Governing from Center Stage: White House Communication Strategies during the Television Age of Politics.

Farnsworth, Stephen J.

By Lori Cox Han. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001. 290 pp.

Few books on the presidency and the news media are as ambitious in intent as Governing from Center Stage, in which Loft Cox Han seeks to present a comprehensive analysis of the public relations strategies of eight presidents (John F. Kennedy through Bill Clinton) during four decades of television-influenced politics. Han, an associate professor of political science at Austin College in Texas, builds her comparative analysis upon a wide range of evidence, including case studies, a thorough classification of public activities by each president, oral histories from leading government officials, and content analysis.

Summarizing four decades of television coverage of presidential governance in a single volume is a daunting task, particularly when one considers some of the other influential works that have examined this topic, most notably Larry Sabato's Feeding Frenzy (2000), Samuel Kernell's Going Public (1997), and Jeffrey Tulis's The Rhetorical Presidency (1987). Despite these challenges, Han's case study--reliant approach offers interesting insights on presidential media management.

Han is particularly effective in giving the reader a sense of each administration: how each approached media relations as well as how each sought to use White House reporters as tools to help convince Congress and the public to support the president's policies. Each administration is presented largely through the examination of the media management strategies employed to secure legislative support for two policy initiatives selected for close scrutiny.

The side-by-side comparisons allow readers to see how some administrations sought to repeat the media management successes of their predecessors and to avoid repeating previous mistakes. Han illustrates how particular media strategies were tailored to take advantage of the strengths of a given president: Reagan excelled at the prepared speech, while Kennedy was especially effective in the give-and-take of a press conference. Han also demonstrates how other efforts at media management backfired: George H. W. Bush was unusually accessible to the press, but his sometimes inarticulate comments tended to hurt, not help, his public standing.

Han examines only domestic policy initiatives before Congress because they are more likely to respond to presidential media strategies. In contrast, international policy matters are likely to represent presidential reaction to external events (rather than presidential initiative) and to be less subject to White House influence through media management. Limiting the discussion to domestic policies also helps mitigate the "apples and oranges" comparisons that sometimes afflict qualitative research across presidential administrations.

But this decision, defensible though it may be, does create a limit on the study of media influence in a significant way. Many of the presidents examined here (as well as George W. Bush, whose administration falls outside the scope of Han's study) gained and lost support with citizens and lawmakers because of how television presented their administrations during wars and international crises. For example, televised reports on Vietnam doomed Lyndon Johnson's hopes for reelection in 1968, while the televised (and government-censored) reports of the 1991 Gulf War helped boost President George H. W. Bush's approval ratings.

More discussion regarding why certain cases were selected for examination would have helped strengthen the argument. Why, for example, does the author concentrate on media coverage of Bill Clinton's 1994 anticrime bill rather than the 1993 budget agreement, the 1994 health care debacle, the 1995 to 1996 budget impasse that shut down the federal government, or the contentious 1996 welfare reform bill? All of these issues seem (on the surface at least) to be equally if not more significant illustrations of Clinton's media management skills.

Content analyzing network television newscasts, rather than articles from the New York Times, would have allowed for a more extensive analysis of television, the dominant media channel of the past four decades. Although the Times helps set the national media agenda, past content analysis research demonstrates important differences: network television news focuses more on the presidency and less on Congress than do newspapers.

In fact, the challenges facing administrations may be even worse than Han's evidence demonstrates. The rise of CNN and the Internet, as well as the recent growth of conservative talk radio and talk television, have dramatically complicated the media management efforts of recent presidents. A more extensive discussion of how presidents have sought to stay afloat during a rising tide of media could have offered further insights into the perennial White House struggles to handle reporters.

--Stephen J. Farnsworth

Mary Washington College

References

Kernell, Samuel. 1997. Going public. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly.

Sabato, Larry. 2000. Feeding frenzy. Baltimore: Lanham.

Tulis, Jeffrey. 1987. The rhetorical presidency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.