By Rick Manning
“The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast
The slowest now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
‘Cause the times, they are a-changin’”—Bob Dylan
The 2024 election may very well be viewed similarly to the 1960 presidential election in terms of what matters in influencing voters.
The 1960 presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon featured the first ever televised presidential debate was viewed on 66.4 million televisions. To put this into context, a total of 68.8 million people voted in that election. Voter turnout increased to the highest level since 1908.
For the next 60 years, television was the kingmaker as polling after the first debate showed that those who watched on television thought Kennedy won and those who listened to it on radio identified Nixon as the winner of the debate. (Sidenote: If you want to experience how dumbed down our current politics are, listen or watch that debate and remember that half of America stayed tuned to it.)
Television was king. At the University of Southern California in my Media Politics class, the Professor led with the following line, “If you learn nothing else from this class, the only thing you need to remember about media and politics is ‘television, television and television’.”
And that is all I remember from that class. But today the winds have changed, permanently.
Media Research Center just released a report on the bias in ABC, CBS and NBC’s news coverage finding that the average coverage of Kamala Harris was 78 percent positive versus 85 percent negative for Donald Trump. Given this disparity, if the ‘television’ axiom of old still held true, Trump would be toast, yet the race remains a virtual toss-up with Trump having a slight advantage.
Independent, non-corporate streaming broadcasts now dominate the communications landscape. Donald Trump spending three hours unedited on Joe Rogan’s program matters more than Kamala Harris’ heavily edited twenty minute interview with the once gold standard 60 Minutes. Trump on Rogan got 40 million views in three days on YouTube alone, 60 Minutes got Kamala 5.7 million viewers.
The unstructured streaming show allowed Rogan to have a conversation with Trump giving viewers an opportunity to judge him based upon what they saw, whereas the establishment media broadcast was just another packaged presentation not allowing viewers to see the authentic Harris.
Allowing people to see and hear unscripted, real Donald Trump was a risk as it made the former president vulnerable to extended scrutiny by viewers, yet it was this very risk that makes the new medium so much more effective. It is safe to assume that many of these viewers had been bombarded with media spin trying to define Trump. By going over the establishment media’s heads, Trump gambled that he would negate their bias by allowing people to make their own minds up.
In essence, 60 Minutes didn’t matter and the Donald Trump wisely rejected their offer to present their edited version of his interview to the public, instead preferring to take his chances with a longer, unedited, neutral interview.
Rogan combined with Trump’s 100 million views for his interview with Elon Musk on X, and the reported 150 million views for his interview with Tucker Carlson on X demonstrates the mass reach possible outside of over the air or even cable dependence.
In 2024, Tim Pool, Theo Von, Joe Rogan and Dan Bongino are the new kingmakers in American politics, not the networks and their cable subsidiaries. Unlike the reign of television network news, the streaming influencers are likely to change as new big audience influencers emerge and the streaming publics tastes change.
But there can be no doubt that the age of television is dead, replaced by entrepreneurs and entertainers who build their own audiences and expose them to politicians as they see fit. It is a brave new and unpredictable world, but it is also a world where politicians will have to demonstrate talent and intelligence as well as a charisma that translates across the Internet without the protection of editing.
And this undoubtedly explains why Joe Rogan had to move his Trump interview onto X after discovering that it was very difficult to find on YouTube. With the well-documented political censorship by Department of Homeland Security and the FBI fresh on our minds, it becomes even more important that Congress aggressively tie the federal government’s hands when it comes to free speech.
Streaming itself will only get more and more prevalent with a reach that dwarfs other media, and stopping government encroachment on these free speech platforms is job one when it comes to securing future political debate.
Will the new media reality always get it right?
No. The success of psychic hotlines on cable television proves that charlatans can do quite well in fooling the public. But, in some ways, it will be refreshing to have voters exposed to the real unedited candidates rather than the shrink wrap version foisted upon the American public by the Democratic Party elites and billionaires in 2024.
The new streaming regime is what government by the people, for the people and of the people looks like, and the end of the establishment media oligarchy is a political revolution that free people should and must embrace. Cause times they are a changing.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
