| President Barack Obama broke a presidential tradition on January 24, 2009. After almost three decades in an audio format, the president delivered the Saturday presidential address via radio and for the first time visually on the White House website and YouTube page. The transition of the weekly radio address to an audiovisual-virtual format presents an important opportunity to examine the content and effects of this area of presidential communications. Arguing that the Saturday presidential address constitutes a genre of presidential rhetoric, I construct a generic rhetorical framework for analyzing content-specific changes to the Saturday address in the Obama administration. Discovering that the weekly address serves as a secular sermon, mediated log, and a means to mark capital time, I then address how presidential audiences are affected by the modality of the address. Using a quantitative analysis that incorporates factor, reliability, and paired samples t-tests, I construct an experimental design with an embedded survey to isolate specific attitude changes related to source credibility including presidential trust, image perceptions, and leadership traits. I find significant attitude change associated with trust and leadership by the modality of conveyance. This multi-methodological approach renders the Saturday presidential address as an integral part of sustaining the presidency, persuading citizens and the press, and inculcating national identity. |
