Presidential Communication and Character

White House News Management from Clinton and Cable to Twitter and Trump

Stephen Farnsworth, Stephen J. Farnsworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315447025
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book traces the evolution of White House news management during America's changing media environment over the past two decades. Comparing and contrasting the communication strategies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, it demonstrates the difficulty that all presidents have in controlling their messages despite a seemingly endless array of new media outlets and the great advantages of the office. That difficulty is compounded by new media's amplification of presidential character traits for good or ill. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube notwithstanding, presidential power still resides in the "power to persuade," and that task remains a steep challenge. More than ever, presidential character matters, and the media presidents now employ report on the messenger as much as the message.

The book also looks at the media strategies of candidates during the 2016 presidential campaign, puts presidential media use in global context, and covers the early phase of the Trump administration, the first true Twitter presidency.

1 Presidents Struggle to Shape the News

The first four presidents of the internet age developed markedly different approaches to selling themselves and their policies through the mass media. While the White House has long been the center of American political discourse, the ever-expanding range of media outlets that have emerged over the past two decades have forced recent presidents to redesign their media management strategies repeatedly in the face of frequently changing journalistic and political environments. Consider, for example, the early morning tweet storms of Donald Trump, Barack Obama casually shooting baskets for a viral BuzzFeed video or George W. Bush standing on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit. All of these media moments demonstrate that tried-and-true White House strategies of winning the news cycle change to frame different kinds of presidential media presentations in different news environments. Above all, modern presidents emphasize their personal qualities in public communication to maximize their popularity and their effectiveness.

Rapid technology advancements have created new opportunities and challenges for each recent presidential administration, making recent decades a period of extensive White House communication experimentation. This book considers the evolution of presidential news management during the massive changes that have rocked America’s mass media over the past quarter century. We examine the differing media strategies of four presidents, starting with Bill Clinton, who used television news (particularly cable outlets) to charm the nation and then to turn the tables on those who would drive him from office. We consider as well the case of George W. Bush, who successfully silenced the critics of the Iraq War early on but subsequently lost control of the narrative nearly everywhere but on Fox News. We then turn to Barack Obama, whose diffident style on social media created a new approach to public communications, and conclude with a study of Donald Trump, whose pugnacious rhetoric and aggressive use of insults and dubious evidence on Twitter marked the greatest departure yet for presidential news-framing efforts during the online age.

Despite their many differences in personality and in the media environments they encountered during their years in office, one theme remains constant: each presidential candidate and later each president had to struggle to shape the news narrative and they fought back against critics and negative media reports by emphasizing presidential character. Rather than concentrating on issues, campaigns often try to win over less partisan and less committed voters by emphasizing the personalities of the men and women who would be president. Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 by offering a more empathetic approach to the nation’s troubles than his predecessor; in 2000 George W. Bush promised a more morally upright approach than Clinton; in 2008 Barack Obama described himself as the personification of a multicultural and culturally tolerant America; and in 2016 Donald Trump presented himself as the voice of white working class voters who felt left behind in a rapidly changing America (Ceaser and Busch 1993, 2001; Ceaser, Busch and Pitney 2009, 2017).

Once in office these candidates-turned-presidents continued to concentrate on character matters, justifying controversial policies on the basis of one’s personal toughness, including taking a hard line against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, engaging in the wars in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, or ripping up international trade deals in 2017 (Farnsworth 2009; Schier and Eberly 2017). Even Bill Clinton, whose personal character generated mixed feelings at least when he ran for president in 1992, nevertheless engaged in a moral battle with his accusers during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment battle of 1998 (Farnsworth and Lichter 2006). The emphasis on character not only helps presidents win battles, it also allows presidents to give citizens general impressions about how presidents will handle problems that emerge during an administration (George and George 1998). And sometimes, the “character” who is the president takes over both the media and the message.

While presidents have a number of media advantages when it comes to getting a hearing in modern Washington’s political debates, these factors do not guarantee public relations success. As head of a relatively unified branch of government—particularly when compared to a legislative branch divided by chamber, by party and by factions within parties—presidents usually can at least work their will over the framing of the narratives of the executive branch. Underlings must sing from the White House hymnal, after all. The executive branch also can offer something approaching a united front when it confronts an often deeply divided Congress, helping the president try to become legislator-in-chief as well as communicator-in-chief in the modern political environment. There can be infighting and leaks involving White House aides, particularly when a president’s political positions are uncertain. But the president’s preferences, once expressed, largely prevail when the executive branch communicates, particularly on high-profile issues.

While the largely unified executive branch makes presidents more capable of dominating the political discourse than any other single political actor, one key challenge all presidents face is the short—and ever-shortening—attention span of both the reporters who produce the news and the citizens who consume it. Ten-second sound bites of quoted material on television, roundly condemned as shallow and insufficiently informative in their day, now seem like soliloquies when compared to a 140-character tweet. While the no-holds-barred coverage found online may provide the president with new and often intensely loyal allies, that environment also amplifies the voices of equally aggressive and relentless enemies who can counter-frame the presidential news narrative in peer-to-peer communication venues like Twitter and Facebook. American public opinion tends to be critical of presidents away from periods of crisis, and there seems to be little that presidents trying to influence the modern media can do to change that, regardless of the structure of the news environment.

