On Thursday morning in Jerusalem, President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid had a joint press conference. President Biden said he received a list of reporters from which to field questions.
After answering one question from an Israeli reporter, the president made the error. He then replied, “Um, sure. Uh, I was given a list here,” before reading out the name of Reuters writer Steve Holland, when asked to call on other reporters.
Biden kept checking his list of reporters to call on as the conference went on. He continued, referring to a reporter for an Arabic news station, “The next person to ask us a question, I guess, is Nadia Bilbassy,”
One day earlier, just after touching down in Israel to start the first part of his Middle East tour, Biden made a linguistic error while alluding to the Holocaust.
The president’s first trip to the Middle East since taking office will start in Israel and end in Saudi Arabia after stopping in the West Bank.
President Biden has drawn criticism before for admitting to calling on a list of journalists who had been pre-approved by his staff.
The president was made fun of when he said, “As usual, I’ll only be calling on reporters my staff directed me to,” to reporters during a Russia-US summit in Geneva last year.
More recently, at the NATO Summit at the end of June, Biden frequently alluded to a list of names when speaking to the media in Madrid. He said he had been instructed to contact Darlene Superville from the Associated Press while looking down at his paper.
One source claims that the absence of a teleprompter in the Oval Office prevents Biden’s staff from holding news conferences there.
The president had a lot fewer formal sit-down interviews with journalists during his first year in office than his two immediate predecessors. The White House Transition Project at Towson University found that Joe Biden only achieved 22, compared to Donald Trump’s 92, Barack Obama’s 156, and Hillary Clinton’s 96.
