Presidents and Media Change
Here’s a fascinating point from Matt Compton that I’m going to steal. It’s about a speech FDR gave in 1929. During the speech, according to H.W. Brands’ new biography he argued that back in the day “Elections were won or lost, parties were driven out or swept into power entirely as the public speakers of one side or the other proved most able and convincing. It was the golden age of the silver tongue.” But then came the rise of the newspaper and the first great era of the sound bite. Compton’s paraphrase:
That tradition, however, had changed with the advent of mass media in the form of the newspapers. Then, as now, publishers seldom printed speeches in their entirety, and voters learned to take their cues from quotes that reporters and editors chose to excerpt.
FDR felt that in his time things were changing:
The pendulum is rapidly swinging back to the old condition of things. One can only guess at the figure, but I think it is a conservative estimate to say that whereas five years ago 99 out of 100 took their arguments from the editorials and the news columns of the daily press, today at least half the voters, sitting at their own fireside, listen to the actual words of the political leaders on both sides and make their decisions based on what they hear rather than what they read. I think it is almost safe to say that in reaching their decisions as to which party they will support, what is heard over the radio decides as many people as what is printed in the newspapers.
Famously, the radio proved to be a hugely effective communications medium for Obama. But then the pendulum swung back in the age of TV. And now in the internet age, it’s swinging back again in an interesting way. The internet is famous for the way it fragments attention, but one of the ways in which it does that is by making it possibly to narrowcast more content to interested parties than would ever be viable to push through the crowded pipes of cable television. Over here I just watched the incoming chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality talk for 85 seconds about high-speed rail and mass transit. 85 seconds isn’t a ton of seconds. But the fact remains that you could never get a television network to devote that much time to a public official just talking about a subject that, though important, isn’t all that interesting to most people.
It’s an interesting new kind of landscape.
46 Responses to “Presidents and Media Change”
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January 15th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Famously, the radio proved to be a hugely effective communications medium for Obama
Hmmm, drinking the Freudian kool aid?
January 15th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Famously, the radio proved to be a hugely effective communications medium for Obama. But then the pendulum swung back in the age of TV.
Obama was before the age of TV?
January 15th, 2009 at 8:55 am
That threw me for a loop.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:55 am
“Interesting” is a word Americans use instead of actually analyizing something. It’s intellectual laziness.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:01 am
1) There’s a BIG difference between now and the past. In the early 20 th century, Teddy Roosevelt could speak of the “malefactors of great wealth”.
Today, Obama no sooner gets elected by the efforts of common people that he rushes to have dinner with the right wing propagandists who have been screwing Obama’s Democratic constituents for the past 16 years.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Why, you kids are too young to remember back in 1932 when we’d all gather ’round the cathedral radio and listen to President Obama inspire the nation! Of course, they had to call him “FDR” back then because there was no way he’d have been elected if they’d known he was colored, no sir!
January 15th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Of course. What did you think the “wireless applications” of Obama’s media strategy were?
January 15th, 2009 at 9:05 am
By the way, Matthew, when are you having dinner with Obama?
Those of us in the common herd depend upon President Obama to signal to us who is worth listening to. So far we have David BRooks, George Will, and William Kristol.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:10 am
If you’re talking about the major broadcast networks, true, but you should turn to the lesser used numbers on your cable box. Out here in Mongomery County we have the Jerry Weast vanity network that sometimes squeezes in a little bit about the issues facing our public schools.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:15 am
Also, it seems Lawrence Kudlow and Charles Krauthammer were at the dinner with Obama.
There’s your Shining Path, Matthew. To work hard and produce analysis of deep insight and intelligence so that one day President Obama will take you as seriously as he takes Charles Krauthammer and Lawrence Kudlow.
That’s a pretty high bar.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Obama did meet with a group that included Rachel Maddow yesterday, and Krugman was invited but I guess was too busy shining his Nobel prize to show up. There were some annoying centrists as well though, including MoDo.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:24 am
I can’t get upset over Obama meeting with rightwingers–he’s their president, too–as long as he doesn’t start doing wht they tell him.
And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples.
And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?
But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:35 am
There was a New Atlantis piece which talked about the fact that the literacy divide between low- and middle-income children is only growing sharper—despite the fact that more and more low-income families are getting access to the Internet. It’s true that we now have access to 85 seconds worth of a public official discussing a less-than-gripping topic—and we should be grateful for that—but, to use a cliche, there are many edges to this sword.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:47 am
By far the most interesting aspect of this post is the window into Matt’s subconscious provided by the Obama => FDR substitution.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Why, oh why, do you hate the language so? This is just so so wrong…
January 15th, 2009 at 10:22 am
For President’s and media change, I recommend Samuel Kernell’s book “Going Public.” I think it has some problems (as all books do) but does include a very interesting account as to the changing relationship between media form and presidential behavior.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:39 am
There were some annoying centrists as well though, including MoDo.
