President Obama: Weekly Address: Closing Corporate Tax Loopholes

[BumRushDaShow]

36. One might not even need to subscribe

I listen to it on my local (CBS-affiliate) all-news radio station every Saturday morning between 6:05 am - 6:10 am ET. When they used to air Shrub's weekly address, they made sure to put it on at 10:05 am.

I.e., some local news/talk stations in the big cities do air them.

[font size="6" face="serif"]Obama holds to weekly radio tradition[/font][/font]
By Matt Viser
Globe Staff July 07, 2014

WASHINGTON — It evokes an image of President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivering one of his fireside chats to a rapt radio audience. Or a bygone era when families motored to the country on a Saturday morning, tuning in to the official word from the White House. In nostalgic defiance of today’s hyper-drive news cycle, the tradition endures as the Weekly Presidential Address.

While historians and current White House officials fiercely defend this packaged political ritual, there is evidence that the address has faded into near-irrelevance. It generates far less news coverage than it did when it began three decades ago, and it is so under the radar that no one is tracking its listenership — or even which stations are carrying it. “Is he even still doing them?” asked Peter Lydotes, director of operations at WBUR, a major public radio outlet in Boston. He is.

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Although the current White House took the address into the video age — with recordings they hope will go viral on the Internet — in essence it’s the same format as Roosevelt pioneered in the 1930s. It harkens to an age before news was digested and spit out in 30 seconds.

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Although Roosevelt was known for his fireside chats, spoken to an America still recovering from the Great Depression, his speeches were fairly sporadic. It wasn’t until 1982 that President Reagan launched a weekly address, delivered every Saturday morning.

More: http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2014/07/06/president-obama-weekly-radio-address-anachronism-that-endures/2xtr0v07pKPHcuqk6QvckN/story.html

Agree that it doesn't fit the narrative of "he's not getting out there with messaging" or the "He should do radio addresses like FDR" nonsense.