ABSTRACT
Q: What was the average length of stories on U.S. network TV news during the Presidential campaign of 1968?
A: 42 seconds (Hallin, 1992)
Q: What was the average length in 2000? A: 7.8 seconds (Lichter, 2001)
Politics and the media have long been intimately involved with each other, with media strongly setting the agenda that politics is very important. Although television has made some drastic changes in the nature of that relationship, the connection itself is not new. Print media have long covered political campaigns, and the level of political rhetoric has sometimes been far more vicious than it is today. For example, the U.S. presidential campaign of 1884 saw Democrat Grover Cleveland’s alleged fathering of an illegitimate child as a major campaign issue (“Hey, man, where’s my pa?/Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”). Still, from the fi rst tentative and fragmented radio reporting of Warren Harding’s U.S. Presidential victory in 1920 to today’s framing of whole campaigns around the use of television and Internet news and advertising, broadcast media have transformed political campaigns beyond recognition from Grover Cleveland’s days. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) was perhaps the quintessential radio president; his lofty mellow tones electrifi ed listeners in ways that watching his body in a wheelchair could never do. In recent decades, candidates have had to deal with the visual aspect of television, and some of them have done so only grudgingly. For another historical example, see Box 8.1 for more on the political use of the media by abolitionists in pre-Civil War United States.
