When the President wants to pursue a new policy, he goes on television. When Bob Dole lost the Presidential election, he went on Saturday Night Live, and now he hawks Viagra in television ads. Nothing our leaders do is outside the gaze of the cameras. We get advice from design experts on how Hilary Clinton should decorate her new house. We look to television to tell us about what is happening.
Television shapes our view of the world.
And none of our leaders will take any step without, at a minimum, considering how it will look on television. And now we have the internet. As we will see, politics still tends to revolve more around television than our newest form of instant communication, but that may be changing. It is not yet as important for a candidate to have a good website as it is for her or him to run good television ads, but at some point in the future, that is likely to shift. But while the influence of the media on American politics is something often remarked upon, it is not very well understood.