combined had only 572 interviews at their six-year marks. Obama’s emphasis on interchanges with the press through interviews represents a change from the practices of the presidents who preceded him,” she wrote.
The shift to individual versus group interviews and press conferences aligns with the public’s move away from TV and newspapers as their top sources and to websites and individual journalists, she wrote.
“Local and network television news has grown in the last two years. But it has been supplanted by a new network of media that people access when and where they want, from television to their iPads, computers, and smartphones. No longer do they need to be at a particular place and time to tune into their president. The White House has adopted its media strategy to reflect this new reality,” she write.
To back that up, the study quoted two of the administration’s top communication strategists.
“While traditionally presidents relied on speeches to gather an audience, that is no longer the case. As White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained to me: ‘If you are making the decision strategically, then you can get a much larger audience for the information that you’re trying to communicate through the use of a strategically chosen interview than you would from a more standard event.
“Added White House Communications Director Jen Psaki: ‘Sometimes it’s about reaching an audience that may not read a speech or watch a speech and may not be subscribing to traditional daily newspapers.'”
Read the full RealClearPolitics report here.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
