The State of the Union Address and the Press Agenda *

For national news, one of the major sources of this daily flow of news is the president, the nation’s number one newsmaker. Being a major source of news places the president in a strategic position to influence the agenda of the news media and the agenda of the public. Every U.S. president prior to the Civil War sought to make sure that he had a sympathetic newspaper to which he could feed information. Abraham Lincoln broke this tradition by relying not upon a particular newspaper, but instead relying heavily upon the new Associated Press. His perspective was national.