From the Society Page to the Front Page: First Ladies as Newsmakers
From the Society Page to the Front Page: First Ladies as Newsmakers
The media has always been fascinated by FLOTUS, but first ladies have taken vastly different approaches to the spotlight.
This is the first story in a two-part series analyzing the evolving relationship between America’s modern first ladies and the media.
In April of 1966, First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson led 100 press representatives on a wilderness adventure at Big Bend National Park in West Texas. Wearing a red checkered shirt, jeans and a cowboy hat, the first lady, along with then-Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, took the group on a hike up the Lost Mine Trail to glimpse views of the rugged desert and mountains surrounding them. As Johnson paused on the ridge between Juniper Canyon and Green Gulch in the Chisos Basin, according to the National Park Service, she said, “This looks like the very edge of the world.”
The next day, a photo of the scene in the New York Times would prompt President Lyndon Johnson to comment on the press coverage, according to a recounting of the scene in the book, “Media Relations and the Modern First Lady.”
“Well, it’s good,” Johnson said. “You have a five column picture on page one of the New York Times. Lady Bird looks like the Lone Ranger, and Stewart Udall looks like Tonto.”
First ladies over history have taken vastly different approaches to their relationship with the media, according to first ladies scholar and Quinnipiac University media studies professor Lisa Burns, who edited “Media Relations and the Modern First Lady.” Just like the role of first lady itself, Burns says, there’s no rulebook that defines how first ladies should communicate their work to the press. First ladies must define their own priorities based on their own unique skills and experience, and in turn work to communicate it. Burns’ research shows that it’s first ladies who take a proactive approach to their communication efforts, like Lady Bird Johnson, that are more successful in getting positive press coverage.
“These women, whether they want to or not, are going to get media attention, and their families are going to get media attention,” Burns says. “Most of them don’t want it, not surprisingly. But then the question is, if this is part of the role, how do you deal with it?”
“These women, whether they want to or not, are going to get media attention, and their families are going to get media attention,” Burns says. “Most of them don’t want it, not surprisingly. But then the question is, if this is part of the role, how do you deal with it?”
The Big Bend trip, organized to promote the Johnson administration’s “See America First” initiative and the 50th anniversary of the National Park Service, was one of many meticulously planned by the first lady and her legendary press secretary, Liz Carpenter. Lady Bird Johnson and Carpenter, a career newswoman and former aide to Lyndon Johnson when he was vice president, traveled more than 200,000 miles together across the country with the press in tow to promote Lady Bird Johnson’s signature initiatives – environmental conservation and beautification, civil rights, and early childhood education, among others. Carpenter called the trips the “Lady Bird Safari,” write first lady scholars Nancy Kegan Smith and Diana Bartelli Carlin in the book’s chapter on Johnson.
“We reporters were proud participants in the Lady Bird brigade,” reporter Helen Thomas later wrote, according to the book. “We felt we were part of a great adventure, promoting conservation and preservation of this land we love.”
Johnson would later describe barbecuing steaks underneath cottonwood trees with the media group, according to the National Park Service, as they watched a “magical” sunset over the Sierra del Carmen mountains. The capstone event was an 11-mile trip in rafts down the Rio Grande. A New York Times reporter wrote it was a “wonder” the first lady “survived” the trip, according to NPS – a joking reference to the water that was no more than two feet deep and the rafts that formed “traffic jams” that “resembled Times Square at rush hour.”
According to Smith and Carlin’s chapter in “Media Relations and the Modern First Lady,” Johnson paddled herself for a portion of the trip, and Smith said Johnson even helped a few members of the group back into the boat after they fell into the shallow water. According to NPS, the first lady called Big Bend “wild country, completely untamed by man, but a good place to come to get your troubles in perspective.”
The goal of the Big Bend trip was to get out the message that Americans should explore the natural resources in their own country. It worked. After widespread press coverage, attendance to Big Bend National Park tripled, according to Carpenter’s memoir cited by Carlin and Smith. But it also placed Johnson squarely at the center of the story she wanted to tell the American public – that America was a beautiful place worth exploring and preserving for future generations.
