Correspondents’ Association asks for more White House press briefings

The White House Correspondents’ Association urged the White House to offer more press briefings, after a summer with far fewer than previous ones.

“We have repeatedly expressed our concerns to Sarah about the infrequency and short duration of the briefings,” WHCA president Olivier Knox told the Erik Wemple Blog, according to an opinion piece Wemple wrote for The Washington Post.

The White House cut down its number of press briefings, dropping to only 13 briefings spanning a total of four hours, according to Wemple. 

Wemple noted that the Obama administration held 35 briefings in the summer of 2016, for a total of 39 hours.

{mosads}When asked how White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had responded, Knox told Wemple, “All I can tell you is she’s heard our concerns.”

Knox has made complaints to Sanders about the lower frequency of press briefings before. 

He told Politico in early August, “The relative scarcity and brevity of briefings is an issue that I raised with Sarah Sanders in our most recent meeting.”

“I conveyed that my members were hopeful that we’d get back to a more normal schedule,” he explained.

Both Wemple and the Post have both also kept a close eye on the phenomenon.

Wemple wrote in late May that Sanders was cutting the functional part of her briefings shorter.

Another Post writer, Callum Borchers, detailed the shortening time frame of the briefing’s question period in early June.

As Wemple noted in his piece Tuesday, the WHCA cannot really do anything to change the frequency of briefings. 

When he asked Knox about next steps Tuesday, he replied, “Nothing I could really talk about.”

The Hill could not immediately reach the White House for comment.