Television

            Many political scientists have lately been questioning the potency of television. Because of the advent of the internet, it seems that more and more politically-interested citizens have been getting their news online instead of from television. Prime time audiences have been shrinking steadily for the past couple decades as people give up on time-dependent programming and turn instead to services like DVR, Netflix and Hulu, where the programs you want to watch are available to you at whatever time you choose to watch them. For these reasons, it seems that television is becoming obsolete. And yet, in this past campaign, Super PAC spending pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into television advertisements.

            It seems that the television ads didn’t really make as much of an impact as the PAC’s probably wanted them to, because of shrunken view audience. But some of the best (and worst) ads did make appearances on Youtube and other video sharing sites and various web forums and blogs. This is actually an example of the internet underlining and emphasizing pieces of televised media. So while there’s no doubt that television’s popularity and importance has been shrinking and making way for the internet to take over, they’re still capable of complementing one another.

            It’s also very easy to communicate with others about political happenings and public media through the internet’s many social channels. The political debates, for example, became like a sort of social gathering, with people making events on facebook, trying to get their friends to watch the debates as they happened live. Though they weren’t all watching through the same television set, sitting around and talking in person, a lot of people took advantage of instant messaging, blog posting, facebook chatting, and twitter updating while watching the debates. Although people weren’t encouraged to get off the internet and watch TV instead, they were encouraged to at least watch a live broadcast and then use the internet simultaneously to discuss it. Some could argue that this was immensely distracting, and that people shouldn’t be on their phones and laptops while trying to pay attention to a political debate, but it can also be argued that the people who did so gained valuable insight into what other people were thinking. They had their views challenged while they were watching and were forced to think about multiple different viewpoints as they watched. So while the internet is kind of stealing pertinence from television as a medium, it’s also enriching it’s social impact by providing a sort of hybrid medium of live broadcasts combined with live social interaction.

Article on “Why TV Still Matters.” http://entertainment.time.com/2012/11/08/dead-tree-alert-why-tv-still-matters-in-politics/

            There’s also a great number of people who use television programs to get most of their political news, but not in the form of news broadcasts. Not nearly as many people watch the nightly news as did twenty or thirty years ago, but political comedy shows are becoming increasingly popular. Shows like The Colbert Report and even Saturday Night Live frequently poke fun at the political atmosphere and sometimes even raise interesting points about controversial issues. Shows like these are a good way to get a more satirical, humorous view of everyone’s current political standing, and sometimes they’re even preferred as a news source. But while these shows are written, recorded, and basically designed for television, they’re not always viewed at the television-programmed time. You can watch episodes of The Colbert Report at his website, colbertnation.com, and most SNL skits are available on Hulu for free. So when someone on a blog you frequent draws your attention to a great political parody that you should really see, you go look it up online. You find that skit on Hulu, or the Colbert episode on its respective site. You can probably even find that hilarious political ad on Youtube for free, too. So while the internet can emphasize elements of television, it often takes them out of the environment they were originally designed for. A television clip will be viewed hundreds more times on the internet than it ever would have been viewed on television.

            Even though the internet more or less depends on television for a lot of material it distributes, it kind of takes the credit away from the original source. If a tv clip like a political ad goes viral on the internet, chances are good that the original creator and publisher of the clip won’t get the reward that the internet receives. Television relies on its ratings to stay high in order to be able to continue to function, and when something becomes incredibly popular in another arena, it’s not quite fair, in a sense. Ratings are based on how many viewers a channel has, so when millions of people use the internet to watch something that was on a TV channel, it’s not carried over in the channel’s ratings. This makes for an awkward combination of healthy contribution and imbalanced viewership between television and internet. Obviously they’re both still valuable resources for political news and he like, but it’ll be very interesting to see how that awkward imbalance pans out for both of them. 

Additional Sources:

Bettina Fabos, Christopher R. Martin, and Richard Campbell. Media & Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication, 8th Edition. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2012. Print.

Radio

            For a long time, before the technological advent of television, radio was the best way for the American public to get their news. Now that most news is on television, or even the internet, fewer and fewer people rely on radio shows to find out what’s going on in their town or state or country. Most people now listen to the radio for music while they drive, but there are still a good number of insightful radio-based talk shows out there on the air. Hearing a story on a radio show is still vastly different from seeing one on a television show, and even more different still from reading a story on the internet.

