Thread by @hunterw

This article is missing *tons* of vital context and all involved here should know better.

In fact, it's missing so much I can't fit it into one tweet and will post the details below.

https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/1370885512635027464

Firstly, it's not good to muddle solo news conferences and joint pressers with foreign leaders. They're very different — including in the amount of questions and how they're asked. I have basically written a whole article on this point. yahoo.com/news/president…

And as you can see in my article, after his initial solo press conference, Trump proceeded to avoid press conferences for a record stretch. That's not even mentioned in this WaPo piece, which is a pretty glaring omission.

It's particularly silly to conflate joint pressers with foreign leaders and solo press conferences in this pandemic moment when foreign heads of state have not visited the White House.

One thing Trump started was doing more informal q and a's with reporters than predecessors. Biden kept that up and, by the start of this month, he did 40 of those. It's not mentioned in this piece at all even though I know the very experts cited here are careful to point that out

Here's great deeply contextualized data on this from the inimitable @mkumar38 who knows this space better than anyone. As you can see, it's far more nuanced than the picture provided in this WaPo piece.

Solo press conferences have unique value for the public. Biden should do more of them and deserves some criticism for this. However, people on the political media and White House beats have no excuse for not knowing this context or including it in pieces on this.

Also, @mkumar38 has *quite literally* written the book on the White House press shop and presidential communications. Any reporters interested in this should reach out to her. She is an absolutely vital and unparalleled resource.

I should note the image above with the totals of various oress engagements was current as of March 4. Sorry for not citing that in the initial tweet!