Using Sentiment Analysis to Evaluate Administration-Press Relations from Clinton Through Trump Joshua Meyer-Gutbrod and John Woolley

Home , Jim Acosta, White House press corps

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1763527

New Conﬂicts in the Brieﬁng Room: Using Sentiment Analysis to Evaluate Administration-press Relations from Clinton through Trump Joshua Meyer-Gutbrod and John Woolley

Department of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Journalists have argued that the high levels of hostility between American politics; executive President Trump and numerous media outlets have marked branch; media; presidency a critical juncture in presidential-press relations. This perceived conflict challenges a key expectation of literatures on political media and the presidency: that functional interdependence will encourage presidential administrations to tolerate more aggressive media questioning in an effort to control media messages. We examine the interactions between U.S. presidential administrations and the White House press corps through thirty-five years of press briefing transcripts to assess the underpinnings of the current shift. We evaluate key hypotheses via a sentiment analysis using the NRC Emotional Lexicon. Generally, each side tends to reinforce, or mirror, positive and negative language of the counterparty during press briefings. However, we find a significant disjunction with the Trump Administration. Trump Administration representatives use negative language at higher rates than previous administrations and respond more sensitively to changes in press tone by decreasing positive language in response to press negativity. We discuss implications for the dynamic role of the media in shaping these changes.

On November 7, 2018, the Trump Administration suspended the White House press pass of CNN Correspondent Jim Acosta, accusing Acosta of shoving a White House aide. Trump himself told Acosta, “You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn’t be working for CNN” (Trump, 2018b). Later, in the midst of litigation about the issue, the White House reinstated Acosta, after the media had characterized the Administration’s justiﬁcation as a lie (Wang & Farhi, 2018). For many observers, this incident was emblematic of the conﬂict between the Trump Administration and the media. President Trump and his allies have argued that the media has adopted a hostile stance toward his Administration (Bush, 2018; Grynbaum, 2017; Trump, 2018a). Journalists have decried these attacks as an assault on the First Amendment, expressing frustration with the perceived disdain for truth within the Trump Administration (Glasser, 2019). In making accusations, both the press and the Administration seem to recognize that a dramatic shift in presidential-media relations has occurred. It is generally agreed that the 1970s saw a similar shift, with an increase in aggressive media investigations and

CONTACT Joshua Meyer-Gutbrod [email protected] Department of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9420 Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’swebsiteat https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1763527. © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 2 J. MEYER-GUTBROD AND J. WOOLLEY a corresponding increase in administration efforts to control coverage (Maltese, 1994; Clayman et al., 2010; Patterson, 1994). Over the past four decades, the executive’s continued dependence on the media to capture public attention and the media’s dependence on the administration for information have produced an adversarial but engaged relationship (Bennett, 1990, 2016; Bennett et al., 2008; Kumar, 2008, 2007). The ongoing inherent tension has generated complex routine interactions with media representatives, bounded by norms of engagement which have recently broken down (Kumar, 2007). In this paper, we explore the origins of the current shift, and in doing so, adjudicate between the competing claims of the Trump Administration and the press. Using auto- mated text analysis on near-daily press briefing transcripts obtained from the American Presidency Project (Woolley & Peters, 2019b), we examine the sentiment of both media and administration spokespersons during the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations. We construct a metric for tone using the percentage of negative and positive words spoken by the press and administration separately, calculated using the widely adopted NRC sentiment lexicon (Mohammad & Turney, 2013b). Using data aggregated by week, we model positive or negative tone of the administration as a function of the tone of the press – and vice versa, including fixed effects for presidential administration, interaction terms, and covariates. We find that the tone of the administration and press are highly correlated, likely due to a shared agenda. However, controlling for this agenda, we find a statistically significant higher use of negative language by the Trump Administration,1 with no corresponding shift within the media’s tone. Further, an increase in the negativity of the press2 corresponds to a unique decline in positivity by the Trump Administration. The results strongly suggest that the Trump Administration marks a critical juncture in presidential-media relations. This juncture is rooted in a decline in the norms of engagement on the part of the Administration in the face of stable press tone. We believe that in the contemporary case, new avenues of communication have provided an opportunity for the Trump Administration to avoid confronting more adversarial media outlets. The growth of Twitter as a medium for direct contact and the partisan division of the media environment through the growth of a polarized right-wing network are central in this process (Benkler, Faris and Roberts 2018). The refusal of the Trump Administration to engage with media outlets through regular, structured briefings has limited the media’s ability to cover the administration and threatened their ability to serve as watchdogs. Further, the Administration’s decision to select winners and losers amongst media outlets based on their willingness to support the president’s agenda will only further polarize and divide the American electorate. Finally, while the “Watergate shift” altered the landscape of president-media relations for forty years, it remains to be seen whether the “Trump shift” will persist. Understanding its roots may shed light on this potential.

