Let’s call it the Fireside Podcast.
Seeking ways to move his agenda forward in a crowded media landscape, President Biden will revive a presidential tradition that has faded under his predecessor: the weekly radio address.
The Biden version isn’t exactly a man and his microphone. White House press secretaries said some rates might follow a traditional format for presidential-people talks, but they also planned to bring Mr. Biden together with everyday Americans and other guests to restore the informal style of popular podcasts. “We expect it to take various forms,” said Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, on Friday.
The first episode is planned for this weekend. In it, Mr Biden speaks to Michele Voelkert, a Californian woman who was fired from her job at a San Francisco-based clothing company during the first few months of the pandemic.
In a long-distance call, the President and Ms. Voelkert, 47, discuss their problems with securing unemployment benefits – she eventually turned to a local MP for help – and with finding new employment. They also talk about their daughter’s virtual school.
The four-minute video segment is slated to be released on Saturday on the White House’s YouTube page and other social media platforms. (Officials said Ms. Voelkert’s husband, Joshua, was a videographer, which made her high-quality footage possible.)
“It’s a digital way of thinking about it,” said Rob Flaherty, director of digital strategy at the White House, in an interview. “We meet people on platforms and formats that they see, in the places where they are.”
Mr Biden’s aides have long referred to its ease with average Americans as critical to its political appeal. When the coronavirus pandemic curtailed campaign events and effectively ended the rope lines of contestants shaking hands and kissing babies, Mr. Biden’s strategists looked for alternatives. One of the solutions was a podcast entitled “Here’s The Deal”. The President’s weekly address is seen as a sort of continuation in the White House.
One place where the radio address may be difficult to find: the actual radio.
Even under President Barack Obama, who put the practice on YouTube and recorded a rate almost every Friday, the spread of the weekly talk declined. “Does he even still do it?” A senior public broadcaster in Boston asked The Boston Globe in 2014.
President Donald J. Trump, who did not hesitate to use a number of mass media platforms, maintained the weekly address when he took office. But the tradition soon faded. “The weekly address has not been fully used,” said former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders when asked about her disappearance in 2017.
The new version of Mr. Biden is the latest in a boom-and-bust cycle for presidents on the radio.
The weekly address was made famous by Franklin D. Roosevelt – and then essentially disappeared. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter took viewer requests on a national live call-in show called “Dial-a-President,” which resulted in a “Saturday Night Live” parody in which Dan Aykroyd played president. For Mr. Carter, “it made him smaller,” said Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley.
President Ronald Reagan, a veteran broadcaster who admired Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats,” whipped the radio address back up to speed in the 1980s. His successor, President George HW Bush, largely abandoned the practice but experienced a renaissance under President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush and Mr. Obama.
“It has to do with a president’s own feeling of running the face-off pulpit,” said Timothy Naftali, a president’s historian and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. He noted that Mr. Biden, who served in the United States Senate from 1973 to 2009, was familiar with the heavy use of a weekly address by previous presidents. “He saw how effective this tool can be in the Reagan years,” said Naftali.
Mr. Biden is participating in another long-running messaging tool this weekend: an interview with a network anchor. His first seated television interview will be aired on the Sunday before the Super Bowl with CBS Evening News host Norah O’Donnell.
Comments are closed.