Presidential Success in Communicating with the Public through Televised Addresses

One of the president's most conspicuous and potentially powerful uses of the bully pulpit is the televised address to the nation. With these addresses, the president has the opportunity to enter homes throughout America to speak to people directly, unfettered by the news media's questions, interpretations, and editing. The president's ability to speak to a nationwide audience has led many to believe the president has a disproportionate amount of power in leading the public and a subsequent advantage in working with other political actors. Televised addresses are often portrayed as the president's ultimate political weapon in shaping the nation's agenda, mobilizing public opinion, and building support for himself and the issue positions he espouses. Although the potential for televised addresses to influence public opinion is tremendous, there are formidable obstacles that stand in the way of the president's leading the public through national addresses (see Edwards and Wayne 1997, 115-20). One of the major challenges the president must overcome is communicating his message to a potentially inattentive audience. For a televised address to influence public opinion on particular issues or policies, the president not only must attract an audience to watch the address but he must also communicate his ideas and preferences to the public so that people are aware of them. In other words, if the president wants to influence public opinion on issues such as health care reform, an energy proposal, or a tax cut, people must be attentive enough to understand the issues the president is discussing. Only after the president has attracted an audience and has successfully conveyed to the public his preferences about an issue can he influence the public on that particular issue (see Salomon and Cohen 1978; Price and Zaller 1993). If a president has been successful at getting people to watch his address and in communicating his message to them, people will be able to "recall or remember the information after exposure" (DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach 1989, 314). The more successful a president is, the more people there will be who recall points from the speech and the more information people will recall. This article examines the president's success at using televised addresses to communicate his message to the public: How effective is the president at getting his message across to the public? With whom is he most effective? Why is the president more successful communicating his message to some rather than others? To answer these questions, this study looks at the points people remember from televised addresses. It examines the number of people who remember points from televised addresses, who the people are who remember the points, how people who remember points differ from those who do not, and why some people remember points from a speech while others do not. Examining People's Recall of Televised Presidential Addresses Although the president must attract an audience and communicate his message to the public for televised addresses to directly influence public opinion, studies have not examined the president's ability to communicate his message to the public. Studies measuring the influence of televised addresses on public opinion have implicitly assumed that because televised addresses receive extensive news coverage and are typically given during primetime hours on network television, audience attention and the president's ability to communicate his message to the public are constant and are not important variables in assessing the influence of televised addresses on public opinion (e.g., Mueller 1973; Ragsdale 1984, 1987; Simon and Ostrom 1989; Brace and Hinckley 1993; Cohen 1995). Yet, we know that the assumption that the audience is constant among televised addresses is not valid. Studies have examined the president's ability to attract an audience to watch televised addresses and have found that it is a more difficult feat for the president to accomplish than is usually recognized (Foote 1990; Baum and Kernell 1999; Welch 2000). …