Television has definitely played an influential role in the United States’ presidential elections since the 1960s. The immense power of television images and personalities may have over time affected who is elected as the most powerful leader in the world. While campaigning, candidates are pursuing image and popularity, which television helps them achieve. Some Americans are not voting for who has the best ideas and concepts; they are attracted to the figure that television and the media support.
First, I am not implying that any past presidential election should have gone the other way; I am just providing examples and ideas to consider. Over the past 50 years, the power of television has increased immensely to a point where it has come to control many things within our daily lives. One of the most important aspects that may make the largest impact is the television media. Presidential campaigning is a media battle. With the hustle and bustle of people’s average daily lives, we don’t take the time to sit down and research the different candidates or come to conclusions on our own. It is too easy to flip the television on and listen to what the nightly reporter has to say. According to Source E, in early 1968 Lyndon B. Johnson was running for reelection and because of Walter Cronkite’s reporting from Vietnam was forced to drop out of the race. The American people trusted CBS’s Cronkite and believed along with him that the current war was hopeless; they weren’t going to support Johnson any longer. The president believed the polls, which showed Cronkite was trusted by the Americans to “tell it the way it is.” On hearing Cronkite’s statements and seeing the polls, Johnson told his aides, “It’s all over” and announced he was dropping out of the race a few weeks later. This doesn’t seem fair that one reporter had such a huge effect on an election. There is no doubt that television media may have hurt the presidential race in 1968.
The media also has the power to pick and choose what to support and more importantly what to bash. The world of television is so biased and there are many people who may not even realize it. The problem with this is that people are not getting the entire picture. Source F discusses a Republican debate saying, “It is a joke to call an event like the one that transpired tonight a debate.” If this was the word the media was putting out, the public would probably agree. But Source F continues to say, “Because we were able to pull the best three or four minutes out of the ninety-minute event (the debate), Nightline made the whole thing look pretty good.” This evidence proves how much the media can skew how certain things in politics can look.
Another negative aspect of how television has been influential in past presidential elections is what the candidates started to pursue because of the effects of television. The table in Source D provides the statistics that the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate had the highest rating until at least the 2000 election. The novelty of this first televised debate may have been a reason for the high ratings. There is no doubt that this race was influenced by image more than any other election before this time. Theodore H. White states in Source C, “Kennedy’s victory in the debates were largely a triumph of image over content.” For the first time, people could catch a glimpse of who they were listening to and it undoubtedly affected their opinions. White also noted, “Kennedy benefited because his image on television was ‘crisp’; Nixon’s—light-colored suit, wrong makeup, bad posture—was ‘fuzzed’.” People who listened to the debates on the radio had other opinions about who should have “won” the debate. This proves that viewing these debates plays a huge role in forming opinions about which candidate won the debate. Source C concludes with the idea that, “television had won the nation away from sound to images in 1960…politics has become a competition for images, rather than between ideals.” Kennedy’s image advantages helped him defeat Nixon in the 1960 election. Did people really vote for who had the best policies and most experience or was Kennedy popular because he was young, smart and had television appeal? It seems utterly wrong that something so important can be decided by something as simple as seeing what just meets the eye.
Television advertising is another aspect of television’s influence in the United States. Today there seems to be more attack ads rather than the typical “vote for me” variety. These visual attacks campaigns place on each other are appealing to the public and give the media something to talk about and analyze. The candidates seem more focused more on what their competitors are doing wrong than what they are doing right. In this never ending circle, the public isn’t getting any information on the candidate’s own policies.
Over the course of the last 50 years there have undoubtedly been many presidential elections that were skewed or effected by television. It may not have been for the worse and we will never know, but many candidates never even had the chance to compete effectively because of how the media and public view certain images. I find it very hard to accept that television can have such a large impact on this very important decision that we have the right to make such as electing the next president of the United States of America.
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