Stumble Bum takes a header
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"Biden will spend the next three days in Los Angeles as host of the Summit of the Americas, the run-up to which has been dominated by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s announcement that he would boycott the event after the White House declined to invite the leftist authoritarian leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Aboard Air Force One, a journalist pressed White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan for an explanation of why Biden did not schedule a press conference while in Los Angeles, which he has done while attending other summits overseas.
“I think it’d be hard to argue that he hasn’t taken many, many questions from the press,” Sullivan replied — despite the fact that Biden has done fewer interviews and press conferences than his predecessors, and it seemed unlikely that he would be pressed too hard by the reliably liberal Kimmel, the onetime co-host of Comedy Central’s bawdy “The Man Show.”
Biden’s most recent known one-on-one interview with a professional journalist was held on Feb. 10 with Lester Holt of NBC. The sitdown was recorded and aired three days later during the network’s pregame coverage of the Super Bowl.
On Feb. 25, Biden taped two separate podcasts — a roughly 13-minute talk with Democratic activist Brian Cohen and a nearly 30-minute conversation with left-leaning Boston College professor Heather Richardson. Cohen said afterward that “I’m not a journalist … I have my agenda and I think this White House is doing a good job trying to enact some of it. Our goals are aligned.”
On March 1, Biden hosted a traditional off-the-record lunch with TV anchors ahead of his first State of the Union address to Congress. He allowed attendees to report his remarks on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Biden also gave a two-word reply to CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins on March 18, saying as he passed her in the West Wing that his call that day with Chinese President Xi Jinping “went well.”
The president sat for just 28 interviews during his first year in office. By contrast, Donald Trump gave 95 interviews, Barack Obama did 162 and George W. Bush granted 50 interviews during their first year as president, according to records kept by White House Transition Project Director Martha Kumar.
There’s no official repositoryof presidential interviews — leaving the tabulations to informal record-keepers such as Kumar, former CBS News reporter Mark Knoller and the platform Factba.se. The counts can vary due to different standards for what counts as an interview and differing visibility into local or off-the-record interviews."