Even in today's fragmented media environment, the president still has the power to lead the debate on income inequality

The election of Donald Trump has reaffirmed that presidents are still able to lead the news agenda in the US. But, can presidents use this power to lead debates towards legislative fixes in important policy areas? In new research that examines 14 years of presidential news coverage, Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha and Ronald J. McGauvran find that presidential attention appears to have ..

Presidential influence over the systemic agenda

Abstract One of the most widely accepted sources of presidential power is agenda setting. Being able to affect the media's agenda on key issues-influencing the systemic agenda and "expanding the scope of conflict"-has enormous consequences for the president's ability to govern effectively. Yet the literature to date has not conclusively determined the extent to which presidents consistently set agendas, especially over the media, because it has not explicitly considered variation in agenda-setting influence by policy type. For these reasons, we test whether presidential public statements have increased the media's attention to three policy areas. Using Vector Autoregression (VAR) analysis, we demonstrate that presidents have some influence over the systemic agenda, at least in the short term, with policy type being an important predictor of presidential influence. Understanding when and why presidents may or may not be successful agenda setters is crucial to explaining the varying legislative impacts of presidential speech making. Agenda setting has long been viewed as a vital source of power in American politics. Whoever controls the agenda affects which issues are debated, how they are framed, and who may participate. Much work on agenda setting holds unequivocally that presidents have this power, and that they are uniquely situated to affect the national agenda. John Kingdon (1984, 25), in his seminal study on Washington agenda setting, maintained that "no other single actor in the political system has quite the capability of the president to set agendas." Baumgartner and Jones (1993, 241) surmised, "no single actor can focus attention as clearly, or change the motivations of such a great number of other actors, as the president." After all, these scholars assert that Congress, the public, and the news media regularly look to presidents for leadership on the nation's most pressing issues. Presidential influence over agenda setting arguably increases the president's ability to govern effectively. If the president dictates the issues that Congress debates each legislative session, he is more likely to succeed on his top legislative prioritie

Presidential Leadership of Television and Newspaper Coverage Through Press Conferences

Does presidential leadership of the news through press conferences extend to both television and newspaper coverage? Presidents speak directly to reporters during their press conferences, and it is likely that both newspapers and television news cover them. Despite important differences between television and newspaper coverage of politics, however, we do not know whether newspapers and television cover the president\u27s press conferences, how this coverage differs, and what these differences mean for presidential leadership of the news. Theoretically, journalistic professionalism and the profit incentive of news media predict that newspapers and television will cover press conferences, particularly those held in Washington, DC Using plagiarism detection software to create similarity scores between the text of the president\u27s press conference and subsequent news coverage, I find that although both media cover press conferences, newspapers devote much more coverage to primetime conferences, a finding that has important implications for the president\u27s leadership of the news media

Local newspaper coverage of the presidency.

Scholarly research says much about national news coverage of the presidency. But there has been little exploration into local news coverage of the presidency, with much research focusing on presidential campaigns or a small subset of presidential news, his local visits. Based on a sample of 288 stories taken from 1995 of the Bill Clinton and 2003 of the George W. Bush administrations, I answer the following questions: What explains the amount of local newspaper coverage of the presidency and what influences the likelihood that local newspapers will cover the presidency, daily? Support for the president, corporate ownership, newspaper resources, and the location of the story itself affect the amount of local newspaper coverage of the president and the likelihood that a newspaper will publish a story on the presidency

How Policy Conditions the Impact of Presidential Speeches on Legislative Success

Although the impact of the president's rhetoric on public opinion remains unfound, it appears to increase the president's success in Congress. This article argues that instead of moving public opinion, presidential speeches act as informational cues for legislators and holds that the impact of the president's public speeches in Congress is conditional on the salience and complexity of the policy voted on by Congress. Copyright (c) 2010 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

UNT Speaks Out

This presentation is part of the faculty lecture series UNT Speaks Out on the 2012 Presidential Primaries. In this presentation, the author gives the audience an overview of the structure of the primaries, and provides a recap of past primaries. The author also speaks about the money, momentum, and media attention in the primaries