Then and Now: Press Conferences

LLast week, President Joe Biden finally saw fit to honor 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 his five immediate predecessors during that period), the old goat delivered a rambling nearly two-hour debacle of a spectacle in which he, among others: Blamed Republicans for his administration’s continued failure to push through its legislative agenda, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2022 midterm and future elections, said he doesn’t believe the polls and casually invited Russian imperialist strongman and all-out freedom enemy Vladimir Putin to go ahead and invade Ukraine.
Although it may seem ubiquitous now, the presidential press conference is a very modern phenomenon. Woodrow Wilson held the first presidential press conference in March 1913, so add that to the list of reasons to hate him. The practice has been continued by each of its 18 predecessors – although, as we can all attest, the effectiveness of such press conferences is much more up for debate these days. Where White House reporters were once seen as representing the Republican conduit (in the sense of political theory) to the public, they now function (with rare exceptions) as little more than a group of mid-level talents and of undeserved egos asking canned partisan questions for clicks or personal influence.
But the idea of a presidential press conference is a good one – and something that speaks a lot about our Republican system of government. A government based on popular sovereignty and elected “by the people, for the people” reverses the traditional power dynamic between a nation’s executive or ruler and its citizens. In theory, a president holds a press conference to promulgate and promote an agenda, yes, but it is also a public accountability mechanism: not only does the public, through the function of the press, have a forum and opportunity to ask questions of its executive, but presidents are also expected to answer these questions, which are usually critical. (That’s why it’s an abdication of good governance standards when presidents like Biden refuse to answer questions or hold public press conferences.) For most of human history, the he expectation that a sovereign would justify himself to a critical population would be totally foreign. Indeed, even asking questions or expressing doubts about a king’s wishes was often punishable by death throughout history.
For me, the modern press conference is also something that has no specific historical antecedent. It is unique in that it is part campaign rhetoric, part public rhetoric, part functional process of government (in that a president attempts to explain certain intricacies or details of his program) and part system republican of representation and responsibility. In the forums of ancient and Imperial Rome, political leaders and even emperors made public speeches in an attempt to win support for their proposals. In the witan (or witenagemot) of medieval England, the chosen king had to heed the advice, counsel and debate of other nobles in his witan. And from Hammurabi’s Mesopotamia to Renaissance Europe and beyond, rulers employed town criers or orators to inform the public of the law and extol its virtue.
Break it all together and there would still be something missing to compare to our American show.