Dowd doesn’t deserve to be called an annoying centrists. Annoying centrists may be a pain in the ass, but at least they have issues and make arguments. Dowd just throws out trite high school bitchiness.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:56 am
If people are interested in the shifting terrain of political communication, I think the book that is still the gold standard is Kathleen Hall Jameison’s Eloquence in an Electronic Age (despite it being 20 years old already). The question of how (and to what extent) communication technologies fundamentally change the way we approach the art of speaking has been a real bone of contention for the study of rhetoric in recent years.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:00 am
I think this hope in the Internet isn’t really true. Maybe it’s the bias of a blogger that wants it to be true. But how many people use the Internet to listen all the way through to a president’s speech? How many got their sense of Clinton’s responses in senate hearings this week by listening all the way through? Rather, there may be a few clips, just as on TV, but with the excerpting process actually encouraged or multiplied by Internet habits. That’s perhaps why Obama, although Internet savvy, chose something as quaint as a long TV infomercial during his campaign’s runup to the election.
I miss the more frequent full transcripts in the Times or Times online. I still have very little sense of what Clinton said and would like to skim for some points of interest to me, but I’ll never in a million years listen to the hearings through even if you give me a link. For now, I’ll just have bloggers assurance that she had to talk about such things as the Law of the Sea.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:04 am
“…an interesting way… interested parties… interesting to most people… interesting new kind of landscape.”
Find a thesaurus, please.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:05 am
I think the real innovation with Obama is from his community organizing background.
To use a historical parallel, Teddy Roosevelt was able to drop into politics at a pretty high level because he’d built a name for himself as a popular public figure. In office, he immediately saw that politically, the President had an untapped resource–the power a preacher or rabble-rouser used. So, he started to use the “bully pulpit.” This was because of his background as a popular person–he saw immediately that this office was a new opportunity to do the same thing he’d been doing his entire career.
Similarly, Obama realized that a presidential campaign can be a unique opportunity to build a movement the way advocacy groups and religious groups have done in the past. Basically, the same way TR realized he had the same power as William Jennings Bryan, Obama realized he has the same power as AARP, Planned Parenthood, or the Christian Coalition.
Using the itnernets is a tool to build a movement, but the real innovation here is that he realized building a movement was something he could and should do.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Re duBois’s comment “Now, the maddening part two: the number of liberals who are cringing over Obama’s rather centrist views.”
————–
This is red herring bullshit, of course.
I’m agnostic over many issues of policy. What I’m not agnostic about is lying America into an unnecessary war which kills 4000+ soldiers and cripples thousands more for life.
What I’m not agnostic is bringing death and destruction down on America via con games to promote private interests.
Here’s William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer’s handiwork — Look at it and tell me that the President of the United States should honor them with a dinner.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-492663/President-Bush-visits-wounded-troops–British-leaders-dare-follow-lead.html
By the way, has Hillary ever visited the troops at the San Antonio medical center?
January 15th, 2009 at 11:21 am
The value of the Internet is that you can gain information from overseas that is covered up by the lying whores in the US news media.
The above pictures of the crippled Iraq veterans comes via the UK’s Daily Mail. The New York Times — the paper of Judith Miller’s stories on Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction — has never ran any such images, for some reason.
Just as the American people is not seeing shit from Gaza. Especially not the pictures of dead children.
Instead, we will be seeing pictures of the US Flag and glamorous dinners in the upcoming week. Images which let us forget that there are scum walking the National Mall — and in NYC’s Central Park — that are far worst than anything found in Hamas or Al Qaeda. People who have killed far more Americans with their lies than any terrorist group.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Pace duBois, this is not about right wing, centrist,or leftist policies. This is about Duty, Honor, Country. About Loyalty to the American People.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:49 am
What Matt’s getting at is capacity. Airtime and print space are limited, bandwidth much less so. Question is, how is the bandwidth used?
January 15th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Re allbetsareoff’s comment “Airtime and print space are limited, bandwidth much less so.”
————–
The bandwidth of the average American voter is extremely limited. So unless you are broadcasting to Space Aliens with High IQs, you’re shut out by Fox News. And Space Aliens can’t vote.
Well, not so far as we know.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Jesus, Yglesias, it really does get old sometimes trying to divine what you mean. If you were in one of my undergrad courses this would go from a B or a B+ to a B- because of the unclarity and almost deliberately vague, bland, and meaningless word choice (”interesting” ad nauseam).
Keep up the good work, though.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Re DTM’s comment “a mistake Obama is fortunately disinclined to make.”
———–
Ah, I see. Tehran by Christmas, eh?
How much is that going to cost Haim Saban — or has he been paying on the installment plan?
January 15th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
The difference between the newspaper age and the nascent internet age is that newspapers acted a narrow filter of which sound bites and issues got attention. Now you have a thousand cheeto-stained nerds writing without editors, who read full transcripts, watch c-span, attend events with cam-corders and pull out all sorts of bites that can bubble into the discourse through blogs, youtube clips, and diaries. In thee olden dayes, if the editor of the Times Picayune didn’t think it was news, it wasn’t. Nowadays if Matt thinks it’s interesting, it may end up being news.
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