What is also new in the Wild West of modern communication is automated deceit, where bots and trolls can spread falsehoods using tweets and posts while the truth struggles to keep pace. During Obama’s presidency there were constant online claims aired without evidence by Donald Trump and others that Obama was born in Africa—claims that did not subside even after Obama produced his Hawaii birth certificate (Hohmann 2017b; Shear 2011). President Trump and his supporters have kept up a steady stream of online and offline attacks on defeated rival Hillary Clinton and the health care policies of President Obama in an effort to deflect attention away from Trump’s own failure (at least so far) to replace Obamacare and the often-denied but increasingly problematic series of interactions involving the Trump team and the Russians during 2016 and 2017 (Hohmann 2017d).

While personal popularity remains a powerful asset, even popular presidents still have to work aggressively to shape the political discourse in ways that favor their administrations. The aggressive and highly partisan redistricting procedures in nearly every state mean that a president faces a U.S. House comprised of only a few members who represent “swing” districts and who are therefore vulnerable to White House pressure—be it exercised in Washington or in the members’ own districts. Senators, with their staggered six-year terms, are experts at wearing down and waiting out presidents when they chose to do so.

In other words, even as the mechanisms continue to change, a president’s communication challenges bring us back to where we once began: with the hallowed admonition from Richard Neustadt (1990) that the real power of presidents is mainly “the power to persuade.” The creation and expansion of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube notwithstanding, the limitations on presidential power that Neustadt saw when he served as a junior White House aide decades ago remain—and arguably have intensified—in our current media environment. The Framers’ vision of limited power for all politicians (even for presidents) may become blurred during times of emergency or heightened threat—like World War II or the panic-filled days after the attacks of 9/11. Even so, those brief departures from the norm only underscore the general truths that both policymaking in Washington and presidential popularity in the country are mainly about conversation and persuasion, and not about unilateral demands.

This book provides a comprehensive look at modern presidential communication, paying particular attention to the first four presidents of the new media age: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. All four presidents, including the current one, has or had periods of highly effective political communication efforts. All four also suffered from severe political communication problems during parts of their presidencies—times when the White House endured negative public evaluations and critical media coverage and faced an uncooperative Capitol Hill. While we will examine these connections in detail in the chapters that follow, it is important at the outset to note that the four presidents faced distinct media environments that shaped their political communication efforts. Clinton’s media strategy reflected the rise of cable television. Bush’s approach centered on the growing prominence of Fox News. Obama took advantage of the increasingly decentralized media environment by orienting his character construction efforts in the direction of social media, including YouTube and BuzzFeed. Trump’s combative style and somewhat indifferent approach to evidence and policy details maximized the utility of Twitter, with its 140-character format.

Before looking at those recent presidents, their media environments and their White House marketing efforts in greater detail, one should consider how presidents have used—and been used by—the news media over the years. This is the subject of the next section of this chapter.

Presidents Battle for Media Attention

First, one can offer some good news for the executive branch. Scholarly research into news coverage during the past half-century revealed that reporters pay far more attention to the White House than to Capitol Hill, giving presidents far greater ability to shape the policy discourse than members of Congress possess (Farnsworth and Lichter 2006). With unparalleled access to information—especially material relating to international concerns—presidents can learn about many things sooner and more comprehensively than can other political actors. That gives the White House a vital head start in framing the news, particularly in matters relating to foreign and military policy where information may not be readily available other than via executive branch sources, such as the Pentagon and the CIA. Further, citizens usually view presidents less negatively than they do the legislative branch. As a result, presidents increasingly seek to use their various communication advantages by going public to shape public opinion in ways designed to force greater acquiescence if not agreement from Congress (Kernell 2007). Presidents also engage in a media-friendly “road show” to sell themselves and their policies to the nation and world (Farnsworth et al. 2013; Heith 2013).

Members of Congress and other political actors sometimes try to focus the discourse in a different direction than that favored by the White House, but their ability to shape news coverage in a way contrary to the president on high salience matters is limited (Christenson and Kriner 2017; Entman 2004). While Members of Congress spend a lot of time in their districts during work periods and attract lots of local news attention, modern presidents have a huge advantage with national media: they can get to dominate U.S. political news at just about any time (Cook 1989, 2005; Farnsworth and Lichter 2006).

Presidential efforts to frame a given event in a certain way often depend on some level of agreement with other political actors, including legislators, reporters and the public. That consensus is often present in times of crisis. At such moments, few political actors want to risk challenging a president, particularly if the president’s commentary and behavior seem at least somewhat reasonable under the circumstances. If a presidential statement is not widely seen as credible—for example, if a president were to claim that a modest uptick in the unemployment rate is comparable to 9/11—then a political, media, and cultural feedback loop eventually will undermine that official claim in favor of more credible messages (Entman 2004).

One key vehicle to maximize the presence of the president’s perspective within news content is by using pseudo-events, stage-managed spectacles designed primarily to attract news coverage and to help advantage a specific perspective relating to an ongoing issue (Boorstin 1961). These marketing efforts can shape public interpretations of an event in ways that may not match the facts surrounding the event itself. An excellent example of this was George W. Bush’s 2003 appearance on an aircraft carrier in a Top Gun-style flight suit, and then shortly afterwards standing below a “Mission Accomplished” banner. These stage-managed events offered visual images suggesting that the president was a war hero. This pseudo-event on the aircraft carrier, which required the crew to be kept at sea longer than originally planned in order to secure the best images, also was designed to suggest that the war in Iraq was over (Bennett 2012). Americans subsequently l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Presidents Struggle to Shape the News
• 2 The Cable News Presidency of Bill Clinton
• 3 The Fox News Presidency of George W. Bush
• 4 The Social Media Presidency of Barack Obama
• 5 The Twitter Presidency of Donald Trump
• 6 Successes and Failures in Presidential Communication
• References
• Index