Executive power · press access
Formal solo news conferences per year, by president
Solo presidential news conferences, the formal kind where the president takes questions alone, per year in office, counted the same way by the American Presidency Project back to Coolidge. It is a proxy for one form of press accountability. It is a narrow one: it does not count the informal driveway and Oval Office question sessions that some presidents use in place of formal conferences.
Solo, joint, and total
| President | Solo | Joint (foreign leaders) | Total | Solo / yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clinton | 62 | 131 | 193 | 7.8 |
| Bush | 53 | 157 | 210 | 6.6 |
| Obama | 68 | 95 | 163 | 8.5 |
| Trump I | 44 | 44 | 88 | 11.0 |
| Biden | 15 | 22 | 37 | 3.75 |
| Trump II* | 11 | 8 | 19 | ~7 |
This measures one channel, not total access. The count is formal solo conferences only, as the American Presidency Project defines them; it excludes informal gaggles, helicopter and driveway exchanges, and social-media sessions. Both Trump terms substituted large volumes of informal Q&A that this metric does not capture, so a low formal count is not the same as being unavailable to the press. The American Presidency Project's own analysis cautions that on a first-three-years basis Biden's solo count is near the bottom but not a clear outlier, so read this as “fewest formal solo conferences,” not “least accessible president.” Joint pressers with foreign leaders are counted separately.