The Presidency in the Era of 24-Hour News available in Paperback, eBook
The Presidency in the Era of 24-Hour News
- ISBN-10:
- 069113717X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691137179
- Pub. Date:
- 03/23/2008
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 069113717X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691137179
- Pub. Date:
- 03/23/2008
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
The Presidency in the Era of 24-Hour News
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Overview
This book carries far-reaching implications for the future of presidential governance and American democracy in the era of new media.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691137179 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/23/2008 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Presidency in the Era of 24-Hour News
By Jeffrey E. Cohen Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13717-9
Chapter One The Growing Disconnect between Presidential News Coverage and Public Opinion
The news media are no longer as consequential in helping to frame public opinion toward the president as they were a generation ago. This decline in the impact of news media on public opinion about the president is puzzling given the increasing access to news because of such developments as the 24/7 cable news networks and the internet. The aims of this book are to address this puzzle-the declining impact of news on public evaluations of the president-and to provide an explanation that accounts for it.
This initial chapter serves two purposes. First, I demonstrate that news coverage of the president over the past quarter century or so does not affect public attitudes toward the president as much as it did during the previous twenty years. To demonstrate this point, I first turn to the three great scandals of the modern presidency, Clinton-Lewinsky, Iran-Contra, and Watergate. Each episode produced large volumes of negative news, but for a variety of reasons, negative news seemed not to touch Bill Clinton as deeply as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan.
Then, using more systematic data, I show that for the period beginning roughly in the mid to late 1970s, no correlation exists between the negativity of presidential news andpublic approval of the president. This stands in sharp contrast to the twenty-five years prior, roughly the late 1940s until the mid 1970s, when there was a strong correlation between the tone of presidential news and presidential approval-a negative tone is associated with lower approval. Why did the correlation between news coverage and public approval seemingly vanish?
The second task of this chapter is to introduce an explanation to account for this disconnect between the tonality of news and presidential approval. My argument, briefly, is that the presidential news system-the web of relationships among the president, the news media, and the mass public-has evolved in such a way that news coverage about the president no longer resonates so strongly with the mass public. Moreover, these changes in the presidential news system also affect the nature of presidential leadership, which has consequences for the larger political system. The chapters that follow document the evolution of the presidential news system and detail the implications of this evolution for American politics and governing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
Three Scandals and the Public Response
The Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal
By almost any standard of presidential scandal, 1998 was a horrible year for the sitting president. On January 19, 1998, the internet site, the Drudge Report, mentioned that Newsweek magazine was sitting on a story that President Clinton had an affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. In the ensuing days, the mainstream news media began to run stories on the allegations. This set off the political firestorm that was to become the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which led to the impeachment of President Clinton.
Impeachment proceedings began formally on December 11, 1998, when, after many months of investigation and hearings, the House Judiciary Committee voted on several impeachment resolutions and sent four articles of impeachment to the House. The House voted to proceed with impeachment on December 19, and the impeachment trial began in the Senate on January 7, 1999. It continued until February 12, when votes on the articles of impeachment were taken, with the president acquitted. On all counts, the vote broke narrowly in Clinton's favor, as Democrats stood steadfast behind him, while from five to ten Republicans also supported his acquittal on the various votes.
From January 1998 until his acquittal, Clinton received a steady stream of bad press. Clinton was known for having bad relations with the press (Kurtz 1998), but the degree of press negativity escalated to new heights during 1998 and early 1999. Thomas Patterson (2000) has collected some data that gives us a sense of the tone or valence of news in 1998 compared to other years. Patterson randomly sampled five thousand news stories from Lexus-Nexus from 1980 through 1998. These data cast a wide net beyond stories on the presidency, and the number of presidential stories per year is modest, which precludes making definitive statements about news coverage of the presidency. Yet because of the long time span and the random selection of stories, we can gather a sense of the comparative tone of news reporting on the presidency across these nearly two decades.
Figure 1.1 traces the percentage of news stories about the president and various administrations from 1980 that Patterson coded "clearly negative" or "more negative than positive." As the figure demonstrates, 1998 stood out in the degree of negative news reports. Only 1987, the year of the Iran-Contra scandal, produced a higher percentage of negative stories. Even 1994, the year of Clinton's ill-fated health care initiative, itself a bad press year for Clinton at 58 percent, is still less negative than 1998 by nearly 10 percent.
