May 30, 2007
How Important Is Television News? V Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:50 PM EST An interesting exchange between Josh Zeitz and John Steele Gordon—“How Important Is Television News?”—prompts these mild thoughts: Josh Zeitz points out that despite Euro-phobias about Fox news running America, the facts are that Fox news has a much wider audience than its cable rivals, a much smaller audience than its network rivals, and a staggeringly smaller audience than NPR’s main news shows. So what is commonly perceived as the electronic right dwarfs the electronic center and is in turn dwarfed by the electronic liberals, and we thus have some grounds for assuming that broadcast news does not much affect our politics, since our electoral politics are often more Foxist than NPR-ist. In any case, Josh Zeitz then looks back at the 1960s, when the alleged effects of broadcast news are said to have turned the American people against segregation and the Vietnam War, and finds that a lot more people were reading newspapers than consuming broadcast news, which suggests that broadcast news cannot have been a significant source of social upheaval. My guess is that who listens matters as much as, maybe more than, how many listen; what looks a lot like upheaval requires a few hundred thousand in the streets of a few cities, repeated over a few years. If demonstrators were over-represented among watchers of broadcast news, that could have mattered. My guess, as it happens, is that it didn’t. I was pretty demonstration prone, and I did not watch or listen to broadcast news. I also read comic books, Zap Comix, to be precise. And I talked to people. 1960s colleges concentrated millions of people in the presence of books, comics, and one another, at a time of life when they had a certain amount of free time, while a steadily expanding economy boomed in a climate of broad idealism and general disinhibition. This may have mattered more than the then novelty of some electronic media. Figuring out the link between what people watch, listen to, or look at and their politics can be tricky. A generation ago, a famous historian discovered that the pre-Revolutionary French spent a lot more time looking at anti-Royalist pornography than reading Rousseau, and some people concluded that porn killed the Old Regime, leaving Rousseau in the clear, and that the French Revolution was more about anti-aristocratic misogyny than more lofty conceptions of politics. I have the impression that we have since returned to a more balanced view: Misogyny mattered more than we once thought, but the French had some conventionally political ideas in addition to the ones spattered through the porn. Do the media matter? Sometimes. I cannot imagine the impeachment of President Clinton without the eager assistance of the media, subsequently disavowed. But sometimes much less than you’d think. The newspapers were steadily more anti-FDR between 1932 and 1944. He won his elections by steadily larger margins. And during the impeachment, New York magazine polled to see how many Americans had heard of any of the much-revered shrieking scolds monopolizing the TV political talk shows. Fewer than 2 percent, if I remember correctly. A fair chunk of the other 98 percent came out to vote in 1998, and the Republicans regretted it, along with some of the media commentators, who opined that the electorate had forfeited the confidence of the press and could win it back only by redoubled efforts. In 2000 there was indeed some penitence on the part of the electorate, although not quite among a majority of it. Some of the same media that had two years before chastised the electorate for too-easily forgiving Clinton now rebuked it for punishing Gore. Go figure. As to the effect of the electronic (and print) media in their current form, one last note. I came of age in a period of relative media civility, at least at the high end of the business. For most of the history of this republic, the press has been sharply politicized and remarkably venomous. One thing I have noticed about the last few years is that political groupings nowadays tend to read their own media. They have a common news source less often than they did in my youth. This does not seem like a healthy development, but we survived it for something like two centuries, and my guess is that we’ll survive it again.
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