President-press Tone and the Changing Media Environment A common theme concerning the transformation of the presidency during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the changing relationship with the news media. Presidents adopted as the media evolved from an explicitly partisan press to a more professionalized, nonpartisan model of journalism (Ellis, 2018). Recent scholarship has POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 3 noted that norms in the press-presidency relationship shifted dramatically during the early 1970s. Among several factors, the Watergate scandal produced journalistic norms empha- sizing aggressive investigations of the presidency and the media’s watchdog role in democracy (Clayman et al., 2010; Patterson, 1994). At the same time, the Nixon Administration made a concerted effort to control presidential-press coverage through the newly established Office of Communications, which subsequent administrations have continued (Kumar, 2007; Maltese, 1994). While there is an inherent tension in the juxtaposition of antagonism and control, both parties recognize the mutual benefits therein, resulting in a symbiotic relationship in which presidents tolerate aggressive media coverage in exchange for the prospect of delivering their core message (Bennett, 2016; Kumar, 2007, 2008). The current tension is rooted in the press’ response to the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. In examining a sample of presidential-press conferences, Clayman et al. found that variation in media use of aggressive language depends on context, including unemployment and interest rates, but not on presidential approval ratings (Clayman et al., 2007). They also found that long-time members of the press corps are more likely to engage in aggressive questioning and that presidents faced tougher questioning during their second term (Clayman et al., 2012, 2007). Ultimately, Clayman et al. show an over- time link between more aggressive questioning and a combination of partisan polarization and a shift in journalistic norms, rejecting alternative explanations including the partisan- ship of the president, and the increase in presidential management of media (Clayman et al., 2010). Put simply, Clayman et al. find a shift toward more aggressive questioning during press conferences starting with the Nixon Administration (Clayman et al., 2010, 2006; Clayman & Heritage, 2002; Heritage & Clayman, 2013). While scholars examining other countries have highlighted a distinction between the aggression in and out of the briefing room (Eriksson & Östman, 2013), no similar trend has been observed in the U.S. Instead, since the shift during Nixon Administration, the press has embraced its role of discovering and publishing negative information about presidential administrations, driven by both a perception of its watchdog role and an economic need to drive scandal coverage (Patterson, 1994; Sparrow, 1999). Accompanying this change has been an increase in the presidential efforts to control the news media and influence the agenda (Kumar, 2007; Maltese, 1994). Political science has long recognized one of the core presidential goals is to shift public opinion to favor their particular policies (Jacobs & Shapiro, 2000). Presidents frequently rely on “going public” to achieve this goal, depending on the press to deliver both information and their policy messages (Kernell, 2006). The White House Press Secretary and the Office of Communications are the main mechanisms to craft a strategy and encourage diligent management of regular press briefings toward this goal (Eshbaugh-Soha, 2016; Kumar, 2007, 2008; Lee, 2014; Maltese, 1994). In spite of their competing goals, the administration and the press have had a tense codependency. This interdependence is the basis of a tone of mutual regard and level of professionalism that is fundamental to both sides (Kumar, 2007, 2008, p. 676; Maltese, 1994). An element of this relationship is the inevitable deference the press gives to presidential leadership – giving prominence to the president’s issues (Bennett, 1990, 2016; Bennett et al., 2008). While this tension has kept these two trends in check, the 4 J. MEYER-GUTBROD AND J. WOOLLEY juxtaposition of an antagonistic press and a controlling administration has prompted significant concern regarding the future of American democracy. The current perceived shift in president-media relations and the increasing disregard for the tone of mutual regard and respect only amplify these concerns. Further, much like the debates produced by the shift in the 1970s, two potential sources stand out clearly: an increase in the negativity and aggression of the press or a shift in the approach of presidential administrations in their efforts to control the media. Consistent with Clayman et al.’s research on the 1970s, one might expect that the current shift in presidential-media relations originates in the behavior of the media. The current shift follows significant scandals in the Trump Administration, suggesting an analog to the 1970s Watergate events. Scholars readily argue that the increase in the negativity of the press has had a tangible and negative impact on the public perception of the government (Patterson, 1994). The commercialization of news media only acts to amplify this concern, as outlets seek to out-scandalize their competitors (Sparrow, 1999). An increased media emphasis on scandal, horse-race politics, and polarization has encouraged a more persistent and hostile media environment for any president (Iyengar & Hahn, 2009; Levendusky, 2013). The Trump Administration has been quick to cite the increase in media negativity during the current administration as justification for the growing rift between the President and the media. At a rally in Fort Myers, FL in October 2018, President Trump told his supporters, “The media doesn’t want you to hear your story. […] The left-wing media doesn’twantto solve problems. They want to stoke resentment” (Bush, 2018;Trump,2018a). In addition, President Trump has repeatedly referred to the media as the “enemy of the people,” labeling news outlets as “Fake News” (Grynbaum, 2017; Patterson, 2017). An alternative view would focus on the behavior of the Trump Administration. In this view, the current shift arises from an administration hostile toward fact and truth that hopes, by adopting an antagonistic approach, to increase administrative control over the media narrative and further inhibit the press’ ability to act as a watchdog (Glasser, 2019). The media environment may be critical for understanding this potential shift on the part of the administration. By 2008 scholars reflecting on presidential reactions to the internet era observed that it became “more difficult for presidents to control the flow of information” (Eshbaugh-Soha, 2016; Owen & Davis, 2008, p. 659). Prior changes in communications technology had, by contrast, created opportunities for presidents to speak directly, without mediation, to popular audiences. The recent social media revolution has provided a return to direct communication, most notably through Twitter. President Trump has made extensive use of this medium, employing it to target his constituent base directly (Ingram, 2017; Stolee & Caton, 2018). The partisan segmentation of the broader media environment during the last two decades has provided a second avenue to evade more aggressive press coverage. With the advent of the internet, the public gradually began to rely on internet sources for news and the dominant role of professional journalists was gradually invaded (Owen & Davis, 2008). As Kernell has pointed out, starting with cable TV and the video-recording systems, presidents’ ability to address large audiences diminished (2006). As media outlets compete for shares of an increasingly fragmented audience, they are incentivized to capture core markets (Prior, 2007). One option is to adopt a more aggressive stance and increase coverage of scandal, a phenomenon W. Lance Bennett refers to as “the burglar alarm that just keeps ringing” (Bennett, 2003). POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 5

