The televised debate between John F Kennedy and Richard M Nixon was probably the most decisive event for the election of 1960, one of the closest in American history. The growth of TV as a new medium and declined use of radio marked a significant change in running election campaigns. For the TV appearance, Nixon refused to wear make up and thus, appeared unshaven, tired and sweaty under the lights. Kennedy, however, did wear the make up and so appeared cooler and more composed than Nixon. Kennedy, before the debate, returned tan and attractive from vacation. Not only did Kennedy appear to be better groomed, and handsome, his suit was navy popping off the grey backdrop.
Nixon’s suit was grey, blending in to the curtain behind him. With these factors combined, TV viewers agreed, Kennedy won the debate. Richard Nixon’s deep, strong, radio-appealing voice won over all radio listeners who agreed Nixon won the debate. Nixon entered the race ahead of Kennedy but lost in the final run. Television as a new medium changed presidential elections from this point on, marking the election of 1960 significant. Radio voice failed to prevail over now “candidate centered” television campaigns.
The Internet played a disruptive role in the 2008 election; much the same way television played a major role in the 1960 elections. The Internet is still relatively new now, as TV was back then, but both came of age and swung the election towards the winning candidate. Kennedy, in particular, used television ads extensively in his campaign to reach the American voters directly, and embraced simple things like make up: The Internet was used by candidates previously but Obama really leveraged it fully with online video, blogging, social networking and fundraising.
Arianna Huffington of the Huffingtonpost.com said if it wasn’t for the Internet, Obama would not be the president. The mainstream media (MSM) had its limitations to report merely what each candidate said without saying who was right or wrong. The blogosphere, on the other hand, tended to call out factual inaccuracies better than the mainstream media. Not only the Internet could be used to raise lots of money online, but social networking was significantly more powerful and allowed for the creation of more meaningful connections between the candidate and voters. Every single thing a candidate said, and how he said it, was available online for people to review and judge.
In the 2008 elections, the technological winner is the video website YouTube and, by extension, democracy. This is a powerful medium for persuasion and for counterargument. Toni Morrison in an interview, calls Obama’s election and presidency the beginning of a participatory democracy. Would this participatory democracy have been possible without the tools, which empower everyone to have a voice that can gain an audience? No. The Internet has emerged as a force in politics, at least in the United States.
Believe it or not, Obama’s spots on YouTube amassed a total of 14.5 million viewing hours, over the course of this election. Together, Barack Obama and John McCain’s YouTube channels received over 100 million video views, though it was telling to look at the different ways the two campaigns use the service. McCain’s channel contained just over 300 videos, with about 20 million views in all. Nearly all of his videos were short, well-produced pieces that mainly looked like TV commercials. Of his top 10 most-viewed videos, only one of them, a nearly eight-minute clip of a Sarah Palin speech, broke that mold.
Obama, by contrast, had over 1,500 videos on his site, totalling about 80 million views. Many of them, like McCain’s, were similar to TV commercials, but that was hardly the rule for Obama.
Hundreds of his videos were more like campaign training manuals or appeared to be micro-targeted at a narrow sliver of viewers- Republicans in Ohio, for instance, or absentee voters in Michigan. But, even those obscure videos had been viewed thousands of times. At the other end of the spectrum, only one of the Obama’s top 10 most-viewed videos was a 30-second commercial.
The rest were longer TV appearances and speeches, including Obama’s famous speech on race, which was 37-minutes-long and had been viewed over six million times. No wonder the internet-savvy youngsters played the decisive role in the victory of Obama. In fact, Americans of all ages have become 21st-century pamphleteers.
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