Obama presidency and the media - Essay Example

In this respect, managing the president’s message is of paramount importance to the White House’s communications operations because it inevitably determines how the message is perceived both internally and externally, how it is interpreted, thereby influencing its outcomes respectively. This paper is an update chapter to Martha Joynt Kumar’s “Managing the president's message”, examining how the Obama administration has coped with new media and traditional media, and the effectiveness of the administration in conveying its message.

Additionally, the paper comments on how the old and new media have covered the Obama presidency from the perspective of a news consumer on the premises of whether or not one can make judgment or take action based upon the information received by the news media. Out of seven US presidents in the period following World War II including Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and George W Bush developed effective communications operations because both the presidents and their staff understood the significance of explaining to the public the administration’s priorities and strategies that promoted their achievement (Kumar 1).

Unlike these five heads of state, Republican George H W Bush and Democrat Jimmy Carter, the two chief executives who had minimal interest in presidential communications since they did not consider them as fundamental aspects of their presidency, had a lot of difficulty winning support of legislators and the public on many issues. The four basic functions of the presidential communications operations include advocating, explaining, defending, and coordinating on behalf of the chief of state; how effectively the communications operations carry out these functions depends on various factors.

These include the nature of what the administration is trying to sell, the chief executive’s communication competence, organizational components of the communications operation; most importantly, the organization of the communications operations needs central control, an infrastructure that satisfies the ever-large news reporters need for news, and a team of communications staff that has vast knowledge of reporters’ routines. The single most important benchmark for effective communications operations is the nature of policies and effective performances of the administration that is trying to sell them since even if the communications operations is so good at what it does, it cannot function on a backdrop of weak policy or weak implementers.

Like his predecessors, the US president Barrack Obama also regularly communicates with his fellow citizens to inform them of his administration’s plans, decisions, as well as stand points on both global and domestic policy issues as need may dictate, but through new media. Coping with new and traditional media The Obama presidency values the significance of an effective communications operations mechanism for the effective delivery of his messages and, unlike all other presidents who have also longed to reach the people directly, bypassing the big national news agencies, the Obama presidency has taken this quest to extreme heights altogether with his thorough disdain of the media (Rubin).

The Obama presidency has shunned mainstream media, and while he engages with both print and broadcast media every day, the chief of state together with his staff