Editor’s Be aware: A model of this text first appeared within the “Dependable Sources” e-newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.
New York
CNN
—
President Joe Biden will likely be sitting on the sidelines this Sunday because the marketing campaign for the 2024 election heats up.
The White Home not too long ago knowledgeable CBS Information that Biden had chosen to not take part within the conventional pre-Tremendous Bowl interview, the second consecutive yr that the president has declined a suggestion to talk on to the nation’s largest assembled dwell viewers.
Biden’s advisers have said that the choice to skip the interview was as a result of they needed to offer the already fatigued public a break from politics through the massive recreation. A White Home official underscored that argument to me on Monday, including that they consider the worth of the interview has dropped, given it has through the years shifted from a extra lighthearted media alternative to a politics-focused affair.
Regardless, the Tremendous Bowl snub displays a bigger Biden technique: The president is leaning far lower than his predecessors on the standard media equipment to get his message out, opting as an alternative for different mediums to deal with the American individuals.
“We’re being extra artistic,” a Biden marketing campaign adviser advised me Monday, “and relying much less on formulation of the previous.”
To that finish, the Biden crew has labored to make inroads with on-line influencers who create content material for platforms like TikTok and YouTube, briefing social media personalities on key occasions and alluring them at instances to the White Home. Biden’s crew has made the president obtainable for podcasts, the place he has chatted with Conan O’Brien and Anderson Cooper about grief and tragedy. And, simply final week, he made calls into 4 Black radio stations forward of the South Carolina main.
“We’re being much less conventional as a result of much less individuals get their information from conventional mediums than ever earlier than,” the Biden marketing campaign official stated.
Whereas the rise of social media and different platforms have given politicians new methods to speak with the general public, it has additionally allowed these in energy to bypass the standard press and, thus, keep away from scrutiny. Biden’s media technique has renewed such questions, with critics skewering him for preserving an arm’s size from the institution press.
Biden’s advisers insist that the president’s embrace of alternate types of media is about diversifying his outreach, not about shielding him from hard-hitting sit downs with robust journalists. They level to interviews Biden did final yr with CBS Information correspondent Scott Pelley for “60 Minutes” and CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria forward of the G7 gathering.
“President Biden is crisscrossing the nation at a fee that usually exceeds his predecessors’ journey schedules, speaking to the American individuals about their lives and the problems that matter most to them and executing an aggressive, trendy, all-of-the-above communications and digital technique that highlights how he’s preventing for households and their values,” Andrew Bates, the deputy White Home press secretary, advised me in an announcement Monday.
However the numbers level to Biden collaborating in far fewer interviews and information conferences than his predecessors. In accordance with The White Home Transition Venture’s Martha Kumar, Biden has sat for roughly one-quarter as many interviews as Donald Trump at this level in his presidency, and one-fifth as many as Barack Obama.
Whereas the president has recurrently engaged in gaggles with the White Home press corps, such boards don’t naturally lend themselves to the kind of aggressive questioning that may are available in a sit-down interview. For many who wish to see their elected leaders recurrently sit down for arduous questions from the free press, no matter political occasion, Biden’s technique doesn’t sit nicely.
Whether or not it’s an efficient political technique, time will inform. Whereas Biden advisers are greater than assured in it, others are extra skeptical. Frank Sesno — a former CNN White Home correspondent, bureau chief, and present director of George Washington College’s College of Media and Public Affairs — argued that it may backfire, noting that whereas it “retains him out of hurt’s manner, it reinforces the narrative that he’s operating from a combat.”
“The Tremendous Bowl is tremendous scores and customarily a full-house free cross for a president,” Sesno advised me. “The interview is extra apple pie than meals for thought. So for Biden to take a cross on this (so to talk) will likely be taken by the over-the-hill crowd as one other piece of proof that he’s not within the recreation. It’s safer for him — no interview means no gaffes, no viral video of a mangled reply. Nevertheless it additionally provides one other punchline to the standup comics and the armchair quarterbacks.”