What is so remarkable about these figures is not that Clinton received so much bad press in 1998, but that his job approval polls rose that year. As figure 1.2 shows, Clinton's polls spiked upward in early 1998, as the scandal became public, reaching a high note in February 1998 at 67 percent (based on averaging the Gallup polls of that month). His polls deteriorated somewhat thereafter, sliding to 60 percent by June 1998, but recovered to 65 by the end of the year, reaching a peak of 73 percent in Gallup's December 19-20, 1998, reading. According to Gallup, on February 12, 1999, the day of the Senate vote, Clinton's poll ratings stood at a lofty 68 percent.
We must be careful not to conclude that the scandal helped the president's polls. In a careful analysis, Brian Newman (2002) finds that the scandal depressed Clinton's polls. He estimates (796) that in February 1998, Clinton lost 1.2 points due to the scandal and that poll losses accumulated over the year, cumulating in a 7 percent loss by February 1999. Shah et al. (2002) also find that news about the scandal hurt the president, with the type of scandal news making a difference. While scandal stories that mentioned the president drove Clinton's poll numbers down, stories about his opponents, for instance, Ken Starr, and stories framed as strategic moves by conservatives against the president had the opposite effect, uplifting his polls. Despite the volume of negative press that he received, Clinton was helped during the scandal by the even greater share of negative news about his adversaries, such as Ken Starr. Other aspects of public opinion, in particular likes and dislikes, also sometimes called favorability, also declined across 1998 (Cohen 1999a, 1999b, 2000).
Overall, Clinton's polls weathered the storms of 1998 and early 1999 quite successfully. Despite the depressing effects that bad news seems to have had (Newman 2002, Shah 2002), Clinton's aggregate poll ratings remained quite high throughout the year. That Clinton's ratings hovered in the 60-70 percent band through the year in a relatively steady pattern suggests that other factors, such as economic performance (Newman 2002) and countervailing news stories that cast the president's antagonists in a poor light offset the negative effects of the scandal on the president's polls. In other words, it appears that scandal news did not dominate thinking about the president (Popkin 1998) despite its volume and tone.
Watergate
The public response to the Clinton scandal and news about the president during 1998 differs considerably from the public response to the other two major scandals of the modern era, Watergate and Iran-Contra. The Watergate scandal, which led to Richard Nixon resigning from the presidency on August 9, 1974, began nearly three years earlier, in September 1971, when Daniel Ells-berg's doctor's office was broken into. Several months later, on January 17, 1972, Washington police were called when the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate complex was burglarized. Yet, the scandal did not become a public concern until August 1, 1972, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein published their first article in the Washington Post tying the break-ins to the administration. We can mark August 1972 as the beginning of the public phase of the Watergate scandal, which ended two years later with Nixon's resignation.
Figure 1.3 plots Nixon's approval polls by month, beginning with January 1972 and ending with his resignation in August 1974. Consistent with the idea that little bad news about the scandal was aired during the remainder of 1972, we see in figure 1.3 that the president's polls remained essentially flat, hovering in the 60 percent range.
However, negative news began to accumulate as events related to the scandal became more common and as Watergate became a major news story. In a content analysis of presidential news in the New York Times from 1949 to 1992, Lyn Ragsdale found that in 1973 and 1974 more than 50 percent of the news that the president received could be coded as negative. This was 20 percent more bad news than any president had received up to that time. Moreover, the volume of Watergate news was quite heavy. Ostrom and Simon (1989, 365) estimate that the New York Times ran Watergate-related front page stories on 74.6 percent of days between March 23, 1973, and August 9, 1974, the day Nixon resigned. The effects of the bad news are easily apparent in figure 1.3. After reaching a poll reading of 65 percent in January 1973, Nixon's polls slid steadily over the next twelve months, touching 25 percent by January 1974. His polls never broke 30 percent thereafter. In contrast to Clinton, whose polls rose during his scandal-ridden year, Nixon's sank, and sank deeply, as one would naturally expect.
