Last week, President Joe Biden finally saw fit to grace the country with a rare press conference, and what a conference it was. In what was only his 10th presser of his first year in office (the fewest of any of his five immediate predecessors over that span), the old goat offered a rambling, nearly two-hour debacle of a spectacle in which he, inter alia: blamed Republicans for his administration’s continued inability to pass his legislative agenda, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2022 midterm elections and future elections, said he didn’t believe in polls, and casually invited Russian imperialist strongman and all-around enemy of freedom Vladimir Putin to go ahead and invade Ukraine.
While it may seem ubiquitous now, the presidential press conference is a very modern phenomenon. Woodrow Wilson held the first presidential press conference in March of 1913, so add that to the list of reasons to hate him. The practice has been continued by each of his 18 predecessors — though, as we can all bear witness, the efficacy of these press conferences is far more up for debate these days. Where White House reporters were once envisioned as representing the republican (in the political theory sense) conduit for the public, they now (with the rare exception) function as little more than a group of middling talents and unearned egos asking canned, partisan questions for clicks or personal clout.
But the idea of a presidential press conference is a good one — and something that speaks very much to our republican system of government. A government based on popular sovereignty and elected “by the people, for the people” reverses the traditional power dynamic between a nation’s executive or sovereign and its citizenry. In theory, a president holds a press conference to promulgate and promote an agenda, yes, but it is also a mechanism of public accountability: Not only does the public, through the function of the press, have a forum and opportunity to ask questions of its executive, but presidents are also expected to answer those questions, which are typically critical ones. (This is why it is an abdication of good governance norms when presidents such as Biden refuse to answer questions or hold public press conferences.) Throughout most of human history, the expectation that a sovereign justify oneself to a critical populace would be entirely alien. Indeed, even to ask questions or express doubt of a king’s wishes was frequently punishable by death across history.
To my mind, the modern press conference is also something lacking a specific historical antecedent. It’s unique in that it is part campaign speech, part public address, part functionary process of government (in that a president attempts to explain some intricacies or details of his agenda), and part republican system of representation and accountability. In the fora of ancient and imperial Rome, political leaders and even emperors gave public addresses attempting to win support for their proposals. In the witan (or witenagemot) in medieval England, the selected king was expected to heed the advice, counsel, and debate of the fellow nobles in his witan. And from Hammurabi’s Mesopotamia through Renaissance Europe and on, rulers have employed town criers or orators to inform the public of the law and rave of its virtue.
Smash all these together and something would still be missing to compare to our U.S. spectacle.
