Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday joked with journalists assembled outside his residence to cover his breakfast with Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, remarking on a chilly first day of spring in Washington, “We never keep the press in the cold.”
“Just in the dark,” Irish journalist Justin McCarthy, of Today FM, responded.
“Yes, the dark – good line,” Biden said.
McCarthy, who is based in Dublin, later told TPM in an email that it was a lighthearted exchange.
“It was just an off the cuff remark, I wasn’t ribbing him about any specific limits on press access although it is my experience that most politicians tend to prefer to keep the media at a distance,” he said. “The tone was light hearted and the comment was not meant to be taken too seriously, its just my sense of humor.’
Members of the White House Correspondents Association have recently taken issue with the Obama administration’s restrictive press practices. And last week, Biden’s office apologized after asking a college journalist to delete photos of the vice president he took at an event. Biden spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff told the Washington Post in a statement:
“It is our policy that all of our open press events are open press even if a reporter is not in the designated press area. This was an unfortunate mistake by a staffer who does not regularly interact with the press. Once we learned about it, I immediately apologized to the Dean of the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, the reporter involved and to the newspaper. It will never happen again.”
