Abstract
The 2016 US presidential election and the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency have made the drastically widening divide between contemporary presidents and the institution of the professional press abundantly clear. The cycle featured Trump’s attacks on the press from the campaign trail, in addition to the future president’s savvy use of social media platforms such as Facebook to appeal directly to his supporters. While the president’s attacks on the press were worrying from a democratic perspective, the various chapters in Stephanie A. Martin’s edited volume Columns to Characters: The Presidency and the Press Enter the Digital Age remind us that there is a time-honored state of tension between the president and the press. Inherent in this is the perpetual clash between presidents’ desire for approval and journalists’ orientation toward conflict and controversy.
This is a volume grounded in analysis of presidential communication yet sweeping in its insights. Columns to Characters provides a compelling lens onto our “contemporary moment of seeming digital chaos” (p. xxxiii). The various contributors proceed both chronologically and thematically, offering up a deep understanding of the evolving relationship between the presidency and the press. And, although the chapters were written before Trump took office, many are deeply prescient of the dynamics that marked the 2016 campaign cycle. Indeed, Martin prefaces the book with a section titled “On Trump” that documents the ways these chapters foreshadowed Trump’s strategic use of social media to appeal directly to American voters while simultaneously attempting to delegitimize the press.
To take an example, Jennifer R. Mercieca makes a compelling argument for a shift in the contemporary relationship between the press and the president toward what she calls the “postrhetorical presidency.” The idea of the “rhetorical presidency” was popularized in the 1980s to describe the transition of the object of presidential rhetoric from governmental bodies to the public and from congressional persuasion to popular persuasion. The theory reflected scholars’ understanding of how presidents communicated in the media system of the 20th century, particularly with respect to the institutional press. Mercieca argues, however, that the rhetorical presidency was a casualty of the rise of digital and social media technologies. The idea of the “postrhetorical presidency” captures the fact that the president’s bully pulpit has become the “social pulpit,” which requires administrations to harness the power of social networks in order to cultivate intimacy with the public (p. 219). In this era, the professional press loses its historical position as the first to know, which in turn threatens its normative role in democracy. Even more, as presidential candidates and administrations have continued to seek more control over their own messaging, their relationships with the press have changed from complementary and cooperative to volatile and competitive, with many candidates and leaders choosing to sidestep professional journalists to distribute their own messages to the people.
Importantly, the various contributors in Columns to Characters clearly reveal that none of this began with Trump. Mercieca’s own case study was the second term Obama administration’s roll out of a new immigration policy. In the afterword, Jon Meachem reminds us that even early American presidents, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were frustrated with press coverage. Meachem’s central message is that our own moment is “but a chapter in a long story” rather than “an entirely new saga” (p. 235). Yet Meachem, along with other voices in this book, reveal how technological change and increased fragmentation and polarization have important effects on the relationship between the president and the press.
To take two examples, chapters written by Stephen A. Smith and Tony Pederson take up the role of digital communication in the modern presidency in differing ways. Smith notes, like Meachem in the afterward, that tensions between the president and the press are nothing new; in fact, the media’s desired stories and the president’s desired messages often do not align, making conflict almost inevitable. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election and the controversy surrounding WikiLeaks’s release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Pederson’s questions surrounding the legal and ethical intricacies of reporting on leaks have never been more timely. Pederson tracks the debate surrounding journalists’ legal rights to withhold information about sources, beginning with the imagined role of press independence during the period of the country’s founding, moving into Branzburg v. Hayes, and ending with various post-9/11 cases that have complicated this issue. Pederson’s chapter is framed around the argument that leaks have long constituted an important part of the give and take between the government and the media, allowing journalism to serve in its normative role as the fourth estate.
One of the features that is innovative about Columns to Characters is the inclusion of “Reality Check” sections, in which journalism professionals and political practitioners contribute practical and normative insights drawn from their experiences with the White House. Martin argues that “theories can only tell us so much” about practitioners’ true experiences, and these sections contribute much to our understanding of the struggle between the press and the president (p. xxxiii). They make for engaging reading and offer a potential model for scholarship that seeks to truly incorporate the voices of practitioners in our theories and empirical findings about the contemporary press.
We believe this is particularly important in an era when communication and history scholars, political scientists, and sociologists seem more intent than ever about understanding presidential communication and its relationship to the fourth estate. As such, Columns to Characters offers an invaluable communication framework for understanding contemporary politics more broadly. While the volume pays little attention to political scientists’ concern with the structural variables that shape electoral and policy outcomes, or the attitudes, identities, and emotions that political psychologists dwell upon, collectively the scholars in this volume offer a powerful set of insights into contemporary political communication. Mercieca’s idea of the “postrhetorical presidency,” for instance, suggests that Trump’s overt disparagement of the press on the campaign trail and in his first year as president—including calling journalists “the enemy of the American people” and calling into question the trustworthiness of mainstream media—may be a routine feature of presidential communication going forward, allowing leaders to employ Twitter accounts and speeches as a means of bypassing the media filter altogether. At the same time, as these scholars show, presidents and the press continue to participate in a delicate balance of powers, albeit one shaped by changing media technologies and political currents. As the book’s final words impart, capturing the fundamentally contested dynamics between presidencies and the press, “so it has been from the beginning, and so, I think, it shall always be” (p. 237).