Another tactic is to shift away from the pretense of providing fact-checking news coverage to more partisan-driven coverage. As Benkler et al. argue, by providing coverage that validates consumers’ Republican identities, news organizations like Fox News and Breitbart are able to capture market segments, creating sources of propaganda for the Republican Party (Benkler, Faris and Roberts 2018). Consistent with this trend, as of May 2019, then-Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had not held a “normal” press briefing in over two months, but had appeared on Fox News 12 times (Haltiwanger, 2019). By targeting these specific outlets and resisting the efforts of more mainstream media questioning, the administration can effectively convey their message while avoiding engagement with critical media sources. This view suggests that a change in media- administration relations has its roots not in increased media aggression but in administration strategy aimed at message control.

Aggression or Control: Hypothesizing the Shift in President-media Relations Competing claims about the recent break-in presidential-media relations can be evaluated empirically. The growth of the administration’s media team and the expansion of the press corps over the last forty years have resulted in an increase in day to day interactions. Kumar argues that these interactions, particularly through White House press briefings, reveal extensive informal ground rules and protocol (Kumar, 2007, pp. 234, 241). This suggests that transcripts of briefings should reveal consistent behaviors and norms, which can inform specific hypotheses. A break in practice by either side would be revealed by a shift in the tone of the administration or the press. Our null hypothesis is that the tone of the press and the administration will reflect each other, independent of presidential administration, referred to as the Mirror Hypothesis.

Mirror Hypothesis: During press brieﬁngs, the tone of the administration will reﬂect the tone of the press, and vice versa.

The Mirror Hypothesis recognizes that conversation tone, measured through sentiment analysis, is not only a product of attitudes but also content. Certain issues, like war, recession, terrorism, etc., may inherently contain more negative than positive language. This will be reﬂected in the tone of both the administration and the press simultaneously. If either the Trump Administration or the press has shifted their approach, it would manifest as a change in tone on the part of one group, without a reciprocal change in tone within the other. If the Trump Administration is in fact being treated worse than previous presidencies during brieﬁngs due to an increase in the aggression of the press, as the President and his allies claim, then the Mirror Hypothesis would not hold. In this case, we should observe a shift in the tone of the media without a reciprocal shift in the tone of the administration, providing evidence of an increase in media aggression. This possibility is captured in the Aggression Hypothesis:

Aggression Hypothesis: TheWhiteHousePresscorpshasadopted and sustained a more aggressive stance during the Trump Administration relative to the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations, resulting in a relative increase in negative media tone. 6 J. MEYER-GUTBROD AND J. WOOLLEY

Alternatively, a shift in press-administration behavior may arise from the Trump Administration and an increased eﬀort to control the agenda and message. In this case, we would observe a shift in the tone of the Administration without a corresponding shift in the tone of the press. We refer to this as the Control Hypothesis.

Control Hypothesis: Administration eﬀorts to achieve greater message control in response to a changing media environment result in a decline in positive tone and an increase in negative tone of Administration spokespersons relative to the press.

The dynamic nature of these hypotheses demands a continuous measure of tone of both the press corps and the administration across multiple presidential administrations. In addition, it requires the exploration of term level effects as well as interaction effects between the presidential term and the reciprocal effect of tone. For this, we turn to sentiment analysis of White House press briefings for the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations.

Measuring Tone through Briefings While there has been fairly extensive empirical research on press conferences, there has been almost none on press briefings. Press conferences are relatively infrequent, formal occasions on which presidents address reporters. A more informal and frequent presidential interaction with reporters is the “exchange with reporters,” in which the president, usually without prior announcement, takes questions. Scholarly research has most often involved press conferences, with an eye to evaluating their usefulness as a means of informing the public and evaluating the tone of the press when engaging with the president (Clayman et al., 2007; Clayman & Heritage, 2002;Eshbaugh-Soha, 2013;Kumar,2007; Manheim, 1979; McGuire, 1968). However, the relative infrequency of press conferences together with their greater formality may make them less useful in revealing the “tone” oftherelationshipbetweentheWhiteHouseandthepresscorps. The “press briefing” rarely involves an appearance by the president but is an occasion for regular interactions between administration officials and members of the White House Press Corps. The format of a press briefing is typically a brief statement by the Press Secretary, or whoever is conducting the briefing, followed by an extended period of questioning by reporters. The frequency and relative informality of press briefings provide a better measure of tone and texture of White House relations with the press (Kumar, 2007). Our primary data source for transcripts of press briefings is the archive of the American Presidency Project (APP) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (Woolley & Peters, 2019b) with updates through the end of 2018 done directly by the authors. The APP reports that it has collected transcripts of all briefings that have been posted on the White House website starting with the Clinton Administration in 1993, resulting in a temporally limited data set. This collection includes briefings conducted by all members of the president’s administration, including formal briefings (typically conducted in the White House Press Room), gaggles (informal briefings outside the press room often in the course of traveling), and “press calls” (briefings through telephone conference). We follow the American Presidency Project’s convention of counting as a “briefing” all sessions the White House called a “briefing” and that included press questions.3 POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 7

