Morning Conference: asking the right questions

What the US press should have asked Joe Biden

Journalism is, basically, a profession built around asking really good questions, listening to the answers, and creating something interesting from them. Even the best opinion writing is derived from that.

And so, it's a constant source of frustration when journalists prove themselves unable to do it. I could rant, at length, about the poor quality of the questioning during the early UK government press conferences a year ago, as the pandemic started to bite.

However, I was stunned over the weekend when I saw on Twitter that not a single reporter asked US President Joe Biden about the pandemic.

Luckily, the insightful Zeynep Tufecki is here with a masterclass in constructing good questions they could have asked:

Ten Questions the Press Should Have Asked President Biden

A socially distant press conference shouldn’t mean distance from the most important story

Insightzeynep

As a paid-up member of the Tufecki fan club, this is fantastic news: she'll be teaching at the Columbia Journalism School. We need more thinkers like her influencing the way we do this.