The President interacts with the Press in many ways. These include formal news conferences with multiple reporters, off-the-record interviews and deliberate “leaks” of information indirectly. Among these, the news conference is one of the most important for public perceptions of the presidency. It allows the Press to ask questions in a controlled setting and provides an opportunity for the President to address specific issues in detail.
The table below summarizes the number of solo news conferences, Prime-time televised news conferences and Joint conferences held by each of the two presidential candidates. Solo conferences are those where the President speaks alone, while a Prime-time conference involves a single foreign Head of State or government attending with the President.
As was the case in 2020, news reports about the horserace and the controversies surrounding the candidates were dominant themes in the election coverage. In this case, however, the partisan slant of Fox and CBS was much more evident than that of CNN or ABC.
As might be expected, Fox’s partisanship showed through in the way it played up and down Biden’s policy stands and symbolic issue statements. For example, 94 percent of the reports on his policy positions that had tone were negative in nature. This contrasted with CBS, where the only controversies it highlighted were his tax filings and racial remarks. Reports on those controversies had a mixed tone but were significantly less negative than those on the horserace. As a result, CBS had positive horserace reports that outnumbered the negative ones four-to-one.