We perform a sentiment analysis of transcripts of press briefings from 1993 through 2018, using only the first congressional session of each presidential term (first semi-term) in order to provide for a direct comparison with the data available for the Trump Administration. Transcripts were separated into statements by the administration and questions or comments by the press. For each speaker group, we measure positive and negative sentiment by calculating the relevant sentiment terms as a percentage of the total substantive words spoken by each group.4 We use the National Research Council (NRC) Canada’sEmotionLexicontoidentify common positive and negative words. The NRC’s emotion lexicon includes over 14000 words that have been manually coded for positive and negative tone using large-scale crowdsourced surveys (Mohammad & Turney, 2013b, 2013a). Sentiment analysis or automatic speech recog- nition has been used to assess the tone of tweeted campaign statements, measure public support in elections, analyze the tone of political speeches, and assess the tone of news media content (Ceron et al., 2014; Mohammad et al., 2015; Soroka et al., 2015).5 We aggregate word counts for each speaker group at the weekly level in order to avoid autocorrelation problems and minimize variationinsamplesizebetweenadministrations.Thenumberofweeksthatholdbriefings is relatively consistent across presidents and terms, with 96 and 103 weeks for Clinton’s first and second terms, 96 and 102 weeks for Bush’s first and second terms, 101 and 98 weeks for Obama’s first and second terms, and 91 weeks for Trump’s first term. We report results for three pairs of models, where the dependent variable in each pair is the positive and negative tone, respectively. The first pair of models uses the weekly tone of the administration as the dependent variable to test the Mirror Hypothesis and the Control Hypothesis by evaluating changes in tone of the administration while controlling for the shared tone produced by a common agenda. The second pair uses the weekly tone of the press as the dependent variable to test the Mirror Hypothesis and the Aggression Hypothesis by evaluating changes in the approach of the press to distinct administrations. The final models use the weekly administration tone as the dependent variable and test interaction terms between presidential administrations and weekly press tone scores. A number of other variables are included to control for other plausible factors. We aggregate the percentage of positive and negative words for the administration and the press for the previous four weeks within each administration to examine the difference between short-term responses to changes in tone versus more persistent behavior. Changes in presidential administration are measured using a categorical variable with the Trump Administration as the baseline, with a second variable for the second term of an administration. The number of weeks until the next congressional election, or the midterm election, is included to account for increased campaigning and the possibility of more controversial campaign media coverage. Monthly presidential approval scores from Gallup, collected by the American Presidency Project, are included to account for the possibility that press tone fluctuates in light of public sentiment (Woolley & Peters, 2019a).6 We also control for the percentage of statements made by the White House Press Secretary, out of total statements (versus other administrative officials) and the number of days each week when there was no briefing.7 The latter should capture potential effects due to the reduced number of briefings under the Trump Administration. The ratios of positive and negative terms are mean- centered in all models to help facilitate interpretation of interaction effects. Durbin–Watson tests for autocorrelation revealed significant autocorrelation with varying lags for each model. We used Newey-West heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation corrected standard errors with appropriate lags to correct for this (Newey & West, 1987, 1994). 8 J. MEYER-GUTBROD AND J. WOOLLEY

Results: Presidential Control and a One-sided Shift The patterns within the transcripts of daily press briefings record some striking similarities between the past four presidential administrations. Obama had the highest number of press briefings, with briefings on 354 days during his first two years in office in both his first and second terms. Clinton had press briefings on 279 days of his first two years in office and 359 days during the first two years of his second term. Bush had only 237 briefing days during his first term and 369 during the second. During his first two years, Trump held press briefings on 261 days, on par with his presidential peers, though he still held fewer briefings overall. The average number of words spoken during Trump press briefings by both the Administration and the media are similar to his predecessors as well. With regard to other measures of briefing duration and frequency in the first two years of a term, the administrations are quite similar. See full summary statistics available in the Online Appendix. While neither the number of press briefing days nor the average length of the press briefings is distinct for the Trump Administration, an analysis of the content of the statements of the administration and the press reveals interesting variation. Figure 1 plots the weekly percentage of positive and negative terms using a loess trend for the first two years of the first term of each administration. Similar plots using raw data are included in the Online Appendix. As the figure illustrates, the Trump and Bush Administrations appear more negative than their Democratic counterparts, with the Trump Administration growing increasingly negative as the midterm election approached. The Bush Administration also appears more positive than the other administrations, indicating a higher frequency of extreme tone. Further, we see a strong decline in positive language at the one-year mark of Trump’s first two years in office, corresponding to an increase in the Trump Administrations use of more negative language. Alternatively, while the press is slightly more negative toward the Bush Administration, there appears to be little other variation either over time or between administrations. While Figure 1 provides an interesting comparison between administrations, to effectively assess our hypotheses requires a statistical model to control for context. Table 1 shows OLS regression estimates (with Newey-West standard errors) where the dependent variable is either the weekly aggregated percentage of positive or negative words spoken by the presidential administration (Model 1 and 2) or the weekly aggregated percentage of positive or negative words spoken by the press corps (Model 3 and 4).8 In each case, the “other-party” variable is the weekly and monthly aggregated percentage of positive or negative words spoken by the opposing group in the press room. The intercepts of all four models reveal that the plurality of interactions during press briefings is positive, with roughly 15–17% of words having a positive tone while only 5% of the words are overtly negative. Further, both models largely validate the Mirror Hypothesis. In Models 1 and 2, the coefficient on the weekly aggregated percentage of negative and positive language used by the press is statistically significant. In other words, an increase in positive language by the press is associated with an increase in positive language and a decline in negative language by the administration. The reverse is true for an increase in negative language by the press. In both models, the positive-to-positive and negative-to-negative coefficients have a stronger impact than the positive-to-negative and negative-to-positive coefficients. While it is impossible to disentangle the causality of this POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 9

