This post will probably sink like a stone...

[thucythucy]

54. TV obviously also had an impact,

perhaps best seen with the Kennedy/Nixon debate of 1960, and earlier than that the McCarthy/Army hearings of 1954. Then too the role of TV ads can't be ignored. Certainly with the advent of TV our politics became more visual, for good or ill. Perhaps its finest hour was during the Vietnam War, when for the first time relatively uncensored depictions of the reality of warfare were disseminated. The resulting public skepticism about American involvement led to a backlash, where we now have "embedded" journalists whose content is strictly controlled by the military powers that be.

Even so, for some reason I don't think the technology itself gave TV the same degree of legitimacy to its content as radio in the 1930s, and smart phones today. I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps because people were already familiar, through radio, with the idea of broadcast media, and so TV was seen as only the visual extension of what was already quite familiar. Then too, one of the things that make today's smart phones so different is their portability, giving them a much more personal feel than TV, and thus making the technology that much more pervasive and different from previous visual media.

But really, I can't say for sure why TV seems--to my mind at least--not to have had the same tectonic effect on our political culture as radio and smart phones. And I could be wrong about that--perhaps TV did have that impact, conveying an almost unquestioned legitimacy to its users, and I'm just not seeing it. But looking at the history, I just don't see TV engendering same sort of quantum leap, the same enormous qualitative difference in our politics that radio in its first decade and smart phones today have made.

On the other hand, the late 1950s and the decade of the '60s were a definite turning point in our politics, which is also when television became so very prevalent. I'll have to think about this some more--these posts here being a sort of first draft for my analysis, such as it is.

Anyway, thanks for commenting, and best wishes to you and yours.