Biden joins Howard Stern for softball interview a day after NY Times rips ‘troubling’ lack of availability
NY Post
President Biden sat down Friday for a gentle one-one-one with Howard Stern — one day after the New York Times published a statement condemning the 81-year-old for avoiding the press more than any other modern commander-in-chief.
The former shock jock’s question topics ranged from praising Biden’s new airline reimbursement policy (“so great,” in Stern’s words) to asking whether the president’s parents were political, recounting Biden’s schoolboy football experience and meeting his first wife, Neilia.
At one point, the “Private Parts” star gushed that Biden had a “very cinematic life,” though it was unclear whether that was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the president’s many questionable anecdotes.
The chat with Stern adds to Biden’s limited interview tally, but the president still has conducted the fewest in-office interrogations of any recent chief executive by a long shot — and an ongoing count by Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project, shows it isn’t particularly close.
According to Kumar, Biden has given just 89 total interviews during his first three years in office.
At the same time in their first terms, Donald Trump had given 300 interviews, Barack Obama had given 422, George W. Bush had given 135, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush had each given 168 and Ronald Reagan had given 189, the tally shows.