Figure 1. The top row of figures shows the percentage of negative words while the bottom row of figures shows the percentage of positive words over time. Data are drawn from the American Presidency Project, Presidential Press Briefing Collection (Woolley & Peters, 2019b). Positive and Negative word counts are constructed using the NRC Emotion Lexicon (Mohammad & Turney, 2013b). dynamic, it is clear that there are significant relationships likely rooted in the substance of a shared agenda of real-world concerns that dominates each press conference. The lagged aggregates from the previous four weeks were not statistically significant, in three of four cases – the exception being for the effect of press positive tone on reducing administration negative tone. Model 2 largely validates the Control Hypothesis, which argues that the Trump Administration has shifted its approach toward the press corps, likely in an effort to control the media message. Controlling for other factors, the Trump Administration is more negative than the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations by anywhere from a half to three-fourths of a percentage. Further, the Trump Administration appears to mark a critical juncture, not a natural progression, in presidential-press relations as the previous three administrations are largely consistent in their negative approach to the press. This is somewhat surprising given previous research on the increase in effort by the administration to control press coverage beginning during the Bush Administration (Kumar, 2007). For positive tone, the Trump Administration represents a middle 10 J. MEYER-GUTBROD AND J. WOOLLEY

Table 1. Model results for presidential administration representatives’ tone and press tone. Model 1: % Positive Model 2: % Negative Model 3: % Positive Model 2: % Negative Admin. Words Admin. Words Press Words Press Words Intercept 15.4 (0.46)* 5.85 (0.32)* 17.05 (0.58)* 5.67 (0.43)* Weekly Other-Party 0.42 (0.04)* −0.09 (0.03)* 0.43 (0.04)* −0.02 (0.03) Positive % Weekly Other-Party −0.12 (0.05)* 0.45 (0.04)* −0.12 (0.07) 0.53 (0.05)* Negative % 4 Week Lag Other- 0.014 (0.082) −0.092 (0.045)* −0.02 (0.07) −0.02 (0.05) Party Positive % 4 Week Lag Other- −0.18 (0.1) 0.11 (0.07) 0.08 (0.09) −0.08 (0.07) Party Negative % Presidential Approval 0.031 (0.009)* 0.003 (0.005) −0.01 (0.01) 0.002 (0.01) Weeks Until Election 0.008 (0.003)* −0.005 (0.002)* −0.002 (0.002) −0.001 (0.002) Percent Statements by 0.008 (0.003)* −0.002 (0.002) 0.002 (0.003) 0.008 (0.002)* Secretary Non-Brief Days This −0.009 (0.03) 0.004 (0.02) 0.012 (0.03) 0.026 (0.02) Week Clinton Administration −0.57 (0.3) −0.87 (0.18)* −0.25 (0.368) 0.26 (0.216) Bush Administration 1.27 (0.31)* −0.53 (0.21)* −0.84 (0.33)* 0.56 (0.24)* Obama Administration −0.57 (0.27)* −0.62 (0.19)* −0.336 (0.33) −0.04 (0.199) 2nd Term 0.23 (0.15) 0.2 (0.11) 0.143 (0.16) −0.014 (0.11) Adjusted R2 0.42 0.34 0.2 0.32 N 675 675 675 675 Table entries are OLS coefficients with estimated standard errors in parenthesis. Newey–West Robust standard errors are shown to account for heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation for lags of three steps for Models 1–3 and only one step for Model 4. “Other-Party” for Model 1 and 2 is the weekly percentage and lagged four-week percentage of positive and negative words used by the press corps. “Other-Party” for Model 3 and 4 is the weekly percentage and lagged four-week percentage of positive and negative word percentages from the administration. *p < .05 two tailed. ground with no over-time trends emerging. Model 1 shows that the Bush Administration maintained a significantly more positive tone in press briefings, in spite of facing a rather confrontational presscorps.Thisdispelsthenotionthat Republican administrations are inherently antagonistic to the press. On the other hand, the Obama Administration was less positive than the Trump Administration, and while the difference was statistically significant it was not as substantial as the difference between Trump and Bush. Thus, while Trump’s rate of positivity falls between his predecessors, his rate of negativity is significantly higher, controlling for other factors. Regarding the other control variables in Model 1 and 2, the proximity of an election is statistically significant for both models, indicating a slight decline in positive language and an increase in negative language on the part of the administration as the election approaches. In addition, there are subtle increases in the use of positive language associated with increased involvement by the Press Secretary. Finally, there is also an increase in the use of positive language by the administration associated with an increase in public approval of the president. In Model 3 and 4, the weekly aggregated rate of positive and negative words spoken by the press is used as the dependent variable in order to test the Aggression Hypothesis, which argues that the recent critical shift was a product of an increase in aggression on the part of the press corps. One of the most striking facts about Models 3 and 4 is that, aside from the tone of administration language, almost no variables reach statistical significance. The results show that the press has not been more adversarial to Trump than to the preceding three administrations, controlling for other conditions. In fact, the press corps’ POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 11 relationship with the Bush Administration stands out as distinctly less positive and more negative than with the Trump Administration and the coefficient is statistically significant. This increase in negativity within the Trump Administration with no corresponding increase in the negativity of the press provides substantial evidence for the Control Hypothesis as opposed to the Aggression Hypothesis. This indicates that the Administration is likely the source for the current shift in president-media relations within the briefing room. Table 2 incorporates interaction effects to evaluate potential variation in administration response to changes in the tone of the press across each administration.9 Only weekly press positive and negative tone aggregates are used and monthly aggregates are dropped due to low significance in the full model. While most of the interaction terms fail to achieve statistical significance, one set of terms is notable. The positive and statistically significant coefficient for the interaction term between the weekly percentage of negative words spoken by the press and the three other presidential administration variables within Model 1 in Table 2 reveals an additional way in which the Trump Administration is unique. The interaction terms for all three of these presidents push the coefficients for these administrations to near zero. In other words, only the Trump Administration’s positive tone changes in association with changes in the negativity of the press. Figure 2 plots the predicted administration positivity rate for each administration across the actual range of negative rates of press tone during the Trump Administration. As the figure illustrates, only the Trump Administration’s positive tone is sensitive, in ways that are clearly statistically identifiable, to changes in the negative tone of the press corps. A 1-point increase in the percent of negative language use by the press corresponds to a half a percentage decrease in the percentage of positive words used by the administration. This shift is sizable, given that the Trump Administration ranged from 11% to 22% of positive content, with a standard deviation of 2%. The interaction effects for the

