Abstract
Before COVID-19, President Trump relied on Twitter and rallies to communicate with the public, but the pandemic forced him to shift to press briefings and to increase his tweeting. This chapter analyzes the content of Trump’s Twitter messages and in press briefings drawing upon theories of constructionism, presidential rhetoric, and cascading network activation of political framing. In the briefings, reporters focused on the virus, constraining Trump’s agenda. Journalists sought detailed answers from the president and his medical experts. The findings show the competing narratives from the President and the press/medical experts about the danger posed by the virus. The chapter provides a fresh view of the possibilities and limitations of press briefings in a polarized environment, where dual narratives can be perilous to a nation’s health.
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Notes
- 1.
To determine which days would be included in our sample, we wrote a program in R to select randomly among all press conference days a start date. Beginning with this start date, we then assigned a coder to each third subsequent briefing. In total, authors coded comments offered by President Trump at briefings held on: March 16th, March 19th, March 22nd, March 29th, April 1st, April 4th, April 7th, April 10th, April 15th, April 18th, and April 21st.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful for support by a grant from the Bartling Family Fund and the meticulous coding work of Kayla Wolf and Chaerim Kim, PhD students in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California.
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Just, M.R., Saraceno, J., Crigler, A.N. (2022). Trump Confronts COVID in Press Briefings and on Twitter. In: Maarek, P.J. (eds) Manufacturing Government Communication on Covid-19 . Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09230-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09230-5_11
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