White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says she is “working hard to be more punctual” after a series of delays caused reporters to spend 50 percent more time this year waiting for scheduled White House press briefings to begin.
Sanders walked to the briefing room podium 88 minutes late on Tuesday, the longest delay of the year, contributing to a sense among journalists that the problem is getting worse.
Reporters who attended all 17 briefings of 2018 spent 10.5 hours waiting for Sanders — and in one instance, her deputy Raj Shah — beyond advertised start times, the equivalent of more than a full workday, transcript timestamps and press guidance indicate.
The actual briefing time featuring Sanders and other senior officials, by contrast, was about 8.5 hours, according to a review of video content from the events.
The average 37-minute delay in 2018 is a jump from late 2017, when the final 17 briefings of the year were on average 24.7 minutes late, claiming just 7 hours of journalists’ time in total.
Calculations made by the Washington Examiner do not include delays announced with at least an hour’s notice, and the 2018 data do not include the time preceding a canceled briefing on the day of a mass shooting in Florida.
Even without crunching the numbers, there was a growing sense among the press corps that delays had grown. Journalists lately struggled to restrain their irritation, groaning in unison when alerted by press staffers to last-minute delays.
Sanders, who apologized to journalists Tuesday following the unusually long wait, generally spends time preparing in her West Wing office before addressing reporters. She told the Washington Examiner she will seek to limit delays going forward.
“We do our very best to be on time,” Sanders said in an email. “I am working hard to be more punctual and be considerate of the press’s time.”
Although reporters are free to use their laptops and phones while they wait, many choose not to do so, or cannot get much accomplished while standing alongside the 49 reserved seats in the briefing room.
People who gather in the briefing room, or who tune in to cable TV or internet live-streams, have grown accustomed to long delays, and many express their frustration to one another in private, though several declined to comment on the record.
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, said “the delays do seem to have grown lately.”
“In fairness, there were long delays during the Obama administration. It’s probably endemic to a White House given all the meetings and issues that come up,” Baker told the Washington Examiner.
He added: “What seems different is how many days we haven’t had briefings at all. The rule of thumb used to be that if the president was in town and not having a news conference, there was pretty much always a briefing. If he was traveling, there was pretty much always a gaggle on the plane. Now it seems more hit or miss. That’s concerning and I hope we get back to more regularity.”
Martha Kumar, a presidential historian who attends briefings as director of the White House Transition Project, also sees the delays in a larger context.
“While reporters have waited longer for the briefing to begin in this administration, it is a recurring problem that has surfaced on at least an occasional basis with most recent press operations,” she said. “Today events move faster and require constant updating to catch up with the news. That is true with reporters and for White House officials. It is difficult to keep up with the pace of news and its volume.”
In conversations among reporters, the brevity of briefings is another gripe. The average briefing length this year is 30 minutes, with notable outliers such as a 74-minute briefing where Dr. Ronny Jackson took questions about President Trump’s health. Although the waits are much longer, the average briefing time in 2018 is about 6.6 minutes longer than in late 2017.