Table 2. Interaction eﬀects model results for presidential administrations’ representatives tone. Model 1: % Positive Words Model 2: % Negative Words Intercept 15.29 (0.44)* 5.86 (0.35)* Weekly Press Positive Rate 0.36 (0.09)* −0.16 (0.08)* Weekly Press Negative Rate −0.42 (0.09)* 0.39 (0.09)* Presidential Approval 0.03 (0.01)* 0.002 (0.01) Weeks Until Election 0.01 (0.003)* −0.01 (0.002)* Percent Statements by Secretary 0.01 (0.003)* −0.001 (0.002) Non-Brief Days This Week −0.004 (0.03) −0.001 (0.02) Clinton Administration −0.63 (0.26)* −0.81 (0.17)* Bush Administration 1.06 (0.28)* −0.4 (0.21) Obama Administration −0.52 (0.24)* −0.54 (0.18)* 2nd Term 0.28 (0.15) 0.2 (0.12) Clinton Admin * Weekly Press Positive Rate −0.09 (0.11) 0.08 (0.1) Bush Admin * Weekly Press Positive Rate 0.22 (0.11) −0.005 (0.1) Obama Admin * Weekly Press Positive Rate 0.17 (0.11) 0.18 (0.09)* Clinton Admin * Weekly Press Negative Rate 0.3 (0.13)* 0.004 (0.11) Bush Admin * Weekly Press Negative Rate 0.34 (0.12)* 0.04 (0.12) Obama Admin * Weekly Press Negative Rate 0.42 (0.14)* 0.25 (0.14). R2 0.43 0.34 N 678 678 Table entries are OLS coeﬃcients with estimated standard errors in parenthesis.Newey–West Robust standard errors are shown to account for heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation for lags of three steps for Models 1 and six steps for Model 2. *p < .05 two tailed. 12 J. MEYER-GUTBROD AND J. WOOLLEY

Figure 2. Figure 2 plots the predicted administration weekly percentage of positive words from Table 2, Model 1, given different levels of the weekly percentage of negative words from the press corps. The range of press negativity is the full range associated with the Trump Administration. All other variables are held at their mean, with term held in the first term. 95% confidence intervals are shown in gray. The interaction effects for the Bush, Clinton, and Obama Administrations are statistically significant, rendering the original relationship nonsignificant during these administrations, while the relationship between the positive tone of the Trump Administration and the negative tone of the press remains significant. The mean weekly percentage of negative words from the press corps is 6.6% across all administrations, with Clinton at 6.4%, Bush at 7.1%, Obama at 6.3%, and Trump at 6.4% with equal ranges.

other three administrations reduce the slope to be indistinguishable from 0 and not statistically significant. As Figure 2 shows, a shift across the full spectrum of negative percentage scores experienced by the Trump Administration during his first two years in office corresponds to a decline in positivity by around 4%–roughly 50% of the full range of positive tone observed during the Trump Administration. Given the relatively consistent negative tone of the press across administrations, these results strongly support the claim POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 13 that the Trump Administration’s tone with the press is more contentious and aggressive, lending further evidence to the Control Hypothesis.

