Former President Richard Milhous Nixon rarely watched TV news or read the newspaper and instead relied on a daily summary typed up by his aides, a recently released study says.

The study, “What Can a President Learn from the News Media?,” (PDF) says Nixon’s reliance on the daily news summary is a cautionary tale for future presidents.

Nixon’s solution to the problem of news consumption was noteworthy: he avoided direct exposure to newspaper, television or radio reports almost entirely. Instead, he instituted an elaborate system of media monitoring that substituted for almost all first-hand consumption of the news. Nixon was not the first president to use his staff to monitor the news, but his monitoring system was more extensive than any of his predecessors. More importantly, Nixon was the first president to rely on such monitoring as his primary source of exposure to the mass media.

Reading the news summary was the first thing on Nixon’s schedule every day. He devoted 20 to 30 minutes to reading them, scrawling notes on the margins that “helped dictate a significant portion of the daily business for the White House staff,” writes Christopher F. Karpowitz, an assistant professor of political science at Brigham Young University.

Nixon’s marginal comments show that he used the summary to comment on the success of administration initiatives, to direct public relations efforts, to praise or discipline administrators, or simply to blow off steam.

The summaries were prepared by staffers Lyndon K. (‘Mort’) Allin and Patrick Buchanan. Although the summaries were advertised as the best way for Nixon to get an objective, cross-section of news coverage, they often were written in a way that fueled “the president’s already burning resentments and biases,” Karpowitz writes.

The summaries themselves tended to personalize the news, repeatedly drawing attention to the perceived biases of prominent reporters.

The possibility the summaries didn’t give him an entirely objective view of the news wasn’t lost on Nixon. Karpowitz notes, for example, that Nixon wondered if Buchanan’s distaste for his historic trip to China colored how Buchanan wrote the summaries. Buchanan was a newspaper editorial writer before joining Nixon’s staff and later ran for president himself.

Nixon’s antipathy toward reporters was established long before Woodward and Bernstein’s stories helped bring him down. In 1962, after a failed campaign for California governor, he famously declared his “last press conference” and told the reporters gathered for it that “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.”

The study recalls historian Stephen Ambrose’s own research of the news summaries, which noted “the prevalence of violent verbs in Nixon’s responses”:

‘Get someone to hit him,’ Nixon would write about one reporter, or ‘fire him’, or ‘cut him’, or ‘freeze him’, or ‘knock this down’, or ‘fight him’, or ‘dump him’, or ‘don’t back off’.

Karpowitz analyzed Nixon’s marginal notes, dividing them into “spin,” “policy,” “vent,” “praise,” “discipline,” “other,” or “missing.”

Roughly one-third of his comments were about “spin,” meaning they focused on image and PR, and 18 percent were to “vent,” meaning they expressed frustration or annoyance but didn’t direct anyone to take action. Another 18 percent dealt with actual policy.

Karpowitz concludes that in part because the summaries gave a few staff members too much power as gatekeepers, the summaries didn’t serve Nixon well.

For healthy presidential leadership, there may be no substitute for first-hand consumption of media stories, even if in managed doses. It can be said of presidential news summaries what is sometimes said of the relative merit of vitamin pills and nutritious foods: in a busy world, a chief executive may find it useful to resort to news summaries, but news capsules provided by a president’s aides are an imperfect replacement for at least some exposure to the real thing. The president whose media diet includes only summaries may be cognitively undernourished.

[via The Monkey Cage]