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.