Discussion and Implications: The Trump Shift The colorful conflicts between the President’s representatives and the press have become a recurring theme within the Trump Administration. President Trump’s first Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, set the tone during his first press briefing on January 21, 2017, when he took no press questions but instead berated the press for alleged inaccurate coverage of President Trump’s inauguration crowds. As our results illustrate, Press Secretary Spicer’s aggressive attempt to control the media narrative would become the standard approach for this Administration, marking a critical shift in presidential-media relations as noted by the administration, journalists, and scholars alike. Further, in spite of the Trump Administration’s claims that the current poor relations with the press are a product of an overly aggressive mainstream media, our research shows no corresponding negative shift by the media in the briefing room. All of this points to the current administration as a potential critical juncture in presidential-media relations. Previous literature has described the post-1960s presidential-press relation shift, highlighting the increase in aggression from the press and a corresponding effort to control the message by the administration. Our results indicate that the current shift reverses this, with an increase in administration negativity and no discernable change by the press. We find that under the prior three administrations, the tone of the press and the administration with regard to both positive and negative language largely moved in tandem, validating the Mirror Hypothesis. This is expected for a number of reasons. First, the press corps and the administration are addressing the same issues, which should be reflected in this shared propensity toward positive and negative language. If low unemployment is being discussed at the press briefing, then both sides are likely to use positive language, while a discussion of a terrorist attack may encourage the opposite. Further, the simultaneity of this interaction, while statistically problematic, reinforces the idea that these interactions are iterative, with the press and the administration responding to each other with immediate and transitory emotionality. However, this reinforcing interaction breaks down during the Trump Administration, along multiple lines. Regarding the Control Hypothesis,wefind that the Trump Administration is significantly more negative than the Bush, Clinton, and Obama Administrations, controlling for confounding variables, indicating a more aggressive and negative stance toward the press.ThenegativetoneoftheTrump Administration is particularly striking given the record low unemployment and little foreign conflict during the first two years of the Administration. At the same time, we do not see a similar effect regarding positivity, with the Bush Administration employing more positive language, while the Obama Administrationwaslesspositive.Ultimately, these results indicate that Trump Administration marks a stark shift in the White House’sapproachtomediarelations,eveninlightof alternative literature highlighting an increased emphasis on message control over the past twenty years (Kumar, 2007). Further, we find little evidence to support the claim that the media has been consis- tently more negative with the Trump Administration, leading us to reject the Aggression Hypothesis. While media outlets are confronting the challenge of reporting on an 14 J. MEYER-GUTBROD AND J. WOOLLEY administration that is hostile to coverage, the norms of engagement have not changed. Journalistic norms still predominantly rely on engaging and understanding the administration’s agenda, with a focus on fact-checking and equal attention to competing groups (Bennett et al., 2008). These results indicate that the Trump Administration has maintained a consistent and negative tone toward the press during briefings in spite of positive economic conditions and a consistent or even lenient questioning approach from the media compared to the previous administrations. Further, the most striking distinction between the Trump Administration and the previous three administrations is the relationship between the negativity of the press and the positivity of the administration within briefings. While the use of positive language on the part of the previous three administrations did not correspond to shifts in the use of negative language on the part of the press, the Trump Administration appears highly sensitive to these shifts. We note that the interactive models fail to empirically establish whether the Trump Administration is becoming less positive in response to an increase in negativity by the press or the press is becoming more negative in response to a decline in positivity from the administration. However, the decline in positivity on the part of the Trump Administration remains unique in spite of similar media shifts toward negative questioning during the Obama and Bush Administrations. Further, the consistent negative tone of the press across all administrations lends further evidence to the claim that this is a shift on the part of the Trump Administration, supporting the Control Hypothesis. While President Trump has personally been openly hostile to the media, these results remain striking in their ability to illustrate how Trump’s attitude has been reflected in the behavior of his Administration’s representatives. These results provide further evidence for a systematic shift in the approach of the Trump Administration toward the media relative to his predecessors. This approach suggests that they no longer value the media and, as a result, have abandoned the typical norms of engagement and given way to more aggressive behavior. Trump’s extensive use of Twitter and his perception that he can circumvent mainstream media provides further support. In comments outside of Marine One, Trump told reporters, “I think that Twitter is a way that I get out the word when we have a corrupt media. And it is corrupt and it’sfake” (Trump, 2019). In addition, the Trump Administration’s emphasis on the Republican base, which already largely rejected the mainstream media in favor of more ideologically identified news outlets like Fox News, has encouraged them to invest in these friendlier outlets. The Administration’s emphasis on the base has led to an increase in access to official White House statements on the part of specific conservative media and the elimination of press briefings post-2019 (Haltiwanger, 2019). Ultimately, the results indicate that the Trump Administration has adopted a unique strategy to reject positive interaction with adversarial media outlets, instead engaging in a targeted messaging strategy. While the role of the American press has long been decried for their aggressive tone and their dependence on the executive (Bennett et al., 2008; Patterson, 1994; Sparrow, 1999), the recent shift presents an entirely distinct set of problems for American democracy. By picking winners and losers regarding press access to the administration based on a media outlet’s willingness to push the President’s agenda, the Trump Administration has fundamentally disrupted half of the balance of president-press relations. In doing so, they limit the media’s ability to accomplish their watchdog role and lend credibility to some outlets over others, undermining support for journalism, and fanning the flames of polarization within the electorate. POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 15

Overall, this study establishes some relatively clear distinctions between the Trump Administration’s relationship with the press and the three previous administrations. Far from resolving all the issues, it provides a starting point for further examination of this relationship. The question of media treatment outside of the briefing room presents a critical next step for understanding this dynamic relationship. It remains possible that Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Sean Spicer have carried the battles associated with critical publications into the briefing room in a way that previous administrations did not. Finally, while the relationship between the Trump Administration and the press has soured, it remains to be seen if this will have long-term effects or if the Trump Administration stands as an outlier. The data presented in Figure 1 seem to illustrate a dramatic shift beginning during Trump’s second year in office. A shift in the Trump Administration’s approach to the media beginning in 2018 could reflect an increased effort to control the media message in light of public negativity and political losses. President Trump experienced record-low approval ratings during late 2017, hitting a low of 35% on August 27, October 29, and finally December 3 according to Gallup (Gallup, 2020). Further, late 2017 saw a number of political setbacks for President Trump, including the election of Democrat Doug Jones of Alabama to the Senate and an increase in activity within the Mueller investigation, culminatinginthesubpoenaofStephenBannoninJanuary2018(Dennis,2017;Schmidt, 2018). At the same time, the Trump Administration also brought on Sarah Huckabee Sanders as White House Press Secretary and Hope Hicks as White House Communications Director in August 2017. If shifting media strategies away from engagement and toward increased control sets a precedent for future presidents to be intolerant of media critiques, it may result in a serious threat to the effectiveness of the fourth estate and the future of democracy.

