Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age

Going public to gain support, especially through reliance on national addresses and the national news media, has been a central tactic for modern presidential public leadership. In Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age, Jeffrey E. Cohen argues that presidents have adapted their going-public activities to reflect the current realities of polarized parties and fragmented media. Going public now entails presidential targeting of their party base, interest groups, and localities. Cohen focuses on localities and offers a theory of presidential news management that is tested using several new data sets, including the first large-scale content analysis of local newspaper coverage of the president. The analysis finds that presidents can affect their local news coverage, which, in turn, affects public opinion toward the president. Although the post-broadcast age presents hurdles to presidential leadership, Going Local demonstrates the effectiveness of targeted presidential appeals and provides us with a refined understanding of the nature of presidential leadership.

Jeffrey E. Cohen is Professor of Political Science at Fordham University and was recently Visiting Senior Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He is the author of eleven books and monographs - including The Presidency in an Era of 24-Hour News - and more than fifty journal articles. Professor Cohen's areas of interest focus on American politics, especially the presidency and public policy.