In order to be the President, one must campaign. The way a candidate promotes him or herself and their political ideas is entirely up to them. In the early stages of America, I am sure a common method was mail, posters, speakers, or even their own travels around the United States. They must have worked pretty well because the same advertising techniques, with the possible exception of mail, are used today. When new technologies were introduced like radio, telephone, and television, candidates figured out that their usage of those technologies spread their views and values a lot faster than the traditional methods. However, faster is not always a good thing and has been proved over the past one hundred or so years. The introduction of campaigning on televisions for instance has become a nuisance in the public eye and seems to deduct from the pure politics that should be the main focus of elections.
In my life, I have experienced my fair share of the media's role in elections. There is not a day that goes by during election season that I won't see at least one advertisement for a candidate on the television, usually degrading other runners. The type of political advertisement for the soon to be presidents have changed from being centered around the candidate's political views, values, and plans to their own images, and appearances. Even the political debates on television, whose sole purpose is to hear the candidates potential future actions, have transformed into something that is based on image and geared more for entertainment and better ratings.
Ted Koppel, a newscaster on Nightline, wrote a journal on the televised debates. He called them a "joke" and "producing nothing but cotton candy for the mind."The debate consisted of two reporters asking candidates each a question who were in turn given a minute and thirty seconds to do so. The candidate was then asked a different question altogether giving him a chance to contort one of his opponents responses. I think that the minute and thirty seconds is a direct example of the stations ambitions for better ratings. They are hoping for short, juicy answers that attract more people to the show. While the debate did give the candidates questions over their views, the minute and half response time was spent trying to twist the other opponents' answers around rather than answering the question in a straight-forward fashion. Even if the candidates had answered the questions in a noble and professional way, appearances still play a part in the reaction of the viewers.
In The Making of the President 1960, Theodore H. White described the reactions of the 1960's presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. "People who listened to the debate on the radio scored it a draw; people who watched it though that, except in the third debate, Kennedy had crushed Nixon. He thought it was because Kennedy's image appeared "crisp" whereas Nixon's light-colored suit, wrong makeup and bad posture showed a "fuzzed" image. The pure response of the people proves that television has made personal image a big part of the views on presidential candidates because of the radio listeners responses; they concluded the debate to be even. The television viewers saw the appearances of the two men and pronounced Kennedy as the winner.
I am not the only one with the idea that televised politics are a little bogus. The television ratings for presidential debates from 1960-1966 published in Tracking the Presidential Election Years shows that people are beginning to see that televised presidential debates make no difference. In 1980, the debate between Anderson, Carter, and Reagan, reached a record 45.8 million viewers whereas the Clinton and Dole debate in 1996 was only watched by 30.6 million viewers. The table also shows a steady decrease of the debate's rating. Where the debate in 1960 had a rating of 59.5, the Clinton-Dole debate had only a rating of 31.6.
While television may be a great campaigning method an idealized world, it has only proved to be the ground for transforming presidential elections into a competition based on self-image, mud-slinging, and better television ratings.
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