Notes 1. We use the phrase “the administration” henceforth to refer collectively to statements made by any administration spokespersons in the course of interacting with the media captured in these transcripts. 2. References to “the press” indicate only the statements made by individuals asking questions in the briefings, not to published media articles or statements on TV shows. 3. The transcripts do not identify specific reporters or their media outlet, limiting one poten- tially interesting line of analysis. 4. Stopwords, like “the,”“a,”“and,” etc., are excluded when calculating the total number of words spoken. 5. We opt to use positive and negative dictionaries to measure sentiment. This can be distin- guished from other works in political science that rely on exclusive, self-constructed dictionaries or word families of political terms. One popular source of this is the DICTION programs (See: Hart & Lind, 2010). We employ broad sentiment analysis for positive and negative language to avoid any potential bias in dictionary creation and capture the general tone of the conversation. Further, the analysis is similar in function, but merely employing different terms within the operative word family. 6. Monthly unemployment rate from the Bureau of Labor has been used as an economic indicator and has been shown to influence press aggression in the past (See: Clayman et al., 2007). However, because of the restriction in terms of office to the first two years, there is no significant variation in employment and it is highly collinear with the president. 7. We do not control for variation in individual press secretaries for both empirical and theoretical reasons. Empirically, our restriction to the first two years of any term means that certain press secretaries overlap perfectly with president-term variables, notably Ari 16 J. MEYER-GUTBROD AND J. WOOLLEY

Fleischer during Bush’s first two years and Robert Gibbs during Obama’s first two years. Further, because we are including all briefings and evaluating relations at a systematic level, we assume that the trends we are observing are indicative of the goals of administration as a whole and not individual speakers. However, the question of press secretary ability does provide an avenue for future research. 8. Durbin–Watson tests for these models revealed autocorrelation for lags of three steps for Models 1–3 and only one step for Model 4. The test statistics for the models and associated p-values in parenthesis are listed below. * indicate statistically significant autocorrelation.

Model 1: 1 lag – 1.57 (0)*, 2 lags – 1.78 (0)*, 3 lags – 1.78 (0)*, 4 lags – 1.91 (0.19), 5 lags – 1.97 (0.64)

Model 2: 1 lag – 1.59 (0)*, 2 lags – 1.78 (0)*, 3 lags – 1.83 (0)*, 4 lags – 1.86 (0.052), 5 lags – 1.86 (0.066)

Model 3: 1 lag – 1.7 (0)*, 2 lags – 1.85 (0.04)*, 3 lags – 1.85 (0.02)*, 4 lags – 1.92 (0.28), 5 lags – 1.86 (0.07)

Model 2: 1 lag – 1.68 (0)*, 2 lags – 1.99 (0.63), 3 lags – 1.96 (0.45), 4 lags – 2.02 (0.9), 5 lags – 1.91 (0.22). 9. Durbin–Watson tests for these models revealed autocorrelation for lags of three steps for Models 1 and six steps for Model 2. The test statistics for the models and associated p-values in parenthesis are listed below. * indicate statistically signiﬁcant autocorrelation.

Model 1: 1 lag – 1.59 (0)*, 2 lags – 1.77 (0)*, 3 lags – 1.79 (0)*, 4 lags – 1.91 (0.23), 5 lags – 1.96 (0.57)

Model 2: 1 lag – 1.64 (0)*, 2 lags – 1.75 (0)*, 3 lags – 1.81 (0.01)*, 4 lags – 1.84 (0.03), 5 lags – 1.82 (0.02), 6 lags – 1.77 (0).

Disclosure Statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement Press brieﬁngs are currently available through the American Presidency Project, https://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/app-categories/press/press-brieﬁngs. The coded dataset will be made available through the American Presidency Project upon acceptance and publication of the manuscript. Replication code and an exact replication dataset will also be made available.

Funding

For Dr. Meyer-Gutbrod: “This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship under Grant No. 1808962.”

Notes on contributors

Joshua Meyer-Gutbrod is a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research primarily focuses on the growth of national partisan polarization and its interaction with state politics. Specifically, his NSF postdoctoral work focuses on using text-based analysis of state legislative campaign websites to examine variation in partisan issue ownership and rhetoric across POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 17 the states. More broadly, he is interested in the application of text-based analysis to examine various issues in political science. He completed my Ph.D. at Cornell University in August 2018. John Woolley is, since late 2018, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara and, on an ongoing basis, Co-Director of the American Presidency Project. His research involves the American presidency (including presidential leadership concerning refugees and immigrants), and US monetary and financial policy. In recent years, he has published articles analyzing the Dodd- Frank financial reforms and the quality of deliberation in the Federal Open Market Committee. In 2017, along with Gerhard Peters, he received the Richard Neustadt Award for Best Reference Resource for the American Presidency Project.”

ORCID Joshua Meyer-Gutbrod http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5977-923X

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