How Has Television Changed Politics?

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Television has changed politics by changing the way in which information is distributed, by altering the way politics happens, and by changing our patterns of response to politics.

By giving the electorate direct access to the candidates, television diminished the role of the political party in the selection of the major party nominees. By centering politics on the person of the candidate, television accelerated the electorate's focus on character rather than issues.

Television has altered the forms of political communication as well. The messages on which most of us rely are briefer than they once were. The stump speech of one to two hours that characterized nineteenth-century political discourse has given way to the 30-second spot ad and the 10-second sound bite in broadcast news.

Increasingly, the audience for a speech is not the one standing in front of the politician but the viewing audience that will hear and see a snippet of the speech on the news.

In these abbreviated forms, much of what constituted the traditional political discourse of earlier ages has been lost. ...
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In fifteen or thirty seconds, a speaker cannot establish the historical context that shaped the issue in question, cannot detail the probable causes of the problem, cannot examine alternative proposals and argue that one is preferable to others. In snippets, politicians assert but do not argue.

Because television is an intimate medium, speaking through it required a changed political style that was more conversational, personal, and visual than that of old-style stump oratory. Reliance on television means that increasingly our political world contains memorable pictures rather than memorable words.

And words increasingly have been spoken in places chosen to heighten their impact. "We have nothing to fear but 15. Dale Russakoff, "No-Name Movement Fed by Fax Expands," Washington Post, 20 August 1995, pp.

Al, A22 fear itself" has given way to "Let them come to Berlin" and "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Schools teach us to analyze words and print; in a world in which politics is increasingly visual, informed citizenship requires a new set of skills.

Recognizing the power of television's pictures, politicians craft television, staged events called pseudo-events designed to attract media coverage.

Much of the political activity we see on television news has been crafted by politicians, their speech writers, and their public relations advisers for televised consumption. Sound bites in news and answers to questions in debates increasingly sound like ads.

Political managers, termed "handlers" in 1988, spend large amounts of time ensuring that their clients appear in visually compelling settings so that the pictures seen in the news will reinforce those seen in ads. In debates, candidates recall those staged pseudo-events.

By focusing on mainstream values, television mainstreams its viewers. Heavy viewers of television differ from light viewers in some politically relevant ways. The likelihood that a character in a prime-time program will be the victim of a crime is higher than it is in real life.

Heavier viewers believe that they are more likely to be victims of crime than they actually are. Heavy viewers are also more conservative in their views about the socially appropriate response to crime.

They are, for example, more likely than light viewers to favor heavy sentences and use of the death penalty. Heavy-viewing conservatives and heavy-viewing liberals are more likely to agree on how to respond to crime than are heavy- and light-viewing liberals.

Whereas heavy viewing makes liberals more conservative on crime, however, television's legitimating of government response to social problems draws conservatives closer to a more liberal view of the value of government solutions to social problems.

The quantity, quality, and audience for televised information about politics is changing. In the mid-1980s, an increase in the quality of political programming on the Public Broadcasting Service and the rise of cable meant that the amount of substantive political information available on television multiplied.

The rise of cable meant that specialized audiences could now be addressed directly by candidates. What had been a broadcast medium, reaching a large, undifferentiated mass audience, was increasingly becoming a narrowcast medium, reaching smaller, more homogenous audiences.

What was once true only of radio and direct mail be-came true of television in the mid-1980s. Spanish-language cable reached Hispanics in large numbers; MTV reached young voters. Whereas broadcasting dictated that political messages speak to concerns that transcended our differences, the narrowcasting of cable meant that the special concerns of special segments of the audience could now be addressed.

Whereas the limited number of broadcast channels meant that reporters could easily eavesdrop on and criticize candidate ads, however, the narrowcasting available on more than 100 cable channels makes this increasingly difficult.

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