TV Technique

Harvey Wheeler
[The author, who teaches political science at Washington and Lee University, examines the Great Debate in the light of the special characteristics of the communications medium in which it took place.]

Lexington, Va.

REGARDLESS of what happens on Election Day, it will be almost impossible to determine the electoral effect of the TV debates between Kennedy and Nixon. If Nixon wins, there will be no way of measuring how the Great Debate affected his victory. If Kennedy wins, Nixon supporters are certain to credit the debates with a large responsibility for the victor. But the case will be hard to make unless Kennedy wins a large popular (not merely electoral college) landslide. Yet it is already apparent that this innovation will have extensive ramifications.

There is no such thing as a "neutral" medium of communication or exchange. Every different type of channel or conveyor imparts its own peculiar form to the material it conveys. The barbecue-Chautauqua favored the oratorical elder statesman and was especially susceptible to emotional and demagogic exploitation. Radio put a high premium on a pleasing voice and accent. Television is even more of a homogenizing mass medium. It has created its own symbolic language: certain shorthand stereotypes which carry a maximum audio-visual message at a minimum cost. Television is for this reason most efficient as a medium of communication when the material it is given has been pre-translated into its own peculiar symbolic language. The most deeply etched stereotypes of television are the "good guys" and the "bad guys"--the Jack Armstrong All-American Boy versus the shady trickster. Television concentrates the expression of these stereotypes on the face. There is little doubt that in his debate with Nixon, Kennedy has profited from his fortuitous facial correspondence with TV's pre-established model of the "good guy."

Moreover, television is a full-attention, leisure, relaxation medium. It sits you down; it requires that you have available leisure; it asks for your full attention. This means that television is intrinsically the medium of affluence and indolence--especially in the evening hours. Even the marginal worker becomes--figuratively--affluent and indolent as he takes his place before his set. Television converts its viewers into a white-collar audience, regardless of their non-television status.

The white-collar (or bureaucratic) class is superseding the laboring classes as the politician's crucial electoral target. Already we know a great deal about the white-collar, bureaucratic man. He is other-directed and status-oriented. He has a characteristic set of fears and aspirations. From this standpoint, Nixon had every reason to expect that a TV debate with Kennedy would be to his advantage; he had television's built-in white-collar bias going for him in the beginning. But it is hard to say that he maintained that advantage throughout the series.

The evidence already in from polls indicates that the unusually high number of "undecideds'' was largely concentrated among the white-collar groups. And this is consistent with all we know of them. For all people, and for white-collar people in particular, a conviction about who is going to win has a determining influence on the decision on whom to be for. If Nixon had made a clearly superior impression in the first debate, it is quite likely that he would have reaped the potential advantage available to him from television's white-collar bias. But the fact that he did not--the fact that he came through in the pre-established image of television's "bad guy"--may have tended to atomize the distribution of the white-collar vote among the two parties.

TELEVISION has a built-in situational bias regarding style of delivery. The orator haranguing a partisan rally develops a special technique for that situation. It is a situation which responds to exaggeration and caricature. But when a TV debate like that between Kennedy and Nixon is staged, the audience has neither organic nor political homogeneity. There is no mass response to the speakers. The viewer, isolated and relaxed, is in intimate contact with each speaker by turns. It is the setting of a living-room conversation, not a mass rally. In such a setting all of the exaggerations which have a positive effect on a mass rally have a negative effect on the living-room viewer.

Nixon had long ago developed an effective oratorical technique for addressing mass partisan rallies. His great success with the "Checkers'' speech probably deceived him into assuming that the same style was well adapted to a television debate. But the "Checkers" speech was over a moral issue, not policy questions. And in that speech he was by himself on television--unchallenged by opponent or reporters. Now, in the debate, the gestures which are necessary in at a mass rally appeared stagey and artificial; emotional issues which can be drummed into an organic audience of partisans seemed thin in an empty studio face to face with a pleasant Ivy-Leaguer with a hair-trigger mind. It is this entirely unexpected failure of previously invincible methods which probably accounts for the bewilderment and shock which Nixon and his supporters displayed after the first round. In the three following rounds, Nixon progressively adjusted his style to the specific situational bias created by the debates. But even at the end he was not master of the situation.

Kennedy on television was the fortuitous beneficiary of his oratorical defects. He is not an orator. He seems temperamentally unable to develop an emotional theme. He addresses a rally gestureless, inflectionless and at a rate of speech so rapid as to render his arguments unintelligible. Reporters who follow him are unanimous in their opinion that the masses who gather to hear him are at their highest pitch of enthusiasm before he starts to speak--with enthusiasm ebbing steadily to the end. However, the very characteristics which tell against him on the hustings worked to his advantage in his debates with Nixon. His unadorned style of delivery fitted well into the viewer's living room. And although his rapid rate of speech prevented much of his content from being assimilated, what did come through was the picture of a bright, knowledgeable young man of great earnestness, energy and integrity.

In these first four debates, entirely accidental features in the styles of delivery of both men happened to favor Kennedy.

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