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The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the president can depend on the
national media to convey his messages from his speeches to the American public. In particular, I
examine coverage of 548 specific presidential messages from two national newspapers -- the
New York Times and the Washington Post -- to determine how often the media will carry these
messages to the American public as well as what factors influence whether a particular
presidential message is reported. Based on this analysis, I find that the newspapers examined
report only a small portion of the president’s messages.
Literature Review
In an article first published in 1981 and reprinted in 1987, Ceaser, Thurow, Tulis, and
Bessette described the rise of the rhetorical presidency from the 1800s when occupants of the
Oval Office infrequently addressed the public on policy issues to the 1900s when presidents
came to feel that “they were not effective leaders unless they constantly exhorted the public”
(1987, p. 4). To a large extent, this article began an explosion of research regarding presidential
rhetoric by both political scientists and speech communication specialists. Despite a growing
literature, there has been little empirical, quantitative work on the power of presidential rhetoric,
however. As Stuckey and Antczak (1998) assert in their review of this literature, “scholars have
been far better at applying and extrapolating the insights of the early work on the rhetorical
presidency than they have been at deriving empirical tests of it, whether using qualitative or
quantitative methods” (p. 424).
One area of research regarding presidential rhetoric that has been characterized by
quantitative analysis surrounds the question of whether presidential rhetoric can influence public
Convention