Abstract
During the ‘golden age’ of broadcasting, the three major television networks dominated the United States media landscape. In a 1986 book (Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership) written at what turned out to be the end of this era, Samuel Kernell described the leadership strategy of ‘going public’, in which presidents can use media – particularly television – to build popular support for their policy agendas and, thus, exert pressure on Congress to enact those agendas. Almost a quarter of a century later, Jeffrey E. Cohen has updated and revised Kernell’s theory by examining presidential leadership in the current environment of fragmented media and polarized political parties. His book, Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age, provides valuable new insights regarding how presidents can still use the mass media to build political capital – as well as what limits they now face in doing so.
The core of Cohen’s account is what he calls the ‘context theory’ of presidential leadership. He argues that presidents rationally adapt their leadership styles to the opportunity structures that they face. In the 1970s and early 1980s, for example, they responded to the dominance of the big three networks, the weakening of Congressional committee chairs, and the decline of party loyalties among citizens by speaking directly to the public through national television. By contrast, they have responded to partisan polarization and media fragmentation by redirecting their communication efforts at narrower targets such as their party bases, interest groups, and localities.
To provide evidence for his theory, Cohen analyzes local newspaper coverage of presidents and the effects of such coverage on public attitudes. At first glance, this ‘old media’ focus may strike readers as an odd approach to studying presidential leadership in a ‘post-broadcast age’. Anticipating the objection, the author demonstrates that local newspapers retain sizable audiences as well as at least some credibility among the public. Unlike local television news, they also offer considerable amounts of presidential coverage.
The first part of Cohen’s empirical case revolves around a pair of content analyses, one focusing in depth on a single year (2000) and the other covering a broader time frame (1990–2007). These analyses show that presidential activities such as speeches and radio addresses can influence both the quantity and the tone of the coverage that local newspapers devote to presidents. The most novel and provocative findings to emerge are the curvilinear relationships between the number of presidential speeches, on the one hand, and the quantity and tone of coverage, on the other: more speeches produce more coverage and greater negativity up to a certain point, but then additional speeches do just the opposite. The author interprets the results as evidence that presidents can distract the news media by flooding them with speeches.
Having shown that presidents can influence local newspaper coverage, Cohen then turns to the effects of such coverage on public attitudes. Here, he uses National Annenberg Election Study data from 2000 to show that the tone of local newspaper coverage influenced citizens’ feelings toward President Bill Clinton. In addition, he demonstrates that this influence depended on both the characteristics of the respondent and the nature of the newspaper. The author provides a persuasive theoretical explanation for why the effects of coverage should depend on the extent to which audience members follow politics, though his argument that citizens will see smaller newspapers as less credible than larger ones is less developed.
Taken together, Cohen’s analyses provide a strong case for his context theory of presidential leadership style. Each analysis suffers from its own data limitations, but the author addresses these limitations straightforwardly. He also provides an excellent model of triangulation by incorporating multiple methods and making creative use of diverse data sources (Chapter 2, which demonstrates presidents’ increasing attention to narrow audiences, is particularly noteworthy in this regard). Furthermore, his presentation of the analyses is both rigorous and accessible.
Cohen concludes by discussing media bias and presidential leadership. Addressing the former, he suggests that studying news tone is more useful than studying the slippier concept of bias. He then returns to the book’s central theme by offering a nuanced account of leadership style that highlights how presidents can influence the public in an environment characterized by media fragmentation and partisan polarization, but that also recognizes how the contemporary opportunity structure limits presidential influence. In and of itself, this account is a key contribution to the literature on the media and presidential politics. At the same time, Cohen’s theoretical framework suggests new directions for research that even the author himself does not fully consider. Although he focuses on one component of ‘going narrow’ – namely, ‘going local’ – his arguments regarding local newspaper coverage could help to explain how presidents use an array of other media to target subgroups among the public. Accordingly, researchers studying forms of ‘narrowcasting’ ranging from ideologically oriented cable television news to blogs might profit by drawing on Cohen’s context theory of presidential leadership.