The Limits of Presidential Agenda Setting: Predicting Newspaper Coverage of the Weekly Radio Address

Abstract

Beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1982, U.S. presidents have typically given a radio address every Saturday morning designed primarily to make news in the Sunday newspapers and on the Sunday news programs. A content analysis of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1982 to 2005 shows that coverage of the presidents' addresses has diminished over time both in terms of the percentage of radio addresses covered and the number of paragraphs directly citing the president. Positive predictors of coverage include presidential approval ratings and a foreign-policy topic. Negative influences on coverage include the number of addresses given by all presidents since Reagan, indicating a decreasing lack of novelty, and whether the speech occurred in an election year.

Toward a Fuller Understanding of the Echoing Press: Presidential Addresses and theNew York Times, 1933-2013

“…To put the distinctions among these three theories in the simplest possible terms, we can say that a typical agenda building study might be interested in the fact that both the president and the press are talking about a war, a typical indexing study might be interested in the fact that the press is reporting the president's pro‐war perspective to roughly the same extent as a foreign leader's antiwar perspective, and a typical echoing study might be interested in the extent to which the president and the press are both justifying the war in terms of “freedom” or “evil.” These distinctions are not always neatly drawn, of course. There are occasionally agenda building studies that track specific presidential quotes in a fashion that an echoing study might (e.g., Horvit, Schiffer, & Wright, ), or indexing studies that work at the level of the “theme” (e.g., Althaus, ) or “label” (e.g., Bennett et al, ) and are thus somewhat similar to echoing studies. And, because “echoing” is a common term, there are occasionally studies that use the word casually to describe the circulation of frames in relation to indexing or cascading activation (e.g., Rowling et al, ).…”