Iran-Contra
Ronald Reagan's travails in 1986 and 1987, during the Iran-Contra scandal, also seemed to follow the classic story of a major scandal harming presidential approval ratings. On November 21, 1986, the Justice Department began an investigation of the National Security Council (NSC) over charges that money from an arms sale to Iran were diverted to the Nicaraguan Contras, in violation of federal law. Unlike Nixon, who stonewalled the Watergate investigators, Reagan took swift action once the Justice Department revealed that it held documentary evidence of the Iran-Contra connection, which consisted of a memo by NSC staffer Oliver North.
On November 26, President Reagan convened an independent commission, to be headed by former Senator John Tower (R-Texas), to investigate the allegations, and in mid December the Senate set its own committee to investigate the Iran-Contra affair. The Tower commission submitted its report to the president in late February 1987, criticizing the president for not controlling his NSC staff. In July, the major Iran-Contra participants, Oliver North and John Poindexter, testified before Congress, and in November, Congress issued a report critical of the president. Unlike Watergate and Lewinsky, Congress declined to take further action against the president. Although this ended Iran-Contra as a major news story, its effects on presidential approval persisted for some time afterward.
Figure 1.4 plots Reagan's polls from his second inaugural (January 1985) through the end of his second term. The plot shows a sharp decline in Reagan's approval from 63 percent in October 1986 to 45 percent by March 1987. Ostrom and Simon (1989, 377) estimate that Iran-Contra depressed Reagan's polls by about 12.5 percentage points and that the effects of Iran-Contra persisted well into 1987. Reagan's polls stayed flat, ranging between 40 and 50 percent until late 1988, and only began to rise to the upper 50 percents near the end of his term.
Despite Reagan's label, the "Teflon president," to whom no bad news would stick, news seemed quite negative toward Reagan during this two-year span. Patterson's Lexis-Nexis data (figure 1.1) indicate a bad news spike in 1987 that rivals 1998. Ragsdale's data also indicate a high volume of negative news (figure 1.5). By her count, about 52 percent of news stories in the New York Times were negative in 1987 compared to 26 percent the year before and 29 percent the year after. Ostrom and Simon (1989, 365) report that the Times ran front page stories about Iran-Contra on 76 percent of days from November 8, 1986, and August 31, 1987, a volume similar to that for Watergate. Again we have some circumstantial evidence that a scandal led to bad news, which seemed to affect presidential polls.
This presents us with a puzzle: Why didn't the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment hurt Bill Clinton's standing with the public more than it did? Although one may argue that Reagan defused the Iran-Contra scandal by admitting responsibility and taking action, Reagan's poll loss of 12.5 points (Ostrom-Simon 1989 estimate) resembles Nixon's poll loss from Watergate (16-17 percent, Newman 2002) more than the 6-7 percent loss that Newman (2002) estimates Clinton suffered. One may even claim that Clinton's stonewalling resembled Nixon's behavior in the face of scandal. Another distinguishing factor is that Congress refused to take any action against Reagan, unlike the impeachment processes that targeted Nixon and Clinton. By refusing to act against Reagan, Congress may have minimized the damage done to Reagan in the public's eyes. Still, it is puzzling that Clinton did not suffer more with the public than he did.
This book is not an attempt to understand public reactions to these three scandals. They serve merely as illustrations of the larger point that I will try to make, that the structure of the relationships between the president, the news media, and the public fundamentally changed during the years from the mid to late 1970s to the present. News during this period may not have had as big of an impact on public thinking toward the president as it had during the two decades or so before.
First let us review some of the more common explanations for the relatively mild public reaction to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. As I will show, while each makes a useful point, none can account for the differing public reaction across these three major scandals.
The Lewinsky Scandal: Explanations of the Public Reaction
The Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment of Bill Clinton stand in sharp contrast to the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals. Where presidential approval fell during the two earlier scandals, Bill Clinton's polls rose in the aggregate. And even if we prefer Newman's (2002) finding that the scandal depressed Clinton's polls, it did so less severely than Nixon's and Reagan's poll losses as a result of Watergate and Iran-Contra.
Many theories have been offered to account for Clinton's ability to weather the storm of scandal and congressional attack in 1998. As the literature is voluminous, here I only address the major explanations, which can be roughly categorized into accounts that look at presidential character and the public response, the policy success of the Clinton administration, and public disdain for the news media's reporting of the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment.