With a journalism degree and many connections in the media as an owner of TV and radio stations, Lady Bird Johnson understood the media’s impact and cultivated the press “masterfully” to amplify her message, says Smith. Like Eleanor Roosevelt before her, who held press conferences exclusively for women reporters, Johnson cultivated relationships with the primarily women reporters assigned to cover her and offered them substantive stories to cover. This helped elevate coverage of the first lady from the society page to the front page, says Smith, president of the First Ladies Association for Research and Education.
“A big thing about Lady Bird is she didn’t view the press as an enemy – she viewed them as a friend, and someone who could help exponentially increase the message she wanted to give,” says Smith, who worked with Lady Bird Johnson during her time as an archivist at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library at the University of Texas at Austin.
Johnson’s approach was a stark departure from her immediate predecessor Jackie Kennedy, who instructed her staff to respond to media requests with “minimum information given with maximum politeness,” writes Elizabeth J. Natalle in her chapter on Kennedy in Burns’ book. The technique became known as the “PBO” – polite brush off, Natalle writes.
In part because of the widespread media attention she garnered, Kennedy became the first, first lady to employ a press secretary, Pamela Turnure. Reporting to Kennedy’s social secretary, Turnure largely handled media coverage of Kennedy’s social events, but also took on media relations surrounding Kennedy’s signature White House restoration efforts, says first ladies scholar Anita McBride.
Kennedy was effective at offering up carefully curated images to the media and doing selective interviews, and saw huge ratings success doing a televised tour of the recently restored White House with CBS, says McBride, a FLARE founding member and executive-in-residence at American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. Kennedy understood the power of the image and used it effectively in her public messaging, McBride says. By limiting the amount of images she released to the media, whenever she released an image, it was “big news.”
“She wanted to control the images that would go to the public – the images of herself, the images of her family,” McBride says. “She was a photojournalist herself, and she knew instinctively what would be interesting, and also knew instinctively if you’re not giving out too much, you’re creating a greater sense of interest in a way.”
Kennedy also wanted Turnure to act as a media gatekeeper, says Carlin, a FLARE founding member and professor emerita of communication at Saint Louis University. Carlin, McBride and Smith recently published the nation’s first college textbook focusing on the legacies of presidential first ladies.
“Jackie knew she was going to be very popular and had a real need for privacy,” Carlin says. “Her goal was to have someone working hand in glove with her to make sure that she wasn’t getting coverage she didn’t want, that [the media] were not being intrusive.”
While Turnure was a trusted Kennedy aide, she was 23 when she took on the newly minted press role, and had little experience in the news industry. In contrast, Liz Carpenter was an industry veteran who understood the needs of the press. She appreciated that Johnson did as well. Carpenter said she loved working with Lady Bird Johnson because she understood the difference between a morning and an evening deadline, Smith says. Carpenter was always available to take media calls – up to 150 a day – a practice that aligned with the advice she gave Johnson to be available and be honest.
“Liz was an incredibly effective journalist and press spokesperson, and together Lady Bird and Liz totally professionalized the press function of the first lady’s office,” Smith says.
Covering the first lady: Criticisms and challenges
To be sure, the media has incredible power in the way first ladies are portrayed whether or not she has a successful press operation. And that coverage often maps onto the shifting roles and expectations of women in society. As the most visible public woman in the country, “What first ladies say and do, as interpreted by journalists, frames public perceptions of the part women should play in American life,” writes Maurine Beasley, a journalism professor emerita at the University of Maryland, in her book, “First Ladies and the Press: The Unfinished Partnership of the Media Age.”
