Border crisis eclipses Covid in first Biden Q&A with press

President Joe Biden began his first White House news conference by practically inviting reporters to ask him about the major story of the past year – the pandemic.

He talked about his administration’s efforts to reopen schools closed during the crisis, celebrated a $1.9trn (€1.6trn) economic stimulus package and announced a new goal to administer 200 million doses of coronavirus vaccine by his 100th day in office.

But the president’s introductory remarks were the last time the pandemic was mentioned during Thursday’s Q&A. Over the next hour, not a single one of the masked and socially-distanced journalists assembled in the East Room asked about it.

Instead, Mr Biden was asked at least 10 times about the surge of migrants on the US-Mexico border, which has recently dominated news coverage, and been portrayed as a major crisis for his administration. (Some immigration experts say the migration numbers match a seasonal pattern and the coverage is overblown.)

Several reporters pressed Mr Biden on whether he would pursue filibuster reform, and he fielded a smattering of questions on voting laws and gun control, North Korea, Afghanistan and China.

After two reporters from CNN and CBS News hit Mr Biden with questions about his re-election plans, the president of barely two months blurted in frustration: “Oh, come on. I don’t even think about it.”

Mr Biden’s first formal news conference took place on a day when hundreds of Americans died with Covid-19, as they have on every day of Mr Biden’s presidency and for nearly a year before it.

More than 547,000 people have now died and more than 30 million have been infected in the United States since the pandemic began.

The press corps’ evident lack of interest in the subject didn’t go unnoticed.

“It was sort of striking to me there wasn’t a single question about the pandemic”, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta said on air.

“The failure to ask a single question about Covid is remarkable,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser. “By any standards, a fail.”

“What a ridiculous failure by the press corps to focus on the issue that the vast majority of Americans care about most,” tweeted Tommy Vietor, co-host of “Pod Save America” and a former Obama administration official.

The website Talking Points Memo noted that White House aides retweeted some of these criticisms, and a deputy communications director for House Speaker Democrat Nancy Pelosi, suggested that the Democratic Party’s pandemic relief measures were too popular for the press to take an interest in.

Mr Biden waited for more than two months after his inauguration to hold a news conference, longer than any of his predecessors in the last 100 years.

Since he announced the event earlier this month, commentators had speculated furiously about how the new president would perform.

But presidential news conferences also serve as venues to judge and criticise the White House press corps..

Biden took questions on Thursday from reporters and appeared to consult a list of names in front of him before calling on each.

And the president gave long, detailed answers – right up until the moment he announced, “Folks, I’m going”, and abruptly left the podium without calling on several other journalists in the room.

“Biden snubs Fox,” read a caption on Fox News moments after the conference ended.

It was the only major television network that wasn’t called on during the event, and correspondent Peter Doocy appeared above the caption holding what he called “a binder full of questions” he didn’t get to ask.

He said at least one of them would have been about the pandemic.