TV Still Runs Politics

When Kamala Harris “introduces” herself to the American public with her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention tonight, most of the people who catch her remarks will do so via television—just as they did when John F. Kennedy accepted the party nomination in 1960. TV may not be the omnipresent force that it was before the rise of the internet, but it is still the most important medium in American politics.

Pundits and wise men have been predicting the fall of television, and particularly television news, for decades. In 2002, The New York Times forecast “the coming disappearance” of nightly network newscasts. No less an authority than Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, averred that once “dinosaurs” such as Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings left their anchor chairs, the traditional 30-minute newscast would face “extinction.” More recently, it was cable TV and cable news that were supposed to be heading for the boneyard, given the ominous trend of cord-cutting and the stampede to streaming. (Confession: I’ve written that take myself.)

These eulogies were premature. Television is no longer the only game in town, but it still sets the game’s agenda. Just about every major development in the current presidential campaign started as a television event. Video clips suggesting that Joe Biden had lost more than a step circulated on social media throughout his presidency, but only after more than 51 million people saw his disastrous June debate appearance did the pressure to drop out of the race become insurmountable. Tim Walz was all but unknown outside Minnesota until his run of folksy cable-news interviews helped propel him onto the Democratic ticket. Similarly, J. D. Vance would probably never have been a contender on the Republican side without the help of his regular Fox News appearances, in which he honed his craft as arch-Trumpist attack dog. As for this week’s convention, it has been scheduled, staged, and choreographed to fit the rhythms of TV, just as dozens were before it.

[Derek Thompson: The ‘Trump effect’ on cable news]

No one would suggest that we still live in the age of Walter Cronkite. Americans now get political news and information through dozens of platforms and tens of thousands of sources—YouTube and TikTok videos, Facebook and X posts, Substack newsletters and podcasts. And yet the TV-news audience has hung around.

Outside of NFL games, nothing on television attracts as large a crowd as the traditional nightly newscasts. Every night, an average of almost 19 million people combined watched ABC’s World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, and CBS Evening News during the 2023–24 TV season. Although that’s several million fewer people than watched the big three 10 years ago, the rate of decline is far slower than that of just about everything else on television, broadcast or otherwise. More people now watch the evening newscasts than the networks’ prime-time entertainment programming. Pretty good for 6:30 p.m.

If anything, cable news has been even more resilient, despite some cyclical ups and downs. During the first quarter of 2024, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC attracted about as many viewers on average as they did eight years ago. That’s despite the fact that millions of households stopped subscribing to cable over the same period.

The explanation isn’t much of a mystery: The cable-news audience is dominated by older viewers, the cohort least likely to give up cable for streaming apps. The rest of the cable industry wishes it had the news channels’ relative stability. USA Network, for example, has lost 75 percent of its nightly audience over the past 10 years; FX and the History Channel have lost about two-thirds.

Relying on an older audience does make TV news less attractive to most advertisers, who want to reach and influence younger consumers. The reverse is true for political campaigns. Old people vote in far greater numbers than young people, making them a highly coveted target audience for anyone who wants to get or stay elected. As a result, cable news remains the de facto town square and community soapbox. As Jack Shafer put it in Politico Magazine early this year, “Cable has become the place that candidates toss their hats into the ring, where they launch trial balloons for new policies, where the debates that once took place in House and Senate chambers are now often conducted under studio lights, where evidence to impeach presidents is first presented, and where Supreme Court nominees are first vetted.”

Television more broadly is where political campaigns will still spend the bulk of their war chests to persuade voters. Many local TV stations, if not their viewers, will benefit from the projected $16 billion in ad spending by presidential, Senate, and House candidates and their allied PACs this cycle. The demand for airtime in swing states, in particular, is so strong that some stations expect to sell all of their available commercial slots this fall.

[Elaine Godfrey: Trump’s TV obsession is a first]

The future of political advertising likely belongs to TV, too. Digital sources now claim about a quarter of political ad spending, but their continued growth is in question, according to Travis N. Ridout, a co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads. “Campaigns are questioning the value of social media ads” for several reasons, he told me. The primary one is the format itself. Political ads make relatively complicated arguments in favor of a candidate or a policy, demanding more attention than the average commercial for Tide or Taco Bell. But ads on Facebook or Instagram can be easily ignored. People quickly swipe or scroll away; they don’t have their sound on. People ignore TV commercials, too, but the medium is more immersive; it arrests a viewer’s attention with sights and sound that fill the screen without distraction.

Instead of being rendered obsolete by social media, TV news has achieved a sort of symbiosis with it, in which television is the dominant species. Michael Socolow, a professor and media historian at the University of Maine, told me that Walz’s and Vance’s appearances on cable shows created the clips that then seeded social media. The combination of old and new media worked in concert to raise their profiles, certifying them as plausible choices. “It’s not cable TV per se” that matters, Socolow said, but the meme culture that it feeds. Television’s future “is through viral-meme creation and social-media circulation.”

The upshot is that new-media sources appear more likely to take their place alongside television than to replace it. If that’s the case, it rebukes the long-standing conventional wisdom that TV news was doomed by senescence and technology. It calls to mind then-CBS president Howard Stringer’s response when he was confronted by a gloomy prediction about the future of his business at a conference some 30 years ago. “They keep saying the networks are dinosaurs,” Stringer said. “What they don’t say is that the dinosaurs ruled the Earth for millions of years.”