The media has faced criticism that their coverage has focused on a first lady’s personality, “likeability” and role as White House hostess over her work. As a case in point, Carlin cited a press conference held by Rosalynn Carter to promote her work advocating for mental health awareness as the honorary chair of her husband President Jimmy Carter’s mental health commission during his term, during which she was asked by a reporter about the kind of alcohol being served in the White House. And an outsized emphasis on the first lady’s clothing is a consistent media criticism, albeit one that’s changing, Carlin says. These are many of the same struggles that women in society, and especially in roles of power such as women running for office, also face, Carlin says.
“I do think women are held to a likeability standard that men certainly aren’t,” Carlin says.
Despite Pat Nixon’s work traveling abroad as a diplomatic representative, advocating for the hiring of women in the federal government and promoting volunteerism, much of her press coverage focused on her appearance and demeanor, and some journalists used the derogatory nickname, “Plastic Pat.” And First Lady Hillary Clinton, who chaired the Clinton administration’s health care task force, was dubbed everything from Lady MacBeth to “yuppie wife from hell” as some journalists portrayed her as wielding too much power, Caryl Rivers writes in the foreword to Beasley’s book.
“A woman close – as close as it is possible to get, in fact – to the holder of great power seems to start all sorts of media alarm bells to ring,” Rivers writes.
The media also tends to “pigeonhole” first ladies based on preconceived perceptions of their personality, says McBride. McBride, who served as chief of staff to First Lady Laura Bush from 2005 to 2009, recalls a reporter asking Laura Bush whether she would be “more like Barbara Bush or more like Hillary Clinton.”
“That’s really saying, are you going to be ‘old fashioned,’ or are you going to be the new ‘activist’ model?” McBride says. “Well, Laura Bush was an activist on the things she cared to be active on, and she was her own person, and she’s making the position her own.”
The national media has also faced critiques that it doesn’t cover the first lady enough. Bush, who visited the Middle East several times to promote women’s rights and health care, in 2005 advocated for women’s equality before a group of Arab leaders at the World Economic Forum in Jordan as the Saudi delegation walked out. McBride recalls some media coverage of the trip, but says it was far harder to generate media interest in her work with youth initiatives domestically.
In many cases, a first lady’s life before the White House defines those choices, and in turn how she’ll be covered as a newsmaker, said Susan Zirinsky, the president of See It Now Studios and the former president and senior executive producer of CBS News, the first woman to hold the position in the history of the network.
“I think the issue is, How active was someone before becoming first lady?” says Zirinsky. “And on the flipside, finding issues that are personally important to you to promote, because then it feels like you have value, you’re not just a handshaker.”
Zirinsky started her career at the CBS Washington Bureau in 1972 and has covered multiple presidential administrations for the network. She cited Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign and Betty Ford’s work advocating for breast cancer awareness after Ford shared her own diagnosis with the disease publicly in 1974. Ford would also later publicly share her struggle with alcohol and opioid medications and become an advocate for people with substance use disorders.
“If the first lady had something special or she was taking an important trip, we staffed it, but it would depend on the import of the event. If it’s window dressing, it’s a voiceover. But do we pay attention and cover it? You bet.”
— Susan Zirinsky, former president and senior executive producer of CBS News
But as newsroom staffing has declined in recent years, the first lady “beat” of the eras of Roosevelt and later, Johnson, has all but dissolved. In addition, the type of reporters covering the first lady – historically women reporters working for society or lifestyle sections, Burns says – has expanded. Today, coverage of the first lady’s activities, when deemed newsworthy by the media, are assigned to reporters juggling a wide variety of other tasks and trying to fit the first lady’s activities into their coverage area.
While Zirinsky says the national media don’t always have the resources to cover a first lady’s advocacy efforts, they dedicate coverage when there’s a “hard news” angle or some other compelling element.
“If the first lady had something special or she was taking an important trip, we staffed it, but it would depend on the import of the event. If it’s window dressing, it’s a voiceover. But do we pay attention and cover it? You bet.”
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the correct title for Lisa Burns. She is a professor of media studies at Quinnipiac University.
This is the first story of a two-part series. The second part features an interview with Lisa Caputo, former press secretary for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, that is slated to run next week.