Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at Biden’s reluctance to speak to reporters, review an ABC report on “superwoman schema,” and cover more media misses.
The Latest Installment of Hidin’ Biden
President Biden will not participate in an interview with CBS ahead of the network’s broadcast of Super Bowl LVIII on Sunday, with the president choosing for the second year in a row to forgo the traditional interview.
CBS reportedly asked Biden to participate in a 15-minute interview, of which three or four minutes would have been aired during the network’s pregame coverage, according to Variety, which first reported the news.
While Biden participated in a pregame interview in 2021 and 2022 when the event was broadcast by NBC and CBS, respectively, he chose to skip the interview last year when the game was aired by Fox News.
While many speculated last year that Biden wouldn’t sit for the pregame interview only because he didn’t want to submit to an interview with a Fox journalist, his decision to skip the primetime moment again this year suggests a broader aversion to the spotlight.
“We hope viewers enjoy watching what they tuned in for — the game,” White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said of this year’s decision.
Biden, apparently, has no interest in sitting for an interview in which he may be asked to discuss recent events, including U.S. retaliatory strikes on Iranian forces in Syria and Iraq.
Reporters have long criticized Biden for submitting himself to questioning less than his predecessors. He’s averaged eleven press conferences per year since taking office in 2021 and an average of 131 exchanges with reporters per year, according to the American Presidency Project. An exchange with reporters is defined as something that “typically happens incidentally alongside some other meeting or event. These are often while the President is moving from one location to another and pauses to take questions from reporters (e.g. walking to the helicopter). Alternatively, the President may decide at the end of remarks to respond to questions from reporters.”
By contrast, Trump held an average of 22 press conferences per year and 178 exchanges, President Obama averaged 20.4 conferences per year and 25 exchanges.
Biden, however, is not the only president to skip the pregame interview; Trump chose not to participate in a sit-down with NBC News anchor Lester Holt in 2018.
Critics have taken to pointing out Biden’s notable absence during pivotal moments at which presidents have typically addressed the nation. Biden has not yet delivered an address about the turmoil that Houthi rebels have sewn in the Red Sea, nor has he appeared on camera to explain his decision to retaliate against attacks on American forces in Jordan through strikes on Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria.
Perhaps Biden would have been more amenable to appearing on MSNBC; a new Axios report reveals that the president regularly watches the network’s Morning Joe. He is such a fan that it “affects how the White House runs — and who Biden listens to.”
White House aides are often booked on the show between 7 and 7:40 a.m. ET to reach Biden, according to Axios. The president reportedly regularly speaks with co-host Joe Scarborough to ask for his take on issues and to complain about media coverage. Biden has even included show regulars in off-the-record conversations with policy experts.
Still, a look at Biden’s latest public appearances offers a glimpse into why his team might not want him making media appearances.
A recent outing resulted in his being widely panned on social media for wearing a construction hard hat backward in a photo with Wisconsin union workers.
More embarrassing, however, was Snopes’s going to bat for the president. The “fact-checker” said Biden was not in fact wearing the hat backward.
“The photo is genuine. And it does look, at first glance, like Biden was wearing that hard hat backwards,” Snopes told readers. “But after comparing it to other photos and videos of the same event, we were forced to reach the opposite conclusion: The hat on Biden’s head was facing forward, bill to the front, not backward.”
The fact-check included a photo of a union worker wearing the same hat the correct way but falsely claimed he was wearing it backwards. “Anyone want to razz that man for how he chooses to wear his hard hat?” Snopes asked.
After receiving pushback online, Snopes issued a correction to its so-called fact check: “We received a ton of comments in a very short time challenging our assumption that wearing a hard hat ‘backwards’ means wearing it with the bill facing to the rear, and ‘forwards’ means wearing it bill to the front.”
A CNN anchor similarly ran cover for Biden after a Politico report claimed Biden has called former president Trump a “sick f***” and a “f***ing ***hole” behind closed doors.
“I think it’s interesting where that’s one of those moments where he connects with people by being a normal person. Kind of off-script Joe Biden that we knew when he was the Senate or when he was Vice President,” CNN anchor Phil Mattingly said, before asking a panel whether Biden needs to do “more of that,” though he specified that he did not mean swearing.
“Does he need to do more of that? Not swear, but,” he posed to the panel.
After political analyst Errol Louis and GOP strategist Doug Heye suggested the profanity is more accepted now, in part because Trump normalized it, Mattingly went on to discuss a moment when Biden almost swore when talking about Trump during a speech last month.
“Joe Biden loathes Donald Trump. It is personal. It is not because he doesn’t like the man. It is because of what he represents. That is a viscerally held view, and it comes out behind closed doors. I think you’ll probably see more of it. That, more than anything else —Everybody laughed, and it was off the cuff. That was real,” he said.
Headline Fail of the Week
“Black women suffer disproportionately from ‘superwoman schema,’” reports ABC’s Good Morning America.
And what is “superwoman schema”? The report helpfully explains it is a “mental health syndrome” that involves “the perceived obligation to quell emotion, convey strength, suppress dependence and vulnerability, and to prioritize caregiving over self-care, according to the National Institutes of Health.”
Media Misses
• University of Southern California professor Shannon Gibson dismissed those who criticize acts of protest such as climate-change activists’ throwing soup on the glass covering the Mona Lisa, saying critics miss a “crucial point.” “Often, their aim is to influence government and business decision-makers,” Gibson wrote for the Los Angeles Times. “By combining radical forms of civil disobedience with more mainstream actions, such as lobbying and state-sanctioned demonstrations, activists not only grab the public’s attention, they make less aggressive tactics more acceptable and possibly more successful,” she writes.
• A new study from the American Psychological Association claims “hiring the most qualified candidate might be unfair.”
“Fairness heuristic theory suggests that, as long as people consider selection processes such as hiring and promotion to be meritocratic and fair, they may continue to accept ever-increasing levels of income inequality. Yet, in reality, inequality and merit-based decisions are deeply intertwined,” the study noted.
“Socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages early in life can have profound influences on educational achievement, test scores, work experiences, and other qualifications that form the basis of ‘meritocratic’ selection processes. Yet the near-universal support for meritocracy suggests that most people may not give much weight to unequal advantages and disadvantages,” it adds.
• CNN anchors were seemingly stunned to learn that some migrant gangs run criminal operations in New York, spend their money in Florida, and then return to New York because of the Big Apple’s lax crime laws.
“But I’m like, ‘why don’t they just stay and steal in Florida?'” CNN law-enforcement analyst John Miller said, adding that detectives told him it is because in Florida, they will go to jail.
After a moment of silence from anchors Erica Hill and Phil Mattingly, Mattingly said, “Fair point.”