Abstract
The mediums of public communication available to presidents have changed substantially since Richard Neustadt first offered his often cited pronouncement—“Presidential power is the power to persuade” (Neustadt 1990: 11). So, too, has the political environment, with each recent president breaking their predecessor’s record high for partisan gaps in approval ratings (Dunn 2018). These developments offer both new opportunities and complications for presidents’ efforts to shape news coverage and public opinion.
Furthermore, the sometimes dizzying speed of technological developments makes meaningful comparisons of presidential news management across administrations difficult, let alone assessments of their varying effectiveness. And, amid a deeply polarized public, objective assessments of character and performance become both more challenging and more needed.
This is precisely the territory into which Stephen J. Farnsworth’s Presidential Communication and Character: White House News Management from Clinton and Cable to Twitter and Trump bravely and adeptly wades. Comparing and placing in context the news management efforts of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump amid the historical trajectory of presidential efforts to use emerging media technologies to shape news coverage and public opinion, the book makes a case that instead of sidestepping character debates, we need to bring character back to the center of focus. Farnworth argues that “. . . personality has become a key component of how presidents sell themselves and how the public evaluates presidents and presidential candidates. Character conversations also are how a president’s critics seek to undermine the president and the administration’s policy initiatives . . .” (p. 8). Thus, any examination of the effectiveness of presidential communication strategies in a new media environment cannot afford to sidestep how they are used to portray character.
In the opening chapter, Farnsworth marshals evidence that efforts to positively shape how citizens view the president’s character have always played an integral role in presidents’ communications strategies. The way presidents build support for their policies among the public is to build support for who they are as a person—their character. This emphasis also helps them gain more positive news coverage than would an emphasis on policy. How exactly they attempt to shape character portrayals to their advantage changes some with the media environment, with new media amplifying these efforts.
The middle chapters provide case studies of Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. They unfold following a similar structure: They begin with characterization of the news media environment during each presidency. As part of this, each chapter includes a snapshot and overview of the White House website and reports the results of contemporaneous Pew Research surveys on where Americans reported getting their news. The chapters then move into character analysis, focusing on applying various character models, including Barber’s (1992) to that president. The chapters then turn to the administration’s efforts to shape character portrayal (including international perspectives), a case study of a challenge in news management, and a discussion of the impact of the efforts to shape portrayals of the president’s character on the president’s legacy.
In a book covering four presidents in under two hundred pages, there is a tradeoff that must be made between breadth and depth. Those looking for rich analyses and detailed descriptions of how Clinton used cable television, Bush used Fox News, Obama used social media (including YouTube and BuzzFeed), and Trump used twitter in their efforts to shape the news—the focus of the book’s subtitle—will be disappointed. The parallel structure of the case study chapters seems confining at times, trading the opportunity for more depth for perfunctory and what seems at times like somewhat superficial analyses. Yet the purpose of sticking to this structure becomes strikingly evident and valuable in the chapter on President Trump—It enables an analysis of how his communication strategies and character evident in his first year of office compares with prior administrations on a series of objective measures. This comparison continues into the final chapter where Farnsworth concludes that while it is clear that Trump’s approach diverges widely from previous presidents in several respects, it remains to be seen whether it will turn out to be effective.
Anyone looking to pepper their lectures on political communication, the presidency, and the media with updated examples will find this a very useful read. So, too, will those struggling with how to objectively place President Trump’s unorthodox communication and news management style in context. Furthermore, Farnsworth writes the book in an engaging and accessible manner, and it could make a useful addition to the syllabus in courses on these topics.
Farnworth’s work reveals there is not a one size fits all approach to effective character communication; however, character will continue to be a central part of presidential communication and persuasion even as media environments continue to evolve. Recent evolutions, including cable television and social media, skew the president’s audience for these character communications toward their base, perhaps further exacerbating the size of the partisan gap in approval. Persuasion across this political divide may be harder, and it may have become increasingly about character rather than policy, but successful persuasion remains key to effectiveness.