By Dan Hart
The Washington Stand
In a stark reversal from his predecessor, President Donald Trump has granted wide-ranging access to press reporters in the White House and has held numerous press conferences during his first four days in office. The new administration has also signaled that it will focus on protecting free speech and overhauling federal broadcasting agencies.
On Monday, the 47th president fielded unscripted questions in the Oval Office from the White House press corps as he signed a series of executive orders. Amid the back and forth, Trump asked Fox News reporter Peter Doocy how many news conferences former President Joe Biden had held in the same fashion. “Like this?” Doocy responded. “Zero.”
As noted by The New York Times, on Inauguration Day, Trump delivered his inauguration address and then “gave an impromptu speech at the Capitol about the official address, then held a rally, then took more than 100 questions in the Oval Office and then spoke at some balls.” On day two, he held a news conference about an artificial intelligence initiative in which he “eagerly fielded questions for half an hour.” On day three, the president sat down to pre-tape an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity. On day four, he held yet another press conference in the Oval Office as he signed more executive orders.
In contrast, it was not until March 25, 2021 — 65 days into his presidency — that Biden held his first news conference. A recent analysis found that, by a significant margin, Biden sat down for the least amount of interviews and held the least amount of news conferences of any president stretching back to Ronald Reagan. Notably, this occurred after Biden’s former press secretary Jen Psaki promised on the first day of his term that his administration planned to “bring transparency and truth back to the government.”
However, insider accounts have surfaced about how Biden’s inner circle attempted to hide the former president’s mental and physical decline, and much of the legacy media willingly followed along, until his disastrous debate performance last June. Incidents like these and a measurable pattern of left-leaning bias have caused the American public to reach its lowest level of trust in the media in history.
Still, the landscape may shift thanks to a new level of openness being exhibited by the Trump White House. Observers say that both the media and lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been surprised by the level of accessibility President Trump has shown in his first week in office.
“I think there’s no question that President Trump wants to talk to the people via any means necessary,” Washington Stand Editor-in-Chief Jared Bridges told TWS. “He’s outpaced Biden — whose administration’s stand-offishness was a hallmark — in every way in just a matter of days. Trump has shown that he’s both unafraid and willing to engage a media that’s been historically hostile to him.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is signaling that it wants to inject some balance into and reform federally funded media. On Thursday, Trump announced that he had nominated Brent Bozell, the head of the conservative media watchdog group Media Research Center, to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees the broadcasting networks Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and others. As noted by The Washington Times, the agency “has come under fire from the House Foreign Affairs Committee over corruption allegations among agency leaders.”
In addition, the new administration moved on Monday to address free speech and censorship. An executive order signed by Trump entitled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” stated in part, “Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.”
It continued, “Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
The executive order went on to declare that going forward, the “policy of the United States” will be to “secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech” by making sure federal employees do not engage in conduct and that taxpayer funds are not used to “abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
Originally published at The Washington Stand!
