The Patriot Post® · The Political Media Winds Are Shifting

Some of you are old enough to remember the Nixon-Kennedy presidential debate in 1960 and how John F. Kennedy’s handlers were shrewd enough to take advantage of this new visual medium. The old story is that those who listened on the radio believed Richard Nixon won the debate, but the telegenic Kennedy won over the television audience and eventually the election.

Four years later, the doomed campaign of Barry Goldwater turned to a man who was quite familiar with this growing medium, and Ronald Reagan made a 30-minute infomercial into a political career of his own. Just as it is now, back then Reagan stated, “This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

However, many of those who were around when television was still black and white have since passed on. In the words of Ian Tuttle at National Review — a gentleman who doesn’t look old enough to remember when Reagan was president — we’ve lived through and beyond the age of television when it comes to the presidency.

“For all that was made of Barack Obama’s digital wizardry in 2008 and again in 2012, Obama was in fact the last president of the televisual age,” Tuttle opines. “Handsome, eloquent, and charismatic, Obama embodied and embraced the televisual symbolism of the Baby Boomer generation. The massive events and awestruck crowds were Woodstock-style spectacles. Every rally was a March on Washington, every speech was ‘I Have a Dream.’”

Conversely, he believes that Donald Trump, despite making his media presence known from a network television show, “was the first national politician to recognize that digital media function differently from televisual media.” Just the rumor that Trump will appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast before the election was enough to excite the media and push Kamala Harris to seek that gig herself. (Ironically, Trump began the Rogan rumor on a different podcast, one of several he’s appeared on during the campaign.)

It seems as though the strange election of 2020, with Joe Biden basically campaigning from his basement thanks to his respect for government-imposed social distancing restrictions, ended the era of television as a political game-changer. And it brings us to a brave new world of alternate media. In reviewing Tuttle’s article for another National Review post, Jack Butler argues, “So what might be the better, and what might be the worse, about the end of the televisual era? It will certainly weaken, and perhaps eventually destroy, the consolidationist tendency that has played a large role in opinion-formation in this country from roughly the Great Depression through (or perhaps merely to?) the present. Throughout this period, a few large institutions played a dominant role in the distribution of information and opinion.”

In short, the era of the Big Three networks with their evening news and Sunday political gabfests, cable news, and megapapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post dictating the news of the day appears to be over. A single Joe Rogan podcast gathers an audience that’s on par with a week’s worth of evening news from ABC, CBS, and NBC, and his numbers will shoot through the roof once Trump’s podcast hits the Internet. (Truthfully, Harris will probably do the same.)

Thus, Butler’s point is a valid one. Instead of having a standard route to success involving the old grouping of news outlets that presidential candidates could predictably follow, the new media means there are myriad other outlets that could be useful to talk to a significant audience. Trump likes his non-traditional podcasts that swerve into other subjects he’s familiar with, such as sports or WWE wrestling, while Harris has sought an audience with radio show hosts like Howard Stern or Charlamagne tha God.

Even the BBC has noticed this: “In August the Trump campaign told reporters that they are targeting a key group of voters that makes up just over a tenth of the electorate in swing states. They’re mostly younger men, and mostly white, but the group includes more Latinos and Asian-Americans than the general population. And they believe they can reach these often fickle voters by putting Trump on shows hosted by people like (comedian Theo) Von, internet pranksters Nelk Boys, YouTuber Logan Paul and Adin Ross, a livestreaming gamer who has repeatedly been banned from sites for violating rules on offensive language.”

As long as they gather votes for Trump, it doesn’t matter how salty the tongue is.

Given the distrust of legacy media among younger voters, perhaps they’re the ones who “believe in our capacity for self-government,” as Ronald Reagan put it 60 years ago. Podcasts and alternative media can bring the message directly to the people, so let’s welcome the demise of the news gatekeepers.