Do still tailor their messages for specific audiences, or has mass media coverage led them to homogenize their messages? Content analysis of 77 of Lyndon B. Johnson's public statements about Vietnam showed that, depending on the audience, he did vary the content-which suggests that to some extent-the audience is the message. Lawrence W. Miller is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Pan American University, Edinburg, Texas. Lee Sigelman is Associate Professor of Political Science, Texas Tech University. The authors wish to thank James Clotfelter for useful comments, and especially Dixie Mercer McNeil for her work on this project. Public Opinion Quarterly ? 1978 by The Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier North-Holland, Inc. 0033-362X/78/0042-0071/$01.25 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.198 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 06:19:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 72 MILLER AND SIGELMAN Thus, Doris Graber (1976b:181) states flatly that politicians tailor their rhetoric to a particular audience or audiences in order to achieve predetermined purposes and avoid undesirable consequences. According to this view, it is likely to be the exceptionally naive or idealistic politician who does not vary his policy pronouncements according to the political predilections of his audience. Barry Goldwater's stubborn insistence on lambasting TVA in Tennessee, Social Security in Florida, and welfare in New York, for example, was widely seen as a contributing factor in the 1964 Republican debacle. Somewhat cynically, we have come to expect campaigners to praise free enterprise and blast labor unions in a speech to a local service club, to be much more pro-labor in a talk to a union local, and to pursue something of a middle course in an address aimed at a more undifferentiated audience. John Mueller (1969:189) observes that speeches by statesmen to congregations of their own countrymen tend to differ from those delivered to foreigners, just as the views of American on civil rights tend to be different when they are voiced in Mississippi rather than Michigan. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, then, conventional wisdom holds that the audience is the messagethat the content of a political statement is largely shaped by the audience for the statement. On the other hand, the actual evidence supporting this conventional wisdom is entirely anecdotal. Moreover, as is so often the case, a second bit of conventional wisdom contradicts the first. According to this second train of thought, the national media coverage accorded to high-ranking government officials and candidates for office homogenizes political rhetoric, and thereby militates against the tailoring of messages for specific audiences. Because have become acutely aware of the political uses of the media, the audience for any public statement extends far beyond those who are in the physical presence of the speaker. Thus, as Katherine Ludington, an early student of mass communication, contended, the political speaker in an era of mass communication must find arguments suited to a farmer or to a city dweller, to a Southerner equally with a New Englander or a Westerner, for if the hookup is wide enough, all will be there (quoted by Chester, 1969:285). Rather than tailoring or targeting his messages, the politician may accordingly be well advised to speak in platitudes, to attempt to project a favorable personal image, and to avoid alienating segments of his heterogeneous, mass-mediated audience. I The fact that presidential statements (the focus of the present research) are often used to communicate signals to foreign governments, friendly and otherwise, and to provide guidance to American officials at home I The best documentation of these tactics remains McGinniss' (1969) inside view of the 1968 Nixon campaign. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.198 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 06:19:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms IS THE AUDIENCE THE MESSAGE? 73 and abroad (Singer and Small, 1974:277) could also offset the tendency to tailor messages for specific audiences. Is tailoring messages for specific audiences a thing of the past, rendered obsolete by media coverage and the attendant expansion of audiences beyond those who are in the physical presence of the speaker? Or do political tactics remain essentially unchanged from the time when politics was a more localized affair? In order to address these questions, we undertook a content analysis of the public pronouncements of a recent American President, Lyndon B. Johnson, on a pressing policy issue, the American involvement in Vietnam. Because we were focusing on the highly publicized statements of an extremely visible politician with a nationwide constituency concerning an issue of unquestioned salience, we considered this to be something of a hard test of the message-tailoring hypothesis; each of these factors-publicity, visibility, a national constituency, and salienceought to make message-tailoring less likely.