WASHINGTON — The White House Correspondents’ Association pushed back Thursday after President Biden again grumbled about disliking a journalist’s question — this time at a joint press conference in Italy alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“I wish you guys would play by the rules a little bit,” the 81-year-old Biden chided Bloomberg News reporter Josh Wingrove, who had asked a question about the endgame of the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Gaza Strip instead of one about the stalemated Russia-Ukraine war.
“I’m here to talk about a critical situation in Ukraine,” Biden groused after a day of meetings at the annual G7 summit. “You’re asking me another subject.”
Veteran NBC News reporter Kelly O’Donnell, president of the association, issued a statement noting that there are no “rules” for what reporters can ask at press conferences.
“The White House Correspondents’ Association believes it is in the public interest to make clear that at a presidential press conference, at home or abroad, there are no preconditions regarding question topics,” O’Donnell said.
“While the White House does determine the number of reporters the president will recognize, it is up to professional journalists to decide what to ask. Any leader may prefer that reporters ask only one question or ask only about a topic that is of most interest to the president or another world leader, but a free press functions independently. “
O’Donnell added that the association “welcome more opportunities to pose a range of questions to the president in a press conference setting.”
The 81-year-old president has given relatively few press conferences and interviews compared to his recent predecessors — and increasingly has vented about journalists asking questions he doesn’t like.
When asked last month during a campaign trip whether he would serve all four years of a second term or hand over power to Vice President Kamala Harris, as Republicans often claim, Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a full second term, shouted back, “Did you fall on your head?”
Biden also lashed out at a press conference at the White House last month with Kenyan President William Ruto when a reporter asked him two questions — rather than just one.
“You guys never keep the deal — but that’s OK,” Biden said in a displeased tone, after attempting to cut off the journalist by demanding that they only ask “one question.”
Although there are no firm rules about what journalists can ask, White House reporters are subject to at-times intense pressure from press colleagues to ask about certain matters and not others, with a general preference for trending news topics — and journalists have sought to better organize historically chaotic shouted queries at the end of public events to improve Biden’s likelihood of engaging.
The Correspondents’ Association is by historical custom incredibly influential over press operations at the White House, with the association’s board in charge of deciding the seating chart of the Brady Press Briefing Room and also allowed to assign West Wing workspace and determine which outlets closely cover the president as part of the in-town, domestic travel and international travel pools.
Under Biden, the association has unsuccessfully attempted for years to both understand and end a mysterious prescreening process for journalists allowed into large indoor event spaces that under past presidents were open to all on-campus press.
In another blow to press corps autonomy, the White House last year formalized procedures for yanking press badges from journalists who do not “act in a professional manner” — closing a long-standing loophole that allowed reporters to successfully challenge badge revocations in the past on due process grounds.
