Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Go Ahead, Biden. Hold a Press Conference.

Formal news briefings don’t have the impact they once did, but they do signal a president’s respect for keeping the public informed.

March 15, 2021 at 11:30 AM UTC

By Jonathan Bernstein

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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President Joe Biden has not yet held a formal press conference, which has sparked a fair amount of chatter from the press corps as well as a lot of indignant defenses of Biden’s choice, at least from what I could see on Twitter. So let’s get into it. Short version: Yes, Biden should keep the tradition of press conferences alive, and he’s a bit behind pace, but we shouldn’t overstate the importance of the issue.