Donald Trump never gets any credit for granting broad access to the press. Team Biden was never blamed for avoiding them. That's because journalists don't care about their own access. They care about the Democrats winning. They're partisan team players, not nonpartisan watchdogs.
This week’s Exhibit A, brought to us by Jorge Bonilla, was CNN’s Scott Jennings thwacking Brian Stelter. He said, "The Biden administration treated the press as poorly as any president has ever treated them, gave them less access, answered no questions, no transparency at any given time. Donald Trump has answered more questions in three weeks than Joe Biden answered in four years."
"That's not true," Stelter protested. "And also a lot of the answers are not true and accurate."
Later, Stelter responded to Jorge Bonilla’s tweet with this: "Because it's not possible. Obviously Biden didn't hold nearly as many Q&As as Trump does. But over the course of 4 years, Biden fielded thousands of questions." He did? How do we know? Why should we accept a guesstimate?
Jennings might be exaggerating on the raw numbers, maybe. But he’s not wrong on the big picture. Biden averaged nine pressers a year, and that’s in part because he had four in 2024 plus the first 3 weeks of 2025. He vanished from scrutiny.
We noted before than Reagan Reese at the Daily Caller found President Biden took just six questions from the White House press corps during his first week in office -- and some of those were answered with just one word. Comparatively, the Daily Caller’s analysis shows that Trump surpassed that number just several hours after being sworn in as he took 75 total questions and follow-ups over a 48-minute period in the Oval Office while signing executive orders. He took questions from the press 11 times during his first week in office -- more than Biden took in his last year.
Now the other obvious point here is the Difference in Attitude of the press. Even when Biden took questions, they were much gentler than the ferocious grilling Trump would receive. Trump fended off angry crusades like Screaming Jim Acosta. Biden was treated with kid gloves, and that’s saying it mildly. The same goes for interviews with the networks. We would throw Erin Burnett’s soft-serve vanilla cone interview with Biden from last spring at Stelter. The questions Republicans get are much tougher, and then the reporters feel like they have to follow up with the so-called Fact Check. Erin Burnett wasn’t going to fact-check Biden as he mangled his record on inflation.
There was another moment on CNN that shouldn’t be missed, and that’s when Anderson Cooper got upset with former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who we recall backed Nikki Haley last year, not Trump. When Sununu gave him some GOP lip, Cooper told him “don’t be a dick.” He quickly retreated and apologized. But it tells you just how much tolerance they have. Sununu was needling Cooper about how much FEMA was spending on illegal immigrants. This is a topic they don’t want to discuss. At all. They call themselves the News networks, but some bits of news they want to strangle to death, never to be heard from. That’s why they have a trust problem.
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