His political opponents—and even some allies—consider President Obama to be aloof, insular, and unreceptive to criticism. Media critics chaff at his administration’s many attempts to control access to the president, circumvent reporters, and chastise journalists and news outlets they deem to be unfriendly.
Those may be valid critiques. Yet it is an undeniable historic fact that no president of the United States has conducted as many interviews as Barack Obama. Not even close. Later this year, he may surpass 1,000 interviews given during his first seven years in office.
At the end of Obama’s sixth year he had given 872 interviews to a broad range of reporters, columnists, bloggers, radio hosts, local television anchors, and others reporting news on a wide scope of issues the president wanted to weigh in on. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush combined had only 572 interviews at their six-year marks. Obama’s emphasis on interchanges with the press through interviews represents a change from the practices of the presidents who preceded him.
Those previous exchanges took place in press conferences and short question-and-answer sessions with White House reporters assigned to cover them and their administrations. The shift to interviews away from White House-centered queries has come about through the opportunities Obama and his White House staff now have to target the segments of the public they want to reach at a particular time. It is a move White House reporters view as consequential for their reporting on the presidency and for what the public knows about the chief executive.
Interviews: The View From the White House
The short answer to the question of why the president does so many interviews is two-fold. First is the opportunity to reach hundreds of millions of people while simultaneously targeting particular audiences about the issues he wants to discuss. Second, the White House sets the rules and chooses whom the president talks to.
Today’s fragmented media environment allows the president and his communications team to target audiences in ways earlier presidents did not and could not do. The traditional 20th century three-network, three-news-magazine, and big-city/small-city newspaper model has declined sharply, except for television. The Pew Research Center reported in its “State of the News Media 2015” that weekday newspaper circulation has fallen 19 percent since 2004.
Local and network television news has grown in the last two years. But it has been supplanted by a new network of media that people access when and where they want, from television to their iPads, computers, and smartphones. No longer do they need to be at a particular place and time to tune into their president. The White House has adopted its media strategy to reflect this new reality.
While traditionally presidents relied on speeches to gather an audience, that is no longer the case. As White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained to me: “If you are making the decision strategically, then you can get a much larger audience for the information that you're trying to communicate through the use of a strategically chosen interview than you would from a more standard event.”
Added White House Communications Director Jen Psaki: “Sometimes it's about reaching an audience that may not read a speech or watch a speech and may not be subscribing to traditional daily newspapers.”
A Pew Research Center survey demonstrates just how many people do not get their news from traditional sources—and how much they differ by age group. Sixty-one percent of millennials (ages 18-33) get their news each week on Facebook, while 60 percent of baby boomers (50-68) get theirs from local television. The Gen Xers, who fall between those two groups, are almost split evenly.
This is the environment the Obama White House works amid when communicating with the public, and it shapes their priorities. From Jan. 20 through June 30, 2015, President Obama gave 59 interviews. Nine of those were with online organizations and 14 were with local television. While local television has been important for interviews from the start of the administration, online presidential interviews have increased as social media have developed during the Obama years, particularly in 2015.
While the public may be divided on its news sources, social media provide an opportunity to open up new pathways to people interested in particular issues even if their overall interest in politics is low.
Given the many platforms that exist, targeted interviews are a contemporary way for the president to reach even more people worldwide than a Super Bowl’s audience of 115 million viewers while at the same time locking in on a specific audience. An example of such an interview is one President Obama did on May 8 with Matt Bai of Yahoo News about Trade Promotion Authority legislation and the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal. The combined audience of people who came across the interview on social media networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest and Google +, was stunning.
According to a metric called “social impressions,” users of those sites came across the interview some 200 million times. Many of those users were people who saw it on various platforms, but one metric cited by Yahoo underscores how effective the White House was: Yahoo has an autoplay feature that aired a snippet of the interview for those using its site. It stopped offering it after a while, but 1.4 million people loaded the page themselves.
That is what the White House wants: to have the president make the case for his initiatives to a huge audience interested in the subject.
The conversation between Bai and Obama lasted 18 minutes, with the president making his case for the trade legislation and responding to points raised by his interviewer, including criticisms made by Democrats who opposed the legislation, particularly Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Obama responded sharply to Warren’s criticism, noting that she “is a politician like everyone else” and asserting that she was “absolutely wrong” in her interpretation of the trade bills.
From the White House’s point of view, all of those elements were key when considering the interview. As a national political columnist for Yahoo News, Bai was the White House’s choice to do a trade interview because he had an audience that included people who opposed the TPP deal.* That was a group White House staff wanted to reach.
From Bai’s perspective, the interview met his goals as well. He is interested in trade and wanted the interview to “explain something complicated to readers, both in the video and what I can do” in his Yahoo column.
Interviews are structured to be suitable for the president’s purposes. Obama can talk about subjects that interest him in a setting and manner of his choosing with journalists selected by his aides. At the same time, reporters conducting the interviews can ask whatever questions they want on the agreed-upon topic: They do not clear their questions with the White House. Thus, these interviews offer a win for both the administration and news organizations selected to conduct them.
White House reporters, however, prefer press conferences and short question-and-answer sessions as venues to get presidential responses. “The White House can package information in many ways – speeches, interviews,” says Michael Shear, White House correspondent for the New York Times. “[But] any time we can pose a question in a way that doesn’t have a prepackaged answer is a good thing.”
There are patterns to the interviews the president does, which can range from long-form exchanges with large audiences, such as on “60 Minutes,” to brief five-minute sessions with local audiences in mind, where the president is pitching a particular idea or program. Each has its benefits for the parties involved.
Large Audience Interviews
Beginning in 2009 and every year since, Obama has had an interview with a journalist from the network carrying the Super Bowl. The reasoning is obvious, though the calculation is not without its tradeoffs. In return for a worldwide audience in excess of 100 million, the president sat for a sometimes testy 2014 session with Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly. That wouldn’t have been his first choice, but Fox was carrying the game. In 2015, his luck was better: the 17-minute interview was conducted by NBC’s Savannah Guthrie.
