The Similarities between Early Radio and TV

Ironically, Politics and Television reaches the same conclusion about the effects of television as Fireside Politics reached about the effects of radio. A new medium comes along. Proponents and Opponents quickly develop. The proponents preach of how this medium will change political campaigning forever, as well as what a great educational tool the new medium is. They also stress how said new medium will allow citizens to hear candidates in their own words and make more informed decisions about who they should vote for. Meanwhile, opponents of the new medium talk about the potential for abuse, as well as fight over means for regulating it and insuring that political campaigning does not become the same as selling kids breakfast cereal.

However, both books reach the same conclusion. New mediums change political campaigning, but not as much as some would like us to believe. People are still apathetic. No matter how perfect the regulatory structure, one candidate always spends more than the other. But life goes on. Politicians still spend money on advertising in more traditional mediums and still travel the country to achieve a personal touch with the electorate.

All of this is not meant to discount the true changes that did occur. It is merely to put things into perspective, noting that while methods may change, the essential principals stayed the same.

For next week, I plan to continue Politics and Television. Once this is complete, I will have read about the effects of newspapers, radio, and early television on political campaigning. At this point, I will attempt to outline where my December paper is going to go and try to figure out what areas I need to conduct more research in.

Fireside Politics Wrap-up

Fireside Politics proved very helpful. Its in-depth look at the ratio industry provided me with valuable information about the regulatory structure of radio. The book begins in the early days of the Federal Radio Commission, up through the Federal Communications Commission. Even once the FCC was established, there were continuing issues about licensing and advertising. NBC and CBS both refused to air political advertisements except during the “election season”, which was from after the national nominating conventions until the election. This provided problems because the party that was not in power often wanted to respond to claims from the party that was in power, however, the networks would not air this.

I liked this idea a lot because it seems that political commentary dominates so much of television news today. I understand why this is the case; but the idea of only listening to political commentary for a limited time is appealing.

Another interesting idea was how the national networks choose to deal with the party committees. The networks often preempted paid advertised programs with political programs. This worked out well for the networks, as the companies often did not demand their money back from these displaced programs. So the networks got paid double for this airtime. Also, even though the networks did not extend credit to the national committees, they did not demand payment within the standard seven days. This likely is because the networks were worried that if they demanded prompt payment, it could cause them to fall out of favor with politicians who were ultimately in control of the licenses they needed to broadcast.

I now plan to start reading Politics and Television Re-viewed by Engel Lang. I think this will work well as it is about the introduction of television to politics. This will allow me to divide my investigation into two parts. For this semester, I will focus on the effects of newspaper, radio, and network television. In the spring, I will focus on the effects cable news and the Internet.

Early Failures of Radio

I have found Fireside Politics much more helpful than by last reading. Although I have yet to finish it, it has provided me with much insight into how radio stations were setup and the differing ideas on regulating them. I was not surprised to learn of the opposition to any plan that involved government ownership of stations. As with so many things, England, Canada, and Australia had some type of system where the government owned at least some of the stations. However, in sticking with the iconic American idea of keeping government and business separate, there was little support for a similar system of regulation here.

One thing that did surprise me was the voluntary censorship the stations adopted during the early years of FDR’s presidency. All the Federal Radio Commission had to do was imply that any station that that broadcast ideas that opposed Roosevelt’s policies would face the possibility of their license being renewed and that was the end of it. An industry dominated with Republicans gave FDR unrestricted access to their airwaves and refused to air opposing viewpoints. In my option, this is an example of a great failure in journalism. According to Craig, many newspapers published editorials openly disagreeing with FDR’s policies. But the threat of being denied a license renewal was enough to prevent radio stations from doing the same.

I have started to read about the formation of the FCC and hope that its replacement of the FRC will alleviate some of the politics of keeping a radio license.

I plan to continue reading Fireside Politics and possibly begin Communities of the Air this week.

Fireside Politics

I finished The Nightly News Nightmare and was generally disappointed. The book provided overwhelming evidence that the nightly news is failing Americans. The nightly news increasingly focuses on the horse race, scandals, and has an increasingly negative tone. They also, in the rush to be first with breaking stories, do not research stores as much as they should. Take the 2000 election as a prime example.

After finishing this book, I began reading Fireside Politics. Part I of this book focuses on the history of radio as a medium. Initially seen solely as a way to communicate between two people, General Electric quickly realized that mass broadcasts of entertainment had the potential to make a lot of money. They created RCA with this mission. I was surprised to learn that during World War I, all radio was put under the control of the Navy. Although Part I does not necessarily relate to my topic, I think it will be beneficial to have a background on radio before reading about its effects on political culture, which the book covers in Part II.

