When Kamala Harris “introduces herself” to the American public tonight with her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, most people will watch her speech on television – just as they did when John F. Kennedy accepted his party’s nomination in 1960. Television may not be as ubiquitous as it was before the rise of the Internet, but it is still the most important medium in American politics.
Experts and smart people have been predicting the demise of television and especially television news for decades. In 2002 The New York Times predicted “the impending demise” of the evening newscast. No less a figure than Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, claimed that the traditional 30-minute newscast would “die out” once “dinosaurs” like Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings left their anchor chairs. More recently, it was cable TV and cable news that were supposedly going to be consigned to the trash heap in the face of the ominous trend of cable cancellation and mass exodus to streaming. (Confession: I wrote this post myself.)
Those eulogies were premature. Television is no longer the only game, but it still sets the game’s agenda. Virtually every major development in the current presidential campaign began as a televised event. Throughout his presidency, video clips circulated on social media suggesting that Joe Biden had fallen more than a step behind, but it was only after more than 51 million people watched his disastrous June debate performance that the pressure to drop out of the race became insurmountable. Tim Walz was virtually unknown outside of Minnesota until his series of folksy cable interviews helped him get on the Democratic ticket. Likewise, JD Vance probably never would have become a candidate on the Republican side without his regular appearances on Fox News, honing his craft as an arch-Trumpist attack dog. As for this week’s party conference, like dozens before it, it was planned, staged and choreographed to fit the rhythm of television.
No one would argue that we still live in the age of Walter Cronkite. Americans now get political news and information from dozens of platforms and tens of thousands of sources—YouTube and TikTok videos, Facebook and X-posts, Substack newsletters, and podcasts. And yet the television news audience has remained.
Outside of NFL games, nothing on television draws as many viewers as the traditional evening news. On average, nearly 19 million people tuned in to ABC’s newscasts each night. World news tonight, NBC Evening NewsAnd CBS Evening News during the 2023-24 television season. Although that’s several million fewer people than the Big Three did 10 years ago, the rate of decline is much slower than almost anything else on television, broadcast or not. More people now watch the evening news than the networks’ prime-time entertainment programs. Pretty good for 6:30 p.m.
If anything, cable news has been even more resilient despite some economic ups and downs. In the first quarter of 2024, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC attracted about the same number of viewers on average as they did eight years ago, despite millions of households canceling their cable subscriptions during the same period.
The explanation is no great mystery: Cable news audiences are dominated by older viewers, the age group least likely to abandon cable in favor of streaming apps. The rest of the cable industry wants the relative stability of news channels. USA Network, for example, has lost 75 percent of its audience over the past decade; FX and the History Channel have lost about two-thirds.
The dependence on an older audience makes television news less attractive to most advertisers seeking to reach and influence younger consumers. The opposite is true for political campaigns. Older people vote in far greater numbers than young people, making them a desirable target audience for anyone seeking to get or stay elected. As a result, cable news remains the de facto marketplace and public speaking platform. As Jack Shafer put it in Politico Magazine Earlier this year, “cable television has become the place where candidates throw their hats in the ring, where they launch test balloons for new policies, where debates that once took place in the chambers of the House and Senate are now often conducted under studio lights, where evidence for impeaching presidents is first presented, and where Supreme Court nominees are first considered.”
On television more broadly, political campaigns will still spend the bulk of their war chests trying to persuade voters. Many local TV stations, if not their viewers, will benefit from the projected $16 billion that presidential, Senate and House candidates and their allied PACs will spend on advertising this cycle. Demand for airtime is so high, particularly in swing states, that some networks expect to sell all available ad space this fall.
The future of political advertising also likely belongs to television. About a quarter of political ad spending now comes from digital sources, but their continued growth is questionable, says Travis N. Ridout, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads. “Campaigns are questioning the value of ads on social media,” for several reasons, he told me. The most important is the format itself. Political ads make relatively complicated arguments for a candidate or policy and draw more attention than the average Tide or Taco Bell commercial. But ads on Facebook or Instagram can be easy to ignore. People quickly swipe or scroll away; they don’t have the sound on. Television ads are also ignored, but the medium is more immersive; it captures the viewer’s attention with images and sounds that fill the screen without distraction.
Rather than being rendered obsolete by social media, television news has formed a kind of symbiosis with it, in which television is the dominant species. Michael Socolow, a professor and media historian at the University of Maine, told me that Walz and Vance’s appearances on cable shows generated the clips that then pollinated social media. The combination of old and new media worked together to raise their profiles, making them a plausible choice. “It’s not cable TV per se” that matters, Socolow said, but the meme culture it feeds. The future of television “lies in creating viral memes and spreading them on social media.”
The bottom line is that new media are taking their place alongside television rather than replacing it. If that’s the case, it refutes the long-held belief that television news was doomed by aging and technology. It’s reminiscent of the reaction of then-CBS president Howard Stringer when confronted with a dire prediction about his company’s future at a conference some 30 years ago. “They keep saying the networks are dinosaurs,” Stringer said. “What they don’t say is that the dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years.”