First, some argue that the public distinguishes between the public performance of president and the person in office and that the public does not care much about personal character. As Kagay argues, "The American public made an immediate distinction between Clinton the man on the one hand, and Clinton the president, on the other hand. People could be sharply critical of the man and his behavior even at the same time they thought that as president he was doing a pretty good job" (1999, 450-51). Zaller makes the point even more forcefully, "The public is, within broad limits, functionally indifferent to presidential character" (1998a, 188), and goes on to point out that the public elected Richard Nixon despite concerns that the public had with Nixon's character.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Presidency in the Era of 24-Hour News by Jeffrey E. Cohen
Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
List of Tables ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii
The Growing Disconnect between Presidential News Coverage and Public Opinion 1
The Presidential News System during the Golden Age of Presidential Television 18
The New Media Age and the Decline in Presidential News 49
Change in Presidential News over the Long Haul: The New York Times Historical Series, 1857-1998 71
The Increasing Negativity in Presidential News in the Age of New Media 89
Sources of Negativity in Presidential News during the Age of New Media 107
The Declining Audience for News and the New Media Age 135
Declining Trust in the News Media and the New Media Age 160
The Implications of the New Media on the Presidential News System and Presidential Leadership 175
Conclusions: The New Media, the Presidency, and American Politics 201
Notes 209
Bibliography 233
Index 251
What People are Saying About This
This is a stunning book on how the emergence of new media has transformed the president's place in our democracy. Jeffrey Cohen shows how the evolving nature of media stunts presidential power and causes the president to focus on narrow slices of citizens rather than the public at large. His findings accentuate the new challenges facing America's democracy in the twenty-first century.
— James N. Druckman, Northwestern University
This book tackles important issues in the relationship between the president, the media, and the public. It makes a provocative argument about how changes in the relationship between these three parties have affected the ability of the news to affect presidents and the ability of presidents to lead. The big picture of this book is really interesting and important.
— David E. Lewis, Princeton University
A very substantial contribution to the field. The conception of the interplay between the media system and the presidency that is provided by the author is more accurate than existing ones. This book should attract a fairly wide readership.
— Thomas E. Patterson, Harvard University
This book makes an important statement. I have seen no other recent book like it in terms of historical scope or nuanced understanding of the multiple factors that condition presidential communication in the age of new media. It has much to commend it to both scholarly and general audiences.
— Scott Althaus, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
"Jeff Cohen does an outstanding job of explaining how changes in the media fundamentally affect presidential leadership."—George C. Edwards III, Texas A&M University"This is a stunning book on how the emergence of new media has transformed the president's place in our democracy. Jeffrey Cohen shows how the evolving nature of media stunts presidential power and causes the president to focus on narrow slices of citizens rather than the public at large. His findings accentuate the new challenges facing America's democracy in the twenty-first century."—James N. Druckman, Northwestern University"A very substantial contribution to the field. The conception of the interplay between the media system and the presidency that is provided by the author is more accurate than existing ones. This book should attract a fairly wide readership."—Thomas E. Patterson, Harvard University"This book tackles important issues in the relationship between the president, the media, and the public. It makes a provocative argument about how changes in the relationship between these three parties have affected the ability of the news to affect presidents and the ability of presidents to lead. The big picture of this book is really interesting and important."—David E. Lewis, Princeton University"A very impressive piece of scholarship. Cohen addresses a very important question: how have changes in the way American citizens obtain political information, as well as changes in the nature of that information, influenced presidential governing strategies. Furthermore, the book is very well grounded theoretically."—David C. Barker, University of Pittsburgh"This book makes an important statement. I have seen no other recent book like it in terms of historical scope or nuanced understanding of the multiple factors that condition presidential communication in the age of new media. It has much to commend it to both scholarly and general audiences."—Scott Althaus, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Jeff Cohen does an outstanding job of explaining how changes in the media fundamentally affect presidential leadership.
— George C. Edwards III, Texas A&M University
A very impressive piece of scholarship. Cohen addresses a very important question: how have changes in the way American citizens obtain political information, as well as changes in the nature of that information, influenced presidential governing strategies. Furthermore, the book is very well grounded theoretically.
— David C. Barker, University of Pittsburgh