The White House broke a State of the Union tradition. Does it matter?

On Tuesday, the White House broke a longstanding State of the Union tradition. Rather than distributing an embargoed copy of the President’s speech to the press and press alone, the address was made public on the blogging site Medium for everyone’s understanding, criticism and analysis. In their Medium post, they explained:

“By making the text available to the public in advance, the White House is continuing efforts to reach a wide online audience and give people a range of ways to consume the speech.”

Obama’s presidency began during social media’s rise. Establishing a presence on a wide range of online platforms has been a central focus for the administration (See Thursday’s broadcast for White House Director of Online Strategy Kori Schulman’s insight.)

To better understand the significance of the White House’s shift in speech protocol, we turned to presidential historian and PBS NewsHour regular Michael Beschloss. Beschloss filled us in on the history of embargoed speeches, and what to expect for the future of the State of the Union.

NewsHour: What is the purpose of embargoing a speech?

Michael Beschloss: “During the era when print newspapers were Americans’ main source of news, the White House would often release the advance text of a President’s speech to a paper under a time embargo, so that it could be published as soon as possible after he actually gave it (but not before).

Sometimes this had unfortunate consequences. For instance, on November 22, 1963, after President Kennedy was assassinated on his way to deliver a luncheon speech at the Dallas Trade Mart, a few newspapers reported that JFK had actually delivered the Trade Mart address, with quotes from what he had ‘said.’

Sometimes a long official document like the federal budget, or an urgently-awaited report by a Presidential commission, will be embargoed in the same way so that journalists will have time to read, study and absorb it before reporting on it.”

NewsHour: Are there other cases where past Presidents broke away from traditional practices?
Beschloss: “Thomas Jefferson stopped the practice that George Washington and John Adams had followed, of going in person to deliver to Congress the annual message that the Constitution requires. He thought the practice was too monarchical and too similar to the British ‘Speech from the Throne,’ delivered (to this day) by Kings and Queens.

Theodore Roosevelt decided that the annual message (as it was routinely called before FDR) should not only be a report on the country’s performance during the previous year but a set of his own proposals to Congress for the coming year.

Woodrow Wilson, who was a bit monarchical himself, thought it would increase the impact of the speech (and his own clout) to deliver the annual message in person, as Presidents have almost always done ever since. Take a look at this editorial cartoon, which Clifford Berryman drew after Wilson made the change in 1913, which shows Theodore Roosevelt’s likely reaction to Wilson’s innovation.”

NewsHour: Why do you think the White House broke this ritual of speech embargo with the State of the Union address on Tuesday?
Beschloss: “In the age of Twitter, Facebook and other social media, these embargoes are broken much more frequently. And what the President will say is more widely speculated about. With the diminished viewing audience for a State of the Union given by a President in his seventh year, the White House presumably figured that they’d get more benefit from disseminating the contents of the speech in advance than in trying to create artificial suspense.”

NewsHour: Do you think this public sharing of a presidential speech is something we can expect in the future?
Beschloss: “Sure. A State of the Union address had more impact during an era when Presidents spoke infrequently and were enveloped in an atmosphere of awe, mystery and little information.

Now that presidents speak so incessantly in public and are so overexposed, and now that the venues for commentators and critics are so much more numerous than even 20 years ago, a White House staff will search for any tactic it can find to increase the chance that a president’s message will reach as many eyes and ears as possible.”

Did you read the President’s speech ahead of time? Tell us below in the comments.