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Once the Lexis-Nexis search engine identified articles containing the relevant keywords, I
read each piece to determine whether it was relevant to the president’s remarks. Only straight
news articles were included in my analysis. In other words, I did not count references to
presidential remarks from editorials, op-ed pieces, or letters to the editor. If an article was
relevant, I coded whether the president’s remarks were the main focus of the article or whether
they were only mentioned briefly as well as whether the article appeared on the front page of the
newspapers or was it buried somewhere inside. I also coded whether the president’s remarks
were reprinted in either of the newspapers examined.
Based on this simple procedure, I have identified a few interesting findings regarding the
coverage of the president’s messages in support of the 25 presidential initiatives included in my
sample. The percentage of presidential messages reported in the New York Times and
Washington Post are reported in Table 1. As these numbers demonstrate, only a relatively small
percentage of presidential messages are reported by the press. In particular, the New York Times
reported only 24 percent of the presidential messages analyzed while the Washington Post
reported only 26.6 percent. Plus, only 14.9 percent of the presidential messages examined were
reported in both newspapers on the same day. Based on these numbers, it appears that presidents
cannot depend on the media to convey every message from every speech.
The president’s ability to shape the coverage of his remarks seems even shakier when we
divide presidential messages that became the main focus of a given article from those messages
that were merely mentioned in an article on the president’s speech or on the president’s activities
from the previous day. Of the presidential messages reported by the New York Times, only 27.7
percent of these messages were the main focus of the Times’ coverage while only 16 percent of
Convention