For next week, I hope to finish Fireside Politics and begin to examine what I will be writing about for our November papers.

New Hampshire, The Horse Race, and The Sound Byte

The Nightly News Nightmare has provided much insight into how network television coverage of presidential elections has change since the rise of alternate forms of news, mainly cable news and the Internet. This part of the book focused largely on what they refer to as the horse race and the sound byte.

However, what really interested me is the importance of the New Hampshire primary. Being the first in the season, the candidates spend a disproportionally large amount of time canvassing the state. In fact, according to Farnsworth and Lichter, approximately 20 percent of registered voters will have at least seen one of the candidates in person before they vote in the primary. It is difficult to continue as a candidate if you do not do well in this primary. In order to be seen as viable by donors, which are clearly necessary in order to continue as a candidate, a first or second place finish is necessary. It seems strange that one state should wield so much power. New Hampshire narrows the field from a crowded six or seven candidates for each party to two, possibly three major contenders that will compete in the rest of the primaries across the country. I suppose that someone has to go first, however, it seems as if we trust a small state with the very large task of significantly narrowing our field of presidential contenders.

But back to the horse race. One of the problems that Farnsworth and Lichter feel with network news coverage is their obsession with the horse race coverage of who is leading in which polls. The thing about this is that it is completely worthless. If the polls show a candidate is doing well, but he performs poorly in a primary contest, his campaign will likely suffer because of the artificial perception that the media created that he was going to win. The opposite is also true. If a candidate is trailing in the polls, but wins a primary by a landslide, the increased media coverage after this could create the appearance of an increase in support, when in actuality, the support was always there, the media was just wrong.

I do not necessarily think that reporting on polls is a bad thing. What seems to be the problem is that it is the media’s favorite thing to report on, and because of this, issue based reporting suffers. The citizens repeatedly say that what they want is issue based reporting. And alternative media shows this. Shows where citizens can call in and ask candidates questions, or debates in the town hall style continually feature more issue-based questions. What are you going to do for me? How are you going to increase my standard of living? What are you going to do to protect my city? Instead of questions about draft dodging, a 25-year-old DUI arrest, whether they ever smoked pot, and who designs their suites.

Network news has gotten better. The two elections in the new millennium have featured slightly more coverage of issues compared to the other elections since the introduction of cable news. However, there are still signs. Many more Americans choose newspapers, cable news shows, talk radio, and the Internet as their main means of getting information on the elections. The question of how long the nightly news can survive is complicated because there will always be people who only do not have access to anything else. If I live on a farm in the middle of Illinois, I probably can’t get the New York Times, cable TV, or the Internet. This leaves over the air broadcasts. For this reason I do not think the question is about longevity, but credibility.

The other thing addressed is the sound byte. The nightly news has reduced candidates to an average of an eight second sound byte. If they speak longer than eight seconds, they risk not receiving coverage at all. As Farnsworth and Lichter put it, “Expressing an idea, even a relatively simple one, in eight seconds or less is a considerable challenge. The standard television commercial, which usually has a single, simple message along the lines of “buy these pants,” uses twenty to thirty seconds to make its case—about three to four times as much times as a presidential candidate has to say “here is why you should vote for me.”” We spend more time hearing about the merits of a pair of jeans than the merits of our leaders. Clearly, this is a problem. However, until journalists care less about advancing themselves personally with mindless commentary, the nightly news will continue to provide the candidates with eight-second intervals to speak with the electorate.

I plan to finish The Nightly News Nightmare and move on to Political Parties, Interest Groups, and Political Campaigns. I have not made any progress on finding an archive of print or button ads.

Television's Influence on Political Campaigning

Switching gears from my previous reading, the Nightly News Nightmare focuses on modern presidential elections from 1988-2004. Initially, it seems as if it is not going to be as helpful as I had hoped. The authors thus far have presented information about public option surveys. It is interesting that what people say they want the news media to cover and what the news media feels is important to cover are often different. For instance, public opinion polls consistently say that American’s want coverage of the issues, while the media constantly covers the candidates as people and their correspondent’s take on this. Even though American’s claim to not be getting the information they want from the news, they still continue to watch it.

I spent a lot of time this week on a cool website, livingroomcanidate.org. This website has an archive of most presidential campaign commercials from 1952-2008. I spent a lot of time watching commercials from both Democrats and Republicans. One striking theme emerges; campaigning in the last decade of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first centuries has taken a decidedly negative turn. I do not mean to suggest that negative campaigning is a new phenomenon. It seems as if older campaign commercials did more attacking of issues and less attacking of the candidate’s character.

