In politics, you’re either on message or you’re losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week… Change of tone.
Specifically, a change in tone coming from the White House.
Over the past four years, former President Donald Trump eschewed the traditional channels of communication and ran the free world via Twitter.
The daily press briefings started with Sean Spicer making a passionate argument to convince us all that the Trump inaugural was the greatest spectacle in American history, then came Sarah Huckabee Sanders before the briefings disappeared for a bit and came back.
(I think there was a Scaramucci in there, but maybe I’m thinking of SNL). Oh, yeah, he was the White House communication director for about a week and a half, so I’m not sure he really counts.
With the complete upheaval of the tried and tested methods of communication, it’s easy to forget just how this is supposed to work.
No matter their political leanings, any knowledgeable observer would admit the Obama White House was a well-oiled communication machine.
They embraced their moment in history intersecting with new technologies that allowed them to go right to the people.
They regularly took a “first question” via Twitter from a regular old Joe.
They produced behind the scenes videos showing everything from how speeches were written, to the president interacting with world leaders.
And they put policy experts front and center to explain complex issues in their White House Whiteboard sessions.
President Obama even used the now-defunct Google+ Hangouts to have virtual town hall meetings with people from around the country.
The approach was innovative and established a brand of being a tech-savvy, inclusive and open administration.
Not surprisingly, it looks like the Biden administration is going to run its own version of the Obama playbook.
This week, Axios reported the White House plans to bypass the national media.
In the works, some of the same social media tactics we saw from Team Obama.
Already, Biden press secretary, Jen Psaki, has taken to Twitter and TikTok to answer questions.
The Axios report also highlighted a strategy of giving more direct interviews with local stations in targeted markets – states and districts where they need support from members of Congress, for example.
This is a smarter, more precise strategy to replace the 280-character carpet bombs and live call-ins to national morning shows of the past four years.
The new administration is also more selective about where the President is seen. In part, that’s because the country is a little POTUS-fatigued.
I mean, it’s an important job but we can survive a couple of days without a news cycle driven by the occupant of the Oval Office.
The Biden administration seems to embrace the idea that, at least for now, less is more.
So, what’s the lesson?
At its most fundamental level, effective communication is about delivering a message from you to your audience with the greatest clarity possible.
For a business or a politician, the media is an important platform because each outlet has an established audience. You deal with them to get to their audience. But you also give up some control as they (intentionally or not) interpret your words and pass them along to their viewers and readers.
Add a variable in the process and you lose some control of the message (even just a degree of it) and you increase the chance of miscommunication – that your audience will hear something differently than you intended.
The White House is in a slightly different position than most because it has the ability to rapidly build its own audience.
Speaking directly to your audience is just cleaner.
Establish a clear channel of communication with the audience you want to reach and you’ll keep more control over the message they hear.
That’s it for this week.
More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground.
Check it new issues every Friday at utpolunderground.com.
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