The President and the Press: Obama Style

In his first 100 days, Barack Obama has demonstrated how a chief executive can use the basic communications tools of the presidency and fashion them to a size and shape to fit his needs.

To explain his ambitious policy agenda, Obama has gone to the public more frequently than his predecessors and used news organizations as a vehicle to get his thoughts, words, and image to his intended audiences.

Television has been a crucial resource; the five major national television networks have interrupted their regular evening programming to provide the president with three one-hour slots for his two nighttime press conferences and his address on the economy to a joint session of the Congress. None of his five most recent predecessors held even one nighttime East Room news conference in the 100-day period. All of Obama's evening events drew large audiences. The Nielsen Co. estimated that those events had a low of 37.8 million viewers for the noon time inauguration to a high of 52.4 million for his congressional appearance on Feb. 24. His two evening news conferences fell between those two points. On a daily basis, cable television networks regularly carry Obama's speeches at home and abroad.

Like his predecessors, Obama has regularly responded to reporters' queries. Although he has calibrated them somewhat differently than did his predecessors, Obama uses the three traditional types of presidential interchanges with reporters: presidential news conferences, short question and answer sessions, and interviews with individual and groups of reporters. Obama has held 12 news conferences, six solo ones and six with foreign leaders. His predecessors held similar sessions, with President Clinton having more (13) with four solo and nine joint appearances, most of which were with visiting foreign dignitaries. President George W. Bush had fewer than both presidents with five, two solo and three joint ones with foreign leaders.

Most presidents hold several sessions a week with reporters where they respond to one or two questions thrown at the chief executive. Typically, these informal exchanges are held in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, the Rose Garden, or similar venues around the White House compound. Clinton held 82 short question-and-answer sessions and George W. Bush had 53 in his first 100 days in office. Obama has held only 18 of them. Instead of answering questions of the moment posed in these sessions, Obama prefers interview sessions where he talks to individual reporters or a group of them. In his 26 interviews with news organizations, Obama has met with a wide range of reporters, including journalists from ethnic news organizations, talk radio, all the major television networks, elite newspapers, as well as three group sessions with reporters working for 33 regional and local newspapers. Clinton and George W. Bush held only eight and 17 interview sessions respectively.

In interchanges with reporters, Obama calls on a broad range of questioners, from those working for online publications, such as the Huffington Post, ethnic and specialty press, as well as reporters for the major television networks, who are carrying his image to an attentive public.


Martha Joynt Kumar is a professor of political science at Towson University, and the author of several books on presidential communications, including her most recent work, "Managing the President's Message: The White House Communications Operation." She is the director of the White House Transition Project.