Weekly presidential address gives radio listeners an earful

Seventy years ago, when he initiated his fireside chats, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had Americans surrounding their radios, rapt with attention.

“If he was going to speak, the idea of doing something else was unthinkable,” wrote historian David Halberstam. “If they did not yet have a radio, they walked the requisite several hundred yards to the home of a more fortunate neighbor who did.”

Nowadays, the president has a weekly five-minute radio address, broadcast by stations nationwide every Saturday morning. But the chief executive no longer is appointment listening.

“I suspect the proportion of people who listen to it when it’s broadcast is very, very small,” said Christopher Sterling, professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University.

The address airs locally at 7:06 a.m. on KNX-AM (1070), followed an hour later by the Democratic response. Sterling said the likeliest listeners are a party’s “true believers.” No matter how small the audience, though, the utility of the weekly address extends far beyond that five minutes of air time.

“It’s one of those things where most people wouldn’t even know about it, except newscasts later in the day say, ‘The president, in his weekly radio address, said such and such,’ ” said Ken Mueller, radio curator for the Museum of Television & Radio.

“It helps set the agenda,” Sterling said, by giving newscasts something to report on slow Saturday news cycles, and the topic can carry over to Sunday morning newspapers and political TV talk shows.

“You have unexpurgated time to get out the message, and it doesn’t get muddied by reporters or editors,” he said. The address is scripted and edited, and lacking the pesky challenges of a news conference. “You can get out a message that’s basically clear, knowing full well it will be reported.”

The subjects range from serious policy recaps or previews to light holiday musings, such as the Cinco de Mayo message President Bush delivered in Spanish in 2001. Last week he spoke about Medicare, while this week he’ll probably touch on Independence Day themes, unless something more newsworthy crops up, said Taylor Gross, White House spokesman and director of radio media.

“The radio address gives the president an opportunity to speak to the nation, a chance to discuss his policies and proposals,” he said. It can easily be recorded whether he’s at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, or in Shanghai, as he was for his Oct. 20, 2001, message.

“If the president has not been in a public setting for three days,” Gross said, “the radio audience is always going to be able to hear his thoughts and ideas.”

He said Bush usually records his messages Friday afternoons in the Oval Office or Cabinet Room, though the time, setting and subject all can change with his schedule and with breaking events.

The ABC Radio Network serves as the pool distributor, making the address available via satellite for any network or station that wants to air it. Gross said the White House really has no idea how many outlets pick it up any given week.

KNX has been airing the weekly addresses since the Reagan administration, said station General Manager George Nicholaw.

“If the president is going to take the time to say something, I think we ought to listen,” and the same goes for the opposition message afterward, he said.

Ronald Reagan began the new tradition of the weekly Saturday morning address April 3, 1982, with a few breaks during his tenure. Then-President Bush’s messages were more sporadic, though he did broadcast weekly during the Gulf War. Clinton resumed the weekly programs shortly after taking office, and George W. Bush has continued them.

It’s no surprise that Reagan would be the one to pick up from Roosevelt and start the new tradition. Before he was an actor, “the great communicator” worked as an announcer and sports reporter at a radio station in Des Moines, after graduating from college in 1932.

That was the year before Roosevelt, just a week into his presidency, gave his first fireside chat, opening with the line, “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.”

Hearing that, modern audiences probably would spin their dials madly, looking for something else to listen to. But the country was in the throes of the Great Depression, and Roosevelt was about to explain why the banks were closed, when they would reopen and why citizens needn’t worry about their money vanishing.

“In spite of being a Hudson River valley aristocrat,” Sterling said, Roosevelt’s language and speaking style made it seem as if he was “sitting across from you at the fireplace.”

Whether he was talking about economics, the attack on Pearl Harbor or the progress of World War II, Mueller said, “his fireside chats had a very calming effect on people, and helped keep them behind the war effort.”

Though Calvin Coolidge was a presidential radio pioneer -- his 1924 inaugural speech was the first to be broadcast -- Roosevelt was a master of the medium. He made regular broadcasts while governor of New York, and continued the practice when he entered the White House.

“Roosevelt knew he did not have the majority of the press with him,” as most of the newspapers were Republican-owned, and their editorial pages veered to the right, Sterling said. “He knew he had to go directly to the people.

“He had a very easy act to follow,” he added. His predecessor, Herbert Hoover “was terrible on the radio. He came across as wooden, and that’s being polite.”

Roosevelt, on the other hand, was able to create such a comfortable aura that radio journalist Robert Trout dubbed the broadcasts fireside chats, and they generated reams of fan mail for the president.

“People were saying, ‘Thank you for stopping by the other day. It sounded just like you were talking to me,’ ” Mueller said. “That was the beauty of radio. For him it was an incredible tool, because he truly was a great communicator. He knew how to use the media.”

But it’s the diversity of media available today that undercuts the power of the radio addresses, Sterling said. There’s no urgency to catch the broadcast, because listeners know they can get the news from TV or the Internet. In 1933, radio itself was a novelty, and the chance to hear the president speaking directly was not to be missed -- not to mention the importance of the topic he’d be discussing.

Today’s audiences are far more jaded, Mueller said, so it would be nearly impossible to duplicate radio addresses with the gravity, immediacy or intimacy that Roosevelt made the most of.