Trump administrationpress briefings each month 15 briefings 10 5 Jan. 2017 July Jan. 2018 July Jan. 2019 15 10 5 Jan. ’17 July Jan. ’18 July Jan. ’19

White House press briefings during the Trump administration have gone from must-see TV to practically canceled after just two seasons.

On Monday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, took questions from the podium for the first time in 41 days. Fox was the only major cable news network to carry the briefing live.

She appeared just once in September, November and December.

Last Tuesday, President Trump said on Twitter that he told Ms. Sanders “not to bother” with briefings anymore because “the press covers her so rudely & inaccurately.”

In an interview on Fox News shortly before Mr. Trump’s tweet, Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, said that the briefings have not officially stopped, but that Ms. Sanders did not need to be at the podium every day because Mr. Trump regularly answers questions from reporters, for example, on his way to Marine One.

Average number of press briefings per month, by year Clinton Bush Obama Trump 20 briefings 15 10 5 1993 1997 2001 2005 2009 2013 2017 Clinton Bush Obama Trump 20 15 10 5 ’93 ’97 ’01 ’05 ’09 ’13 ’17 Note: Each bar includes briefings beginning with Jan. 20 of that year through Jan. 19 of the following year.

But Martha Joynt Kumar, the director of the White House Transition Project, analyzed the frequencies of press briefings and found that the press secretaries for former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush “held regularly scheduled briefings independent of whether their president answered reporters’ questions.”

The Trump administration, she said, seemed to use the briefing as an instrument of the White House “to promote the president and his agenda rather than as a medium where reporters establish the subjects under discussion and call upon the White House to answer to the American public on topics of their choosing.”

Olivier Knox, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, stressed that being able to ask a president questions is not a substitute for a briefing.