Presidential Leadership, the News Media, and Income Inequality

• Published date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912917726602
• Date: 01 March 2018
• Author: Ronald J. McGauvran,Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912917726602

Political Research Quarterly

2018, Vol. 71(1) 157 –171

© 2017 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912917726602

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Article

Because they are perceived to be the top agenda-setters in

American politics, the interrelationship between news

media and the presidency has been a constant source of

scholarly examination. Although presidents had been

assumed to lead the national policy agenda (Baumgartner

and Jones 1993; Kingdon 1995), subsequent research

questioned these claims (Edwards and Wood 1999),

showing a greater and perhaps unexpected propensity for

media to lead the president’s agenda on foreign and some

domestic policy issues. That presidential responsiveness

to the news persists on issues of high importance, like the

economy (Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake 2005), suggests that

presidents have much difficulty leading the news, except

in instances when they are the first movers of a public

debate (Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake 2011).

The prospects for presidential leadership of the news

agenda are even more suspect in the post-broadcast age.

Mainstream news sources that increasingly eschew hard

in favor of soft news stories may undercut presidential

access to traditional news programs. Although the diver-

sity of available media choices that target an increasingly

fragmented news audience supplies presidents with more

options through which to communicate their policy agen-

das, these increased options, which also offer the public

more opportunity to ignore presidential politics (Prior

2007), may simultaneously limit presidents’ ability to

lead the news agenda through their public rhetoric. Given

that we know little about whether a more diverse news

media promote or hinder presidential leadership of the

news, we examine this important topic. Thus, the primary

purpose of this paper is to explore the interrelationships

between presidents and divergent media in the post-

broadcast age, in terms of both the amount (agendas) and

tone of coverage.

To manage studying the relationships between the

presidency and several news sources, we examine one

policy area—income inequality—a specific policy area

that has become increasingly important to presidential

politics and news coverage. Beginning with President

Clinton, who framed the 1990s economic boom as having

benefited some (but not all) Americans, the issue of

income inequality had become a prominent issue after the

2008 financial meltdown and corresponding presidential

election. The subsequent recession gave rise to not only

the Tea Party (Skocpol and Williamson 2012) and Occupy

Wall Street movements but has also generated interest

among popular news media and spurred new scholarship

(see Putman 2015), despite a lack of public consensus

that government policies should be used to remedy

726602PRQXXX10.1177/1065912917726602Political Research QuarterlyEshbaugh-Soha and McGauvran

research-article2017

1University of North Texas, Denton, USA

Corresponding Author:

Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, Department of Political Science, University

of North Texas, 125 Wooten Hall, 1155 Union Circle #305340,

Denton, TX 76203-5340, USA.

Email: mes@unt.edu

Presidential Leadership, the News

Media, and Income Inequality

Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha1 and Ronald J. McGauvran1

Abstract

Most research on media in the post-broadcast age of politics focuses on how media affect the public, not on the

interinstitutional relationships between the presidency and news media. This study tackles this important topic by

studying news coverage of and presidential attention to the issue of income inequality. We use web scraping and

text analysis software to build a dataset of weekly news coverage from 1999 through 2013, across traditional and

nontraditional media, including newspapers, broadcast and cable television transcripts, and online news websites.

The data show that presidential attention to income inequality influences the income inequality news agenda across

all sources except network television and affects the tone of newspaper coverage. Presidential influence of tone is

especially pronounced on income inequality issues that have an international focus. The implications of this paper are

significant not only for understanding how media and the presidency interact in the post-broadcast age but also for the

prospects for federal policies that may combat income inequality.

Keywords

presidency, media, news agenda, tone, income inequality