            When you read a news article on the internet, it’s pretty isolated and impersonal. You’re alone when you read the story, it isn’t directly told to you by someone else, and it doesn’t necessarily have much of a good chance to stick in your mind afterward since usually you’re off clicking another link almost immediately. There are also numerous distractions from the story you’re reading, in the form of ads. Sites have to host ads from outside sources to pay for their website, and they also often advertise other affiliated sites and other articles within the same site. So while you’re reading about that woman who drove drunk, listened to her GPS too carefully, and drove into the sand trap at the local golf course, you’re also seeing an advertisement for Snickers bars, a middle-aged man telling you to shop at Home Depot, and six sidebar links to six other articles about politics, the latest football game, and Disney buying Lucasfilm. It’s difficult to be focused on that initial article, even if you sincerely care about the woman in the sand trap. In most cases, there are too many impersonal distractions for internet news to be very emotionally impacting.

            Television has similar issues, though not quite to the same degree as internet. There are advertisements, but they’re cordoned off into their own time slot. The ads don’t get aired alongside the news stories, but often they’re more colorful and attention-grabbing than the news show itself, so they still serve as more of a distraction than anything. Someone is as likely to remember the latest Geico commercial as they are to remember the pictures of a car driven through the bushes and into a sand trap. Advertisements aside, television is also fairly impersonal in the way it portrays its stories. A viewer will get a thirty-second or one-minute clip about the woman in the sand trap; they’ll mention the town she lives in, the town the golf course is in, the fact that she’s in custody for driving under the influence but more or less unharmed, show a couple pictures of cars and maybe some people putting on that golf course, and then move on to the next story. You don’t really feel anything much in particular for the woman in the sand trap. There’s just not enough time for you to let the story sink in and consider what it means before they’re on to the next information tidbit.

            With radio, though, news seems a lot more personal. Their ads, like television, are also cordoned off from the rest of the show, but usually don’t grab as much more of your attention, as is the case for TV. Radio ads are actually pretty easy to tune out for the most part. You get used to listening to the talk show host speaking in a conversational, moderated tone, so when the ads come along with some voice actor talking really fast about a car dealership right down the road, you can basically just put him on ignore and wait for the host to get back on the air. Ads are usually a good opportunity to think about the last story you just heard because they don’t demand all of your attention like television ads seem to do. Radio also spends more time telling a story than the television news shows do. Instead of talking for only a minute about that woman in the sand trap, they spend five or ten minutes on her story. The listener gets more involved in the event and can more easily imagine it happening to them or someone they know. Because they’re not distracted with images of the aftermath of the event, they can better imagine the event actually happening. It becomes easy to understand how embarrassed she must be now, and how chagrined the golf course owner must feel. Instead of seeing a fairly attractive person sitting at a desk talking about this story in a distant monotone, you only hear someone’s voice speaking personably to you. You imagine it happening to someone you don’t like and you laugh, or you imagine it happening to yourself and you don’t. Radio has the ability to be more personal because of the lack of distraction, and the presence of the type of sensory input that allows the listener to imagine what it all means in reference to himself or herself. It’s just like storytelling always has been for people since before written language.

            And because of this vast difference in medium, the same story can have completely different tones depending on where it’s broadcast. A couple of days ago, Mitt Romney gave his final GOP talk scheduled to happen before the election takes place. Many of the issues that were considered during the primaries weren’t addressed in his final radio talk; he avoided mentioning abortions and birth control. He mainly spent his air time bashing the economy and Obama and telling people to vote for him instead. The internet article gave a brief run-down of what Romney talked about, television coverage would have probably done about the same, and a radio show would probably have dwelled upon the ramifications of it for a few minutes and maybe taken some call-ins from listeners and made a discussion about it. So while radio can’t really broadcast as much news as television or internet, it seems that the news that comes from radio has more of a human quality to it. I definitely think that radio news and talk shows are a valuable form of communication that should be preserved in our culture.

The internet article on the radio broadcast: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/11/03/Romney-delivers-last-pre-election-GOP-talk/UPI-26751351978705/

Additional Sources:

Bettina Fabos, Christopher R. Martin, and Richard Campbell. Media & Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication, 8th Edition. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2012. Print.