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Presidential visits abroad are normally covered as headline-worthy events, but President Joe Biden’s visit to Northern Ireland to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement hasn’t generated much interest from the American press, according to WOR’s White House correspondent Jon Decker. Speaking on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program, Decker rationalized why he didn’t even go to the Emerald Isle this week.
“I have some say in this, and I saw this trip and I said it’s not really that newsworthy,” Decker told Berman and Riedel, who were mildly surprised he chose not to cover the trip. “This story of Joe Biden being in Ireland and Northern Ireland, it’s in the C-block. There’s just no news out of there. To me, it’s just a taxpayer-funded vacation to Joe Biden’s ancestral home. That’s the way I view it.”
Decker followed up on his heated discussion with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre over the president’s reluctance to answer reporters’ questions. Jean Pierre insists that Biden has taken more questions than his predecessors in the Oval Office. “I’d love to see the metric. If the metric is simply how many questions he’s asked, well, every time he walks by coming back from wherever on Marine One, walking across the South Lawn, we ask him questions but there’s no reply. So, if the metric is simply how many questions he’s been asked, I’m sure that number’s pretty high. It’s really a matter of answering those questions.”
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