Philip Bump has an interesting bit of analysis in WaPo: It seems as if maybe the White House doesn’t really want to talk to the press.
The headline is perhaps more tongue-in-cheek than it ought to be, because Bump does an interesting bit of comparison between the end of the Obama administration and the start of the Trump administration to detail that, yes, the current administration is more adverse to the press than was than was the previous.
Take, for example, the following chart:
There are several additional charts in the piece, which I recommend as worthy of a click-through.
I will provide the last bit of data from the piece:
Between January 2016 and Jan. 20, 2017, Earnest spent 11,800 minutes briefing the media, with his deputies adding another 906 minutes. Since late last July, about 10 months, Sanders has spent 2,800 minutes briefing the media, only about four more hours than Spicer spent during his tenure in the White House.
Spicer worked there for four fewer months.
Josh Earnest was Obama’s last press secretary.
