Measuring the efficacy of the weekly presidential radio address

Résumé du document

The first presidential radio address in United States history was delivered by President Warren G. Harding on June 14th, 1922. He delivered a speech in Baltimore, MD and it was broadcasted by WEAR (now WFBR). Perhaps more historic than this was the first official radio address delivered in 1921 regarding the recent election results. Equally important was the first annual address delivered by President Calvin Coolidge in 1923. This innovation established a continuing tradition of regularly scheduled addresses that were meant to inform the public about the President's agenda. However, it was not until the year 1933 that the official presidential weekly radio address was truly popularized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR captivated the nation with his famous fireside chats that were delivered during nights, when families often gathered around the radio and could afford to spend some time actively listening to the presidential messages. Ever since then, U.S. presidents have given weekly addresses, though some (Nixon, Ford, Carter, H. Bush) chose to engage themselves in the tradition less than others (Reagan, Clinton, W. Bush). Nonetheless, presidents have realized the strategic potential of radio ever since the end of WWI, when the industry was officially commercialized and the market first began to flourish from coast to coast. It is plausible that radio will one day be rendered obsolete by the proliferation of the Internet and increasing reliance on television news, but these are topics that will discussed later in light of the research I have conducted.

Extraits

[...] revised late editions were not counted) and obviously unrelated searches were discarded wherever possible. The data is presented in the following section. Interpretation of Results As can be seen in the tables I have presented, there does not exist compelling evidence to suggest that the weekly radio addresses had any significant influence on the issues attended to by major media outlets. I have developed a quantifiable measure of the messages' effects in Table which measures the range between the difference of the mean value and standard deviation for a given issue. [...]

[...] All other values imply a correlation that is inconsequential. Thus, if we examine each issue during the weeks that President Bush's radio address discussed it and see where it falls along this measure, we should be able to determine if there was a significant effect due to his message. In the first case, for American competitiveness, we observe a positive correlation on Feb. 4th and negligible relationships on Feb. 25th and April 22nd. For Medicare prescription drug coverage, we observe a negative correlation on both Feb. [...]

[...] One might also be inclined to argue that the rise of the Internet has diminished the potential effectiveness of a radio message. However, a search on Lexis-Nexis within all major news publications for the phrase “weekly radio address” in the same sentence as either or “President” in between Jan. 20th and Jan. 19th yielded 1,251 results. This amounts to an average of 251 articles pertaining to his weekly radio address each year. Similarly, a search during Clinton's time in office yields 2,213 results. [...]

[...] Further analysis of why the radio addresses may be ineffective will be discussed later on in the paper. I will define agenda setting as the ability to tell the public not what to think, but what to think about. In this sense, a large number of newspaper articles devoted to health care will reflect a public concern to think about and discuss that given issue. This is a rational claim because if the public was more concerned about a different issue, their representatives would bring it to the attention of both Congress and the President, who in turn would act rationally and in an attempt to appeal to the median voter would answer the call to the public's concern. [...]

[...] To begin with, the weekly radio address utterly lacks drama. The importance of the regularity of these weekly speeches is paramount to understanding their inefficacy because countless studies have shown that there is a positive relationship between increased public attention (and often approval) and presidential drama (Ostrom and Simon). Thus, the absolute lack of spontaneity in the timing of the radio addresses could account for a great deal of the public's inattention to the messages being delivered. Furthermore, the radio addresses are delivered at 10:06 ET every Saturday morning this is arguably the slowest point of the week in terms of news coverage. [...]