News media trust is essential to the role that journalism plays in democracies. The work of the press enables informed and rational political participation by citizens in deliberative democracies (Habermas, 1991). But what happens when the president dispenses with the traditional media filter and speaks directly to the people?
In political communication, disintermediation is the process in which a political actor communicates directly to the public through his/her personal social media account (Chadwick, 2017: 284). The term was first used in the early 1980s to describe change in the financial sectors of capitalist economies, especially the impact on broker firms of new technology in the stock market. Disintermediation is innovation that undermines established or incumbent structures. It cuts out the middleman or middle layers in a process. In that capacity, it has been around for a long time: most of the revolutionary developments in the world economy have something to do with making the economic structure simpler and straighter (Chadwick, 2006). Shopping online instead of going to a retail shop is one of the more visible examples. Online banking instead of going to bank branches in person is another (Chadwick & Stromer-Galley, 2016). It happens when a new technology erodes the business model maintaining the “middleman”. Just as happened to record stores and video rental companies: since people started getting their music movies online for free or at a very low cost, it no longer makes business sense to pay for the middleman—the physical store that sold or rented a physical commodity. Analogously, the era of social media allows political leaders to speak directly to voters, sidestepping all the traditional journalistic filters that for centuries, mainstream media placed to cover politics.
Donald Trump is the first disintermediating US president. His campaign, which got him elected at a relatively modest expense, disposed of the entire political-industrial complex of pollsters, fundraisers, and political advisers. He talks to the public through his tweets, thus cutting out not only the mainstream media but also the traditional circle of presidential advisors. As Pippa Malmgren recently said: “[H]e is the Uber of politics. He is disintermediating, disrupting, and displacing the traditional power structures at every level. And all of these people are deeply upset and uncomfortable, just like taxi drivers” (Smith, 2017). Trump’s disintermediation comes with costs, of course, especially in the foreign and national security domains. Tweets, the erratic statements in press conferences, the unpredictable behavior with foreign leaders, add up to what has been called “shock-jock diplomacy” (Murray, 2017).
McGeough (2016) was one of the first to understand how Trump’s campaign was disintermediating politics, cutting out middlemen. He first sought the decline of traditional party politics:
Indeed, despite being the oldest person ever elected US president, Donald Trump seems to be born for the social media age. Probably, if this had been limited to the campaign period only, Trump’s disintermediating campaign in 2016 would have been considered just another successful and innovative type of campaign. And, it would probably have been studied alongside Obama’s 2012 big data exploitation or Howard Dean’s early use of the Internet in 2004. Crucially, though, this disintermediation did not stop after the election, and Trump’s communication has never become “presidential”. President Trump simply continued his permanent campaign style of communication, based on his personal Twitter account. First as a candidate and later as president, he has instinctively understood the power of disintermediation that allows him to speak directly to a wide audience, in a process which is slavishly amplified by the mass media. About a decade ago, it would have been impossible to reach such a large number of citizens in this way. Statistics from the time of Trump’s campaign, however, already showed a complete penetration of social media in the United States among all ages (Gottfried & Shearer, 2016).Think of the disruptive force of Uber and the taxi industry. In politics too, it’s all about cutting out the middleman and allowing consumers/voters to choose someone who responds to long-held grievances that for years have been fobbed off by parties that have claimed voter loyalty, but at the same time stuck to agendas that served the interests of their donors (…) Trump also treats GOP orthodoxy with contempt.
A good way to start measuring a president’s disintermediating communication is to look at the variation among the presidents in the forums they choose to answer reporters’ questions. Considering the last four presidents at the two-year mark, we see the choices that presidents now have in the venues where they meet reporters. Yourish and Lee (2019) measured Trump’s administration press briefings on a month-by-month basis. They found that “White House press briefings during the Trump administration have gone from must-see TV to practically canceled after just two seasons” and that “President Trump said on Twitter that he told Ms. Sanders ‘not to bother’ with briefings anymore because ‘the press covers her so rudely and inaccurately’”.
Martha Joynt Kumar, the director of the White House Transition Project, analyzed the frequencies of press briefings and found that 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” (Yourish & Lee, 2019).
Table 1.1 summarizes the total number of presidential press briefings per year (all formats included). The findings are self-explanatory: since Bill Clinton’s presidency, the yearly average has significantly dropped and under President Trump is less than a third of what it was under Clinton’s administration. In his first two years, Obama’s administration held 336 conferences, under George W. Bush’s there were 289, in the first two years of Clinton’s administration 409. In 2017 and 2018, only 179 presidential press briefings were held.
Table 1.1
Average number of presidential press briefings per year (1993–2018)
I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | Total | Yearly average | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bill Clinton (1993–2000) | 241 | 168 | 313 | 311 | 314 | 337 | 301 | 241 | 2378 | 297.25 |
George W. Bush (2001–2008) | 180 | 109 | 119 | 95 | 146 | 156 | 192 | 179 | 1179 | 147.37 |
Barack Obama (2009–2016) | 191 | 145 | 145 | 96 | 157 | 148 | 155 | 145 | 1280 | 160 |
Donald Trump (2017–2018) | 131 | 48 | 179 | 89.5 |
The picture gets even clearer if we consider only the presidential solo press conferences held in the first two years. Table 1.2 summarizes data for the past 42 years: President Trump, with only 3 solo press conferences in 24 months, is far lower than his predecessors. George H.W. Bush leads this chart with 56 solo press conferences, followed by Jimmy Carter with 40. It is true that also Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were not great fans of such kind of press meeting (9 and 7 solo press conferences, respectively), but Trump’s numbers are way below Obama’s (17 solo meetings with press in his first two years of administration) and Clinton’s (27).
Table 1.2
Number of presidential solo press conferences in president’s first two years in office (1976–2018)
First year | Second year | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
Carter | 22 | 18 | 40 |
Reagan | 6 | 3 | 9 |
George H. W. Bush | 27 | 29 | 56 |
Clinton | 11 | 16 | 27 |
George W. Bush | 4 | 3 | 7 |
Obama | 7 | 10 | 17 |
Trump | 1 | 2 | 3 |
Obviously, reducing the number of solo press conferences is a strategy to avoid a direct confrontation with reporters, with potentially “dangerous” questions and not to have the president’s messages filtered by journalists. So, how does President Trump communicate? He communicates like candidate Trump, through his Twitter account, by-passing any media filters, completely disintermediating his communication.
For nearly a decade, la...