President Joe Biden’s 2024 media strategy has largely revolved around one cardinal rule: avoid adversarial interviews whenever possible.
About three and a half years into his term, the 81-year-old incumbent continues to generally eschew lengthy press conferences, large rallies, and adversarial interviews with traditional media outlets — though he does have an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett scheduled to air Wednesday night.
Instead, he’s typically giving shorter speeches and participating in softball interviews with sympathetic celebrities. He’s also meeting with voters one-on-one in smaller venues to create interactions that can be neatly clipped for social media.
It’s all part of what Biden aides say is a “less is more” media strategy that prioritizes “quality over quantity,” removes the “clutter,” and helps Biden “get directly to the point.”
But the president’s critics see something else: a concerted effort by the White House to keep him in controlled environments that lower the risk of verbal slip-ups and negative media coverage in the critical months leading up to Election Day.
“His team lacks confidence in his ability to deliver a cohesive message,” says Dave Kochel, a veteran Republican strategist. “And it’s funny because they’ll constantly signal that they’re going to be more aggressive with this or that, and then they don’t ever do it. I assume it’s because the poll numbers come back and his appearances don’t ever seem to move numbers.”
“The truth is, they’ve got a candidate who just doesn’t have the performance ability that he used to have,” Kochel added. “He’s never been great. He’s always been a little bit of a gaffe machine. But he’s lost more than a step. He’s lost multiple steps.”
Voters tuning into Biden’s recent interviews hoping to hear him answer hard-hitting questions about foreign policy, immigration, or the economy will be out of luck.
Instead, they’ll hear lay-up questions from Hollywood stars whose conversations with the president often devolve into vent sessions about former president Donald Trump.
“It’s not the first time that you three have combined forces to really kind of do what we all need you guys to do, which is keep you in office,” SmartLess podcast co-host and actor Jason Bateman said in a recent joint interview with Biden and former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
The White House’s aversion to hard-hitting media interviews is not new. Biden has so far spent his entire presidency avoiding cable news like the plague and refusing to sit down with the editorial boards of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. And during his first three years, Biden averaged just eleven press conferences annually, according to the University of California Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project. That’s roughly half of his predecessor’s 22-per-year average.
Given the incumbent’s advanced age, underwater approval ratings, and propensity for verbal slip-ups, keeping him in controlled environments with sympathetic hosts like Howard Stern and Late Night host Seth Meyers may be to his benefit.
From a purely political standpoint, even his critics admit, he has every incentive to avoid tough policy questions and to keep the media’s focus on his opponent’s legal troubles. The campaign’s recent emphasis on shorter speeches also means fewer opportunities for gaffes and accidentally reading aloud teleprompter instructions, like “pause” and “repeat the line.”
“Probably the best course of action is what you see from people who are closest to him in the administration, which tends to be: Keep it scripted, don’t go for the home run on everything. Just try to get him out there but do it in a way that we can control,” says Tim Chapman, an adviser to former vice president Mike Pence’s advocacy group Advancing American Freedom.
After all, Biden’s unscripted moments are often his worst.
In February, he held an impromptu press conference to address a report from special counsel Robert Hur on his mishandling of classified documents that described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and suggested that he could not recall when his son Beau had died, even within several years. Yet the press conference, which was meant to dispel voters’ concerns about his age and memory, ended up backfiring when Biden accidentally referred to Egypt’s President Sisi as the president of Mexico while answering a question about hostage negotiations in Gaza.
During Biden’s interview with Howard Stern last month, he indicated he would be willing to debate Trump, after months of declining to say definitively whether he planned to appear onstage alongside his Republican challenger. Biden’s willingness to debate came only after reports that the five major TV news networks and the Associated Press sent an unprecedented letter to both campaigns encouraging them to debate.
The letter was part of a growing trend of legacy media organizations pushing Biden to adhere to the norms around media appearances.
The New York Times released a statement last month saying it is “troubling that President Biden has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term,” adding that it “establishes a dangerous precedent that future presidents can use to avoid scrutiny and accountability.”
Biden even avoided the traditional pre–Super Bowl interview earlier this year, declining for the second year in a row to sit down with a major news network ahead of the game. Many speculated last year that Biden didn’t sit for the pre-game interview because he didn’t want to submit to an interview with Fox, which aired the game. But his decision to skip the primetime moment again this year, when the game aired on CBS, suggested a broader aversion to the spotlight.
John Woolley, a professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara and co-director of the American Presidency Project, says Biden isn’t ignoring the press, he’s just trying to define the terms of the relationship, like those who came before him. Biden “briefs the press extensively” and “interacts informally” with reporters often.
For all the criticism the press has levied at Biden, the president and his aides have been more than willing to give it right back.
Journalists were stunned during the White House correspondents’ dinner last month when Biden told them to “rise up to the seriousness of the moment,” “move past the horse race numbers and the gotcha moments,” and “focus on what’s actually at stake.” His speech lasted just ten minutes.
And earlier this year, White House spokesman Ian Sams sent a letter to the White House Correspondents Association asking reporters to reframe their coverage of the special counsel’s report, accusing journalists of having misconstrued its findings.
At this point in campaign season, few congressional Democrats seem to be concerned about the president’s nontraditional media strategy — a political reality that suggests many in-cycle Democrats think there’s little to be gained by “letting Joe be Joe.”
“I’m not hearing rank-and-file people saying, ‘Biden’s not out there doing press conferences or sit-downs or whatever,’” one swing-district House Democrat told NR in the U.S. Capitol Tuesday afternoon. “I think the only people paying attention, to tell you the truth, are the media.”
Around NR
• Put a fork in Kristi Noem’s VP chances, they’re officially done, writes Rich Lowry:
I’m not sure how likely Noem was to get the VP nod prior to the dog-killing fiasco, but if Cricket didn’t finish off her chances, this interview yesterday on CBS should do it. Noem was wholly unsympathetic, stuck on unconvincing talking points, and not remotely close to ready for prime-time. At least she’s done everyone the favor of demonstrating her unsuitability well in advance.
• Trump is overdue in his embrace of early and mail voting, the NR editors write:
It is regrettable that Donald Trump’s private mania became that of his supporters years ago, but perhaps it is not too late for Republican politicians and voters to realize that nobody has ever changed a flawed system by repeatedly shooting himself in the foot.
• Ruben Gallego will have a tough time trying to strike a moderate profile with voters as he’s haunted by his progressive voting record in Congress, reports Audrey Fahlberg, who recently had a chance to briefly catch up with the Democratic Senate candidate:
Republicans looking to damage Gallego’s credibility on border issues have a yearslong congressional record to work with, along with a deep well of old social-media posts and press releases in which Gallego has called Trump’s border wall “ridiculous,” “stupid,” and a “giant waste of money,” aimed at “trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”
• Andrew C. McCarthy says Democrats’ lawfare campaign is still the 2024 favorite over Trump:
MAGA Republicans who already see their man back in the Oval Office next year have simply never come to grips with a stubborn fact: Their affection for Donald Trump is a decidedly minority position in these United States. There is only so much Joe Biden’s unpopularity can do about that.
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