Tying in what I learned from Nightly News Nightmare, this seems strange. If American’s are supposedly more concerned with issues that affect them (ie. healthcare, defense, social welfare programs), then why have advertisements turned away from the issues? The theme for modern political ads seems to be attacking one another’s character. Obama does not have enough experience. McCain is too old to be president. Sarah Palin is a sexy librarian with no brain.

There can only be one reason that campaigns chose to run these ads; they must work. Which shows the indecisiveness of the American electorate. We supposedly care less about candidates’ extra-marital dealings and war records then about their positions. However, we are not swayed by political platforms, we are swayed by the candidate’s personal shortcomings.

I am interested to see how Farnsworth and Lichter account for this apparent hypocrisy. Do American’s really not know what we think is important in selecting our leader? Or are these public opinion polls so far off base that they are projecting falsehoods about the electorate?

I plan to continue to read Nightly News Nightmare, as well as look around for other sites that log political advertisements. As Ben Wright suggested, I would like to look at how campaign posters and buttons have changed. Hopefully I can find a sampling of this online. If anyone knows of where I could find this, please speak up. Comments are always welcome…

Four Hats in the Ring (Part II)

The second half of Four Hats in the Ring takes a chapter to analyze Roosevelt, Debs, Taft, Wilson, and to some extent LaFollette. These chapters provide much insight into these men’s personalities. Roosevelt believed that if he did not gain the republican nomination, his personal fame would carry him to creating his new third party. To an extent it did. Once the progressive party was organized, Roosevelt drew large crowds whenever he spoke. However, he himself admitted that this did not necessarily mean that he had the support of these throngs of people; it was quite possible that they were only there to see the famous former president. Roosevelt was somewhat blinded with his own ambition, however, as the election approached, he knew there was little chance he would win.

The irony in Roosevelt’s losing is how progressive his ideas really were. Wilson implemented many of them in order to gain reelection in 1916. According to Gould, almost all of them were implemented sometime in the next twenty-five years.

Then there is Taft. After securing the Republican nomination, he knew there was little chance he would win; he was not that popular. However, he refused to campaign in keeping with tradition. Considering that he did not campaign himself, his vice president was very ill and died several days prior to the election, and the split in the Republican Party, it is impressive that he garnered the number of votes that he did. Although he held out hope that he would win the election, he did not expect to.

Eugene Debs certainly did not expect to win either. His stated goal was to increase the presence of the Socialist Party. Because of this, he insisted on campaigning nationally, as opposed to concentrating his efforts in areas sympathetic to the socialist agenda. Although it may have not been the resounding success he was looking for, the 1912 election did yield the greatest percentage victory for the socialist cause.

Which leaves Wilson. As the election drew nearer, he knew that he was virtually guaranteed the presidency. However, he still introduced the idea of New Freedom as his plan for improving the country. New Freedom was just the catch phrase the Democrats needed. It gave them something to say without providing much detail of what the actual plans were. Once Wilson won the election with great majorities in both the House and Senate, he basically had a blank slate to implement whatever the Democrats wanted to.

I cannot help but draw connections to Obama’s campaign. He knew that McCain winning was a long shot, especially once the economy tanked. His version of New Freedom was Change; a nice word to put on campaign posters, but no real substance to back it up. Now that he is in office with a Democrat majority in the House and Senate, he is also trying to advance the Democrat’s agenda for the country.

According to Gould, many have said that had Taft and Roosevelt reconciled their differences and ran together, the chance of a Republican victory would have been possible. However, he does not feel this would be the case. In fact, the four completing candidates, only one with a real chance, is not what he feels makes the 1912 election modern at all. It is everything else that was going on in the country at the same time.

The presidential candidates had to compete for election coverage for the first time. The American public was fascinated with the first major organized crime trial in New York City, Jim Thorpe’s wins at the Olympics, and Jim Johnson’s controversial marriage to a young white girl. Because newspapers were able to print news from around the country, these pop culture stories would grab the public’s attention away from the election.

The trend of American’s participating less in politics is shown by the voter turnout figures. The 1908 election, according to Gould one considered particularity safe and boring at the time, attracted nearly the same number of American’s to the polls as this bitter four-way race. This seems to have begun the trend of many American’s choosing to not participate in the election of their public officials.

Overall, this book was interesting to being my study of the changing nature of political campaigns. Although it did not involve a major innovation like radio, TV, or the Internet, it seems to have singled the shift to modern elections in that American’s began to not care as much about politics. As I said last week, my next reading will be The Nightly News Nightmare by Stephen Farnsworth and Robert Lichter. Perhaps this obsession with nightly campaign updates will signal a shift back to more American’s having a genuine interest in politics. As always, comments are welcome…