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This post is a follow-up to a brief exchange between Paul Rosenberg and I last week (here, here and here) regarding how Democrats messed up. The TV issue was a side topic, but I thought I'd write a little more about it…
Those of us who do politics for a living are at a moment in history that feels similar to what political operatives must have felt like back in the late 1950's. The medium of television that had emerged a few years before was transforming the way politics was done. However, no one could imagine just how much it was going to revolutionize political campaigns, political organizing and the political dialogue across the United States. In the 1950's, it was television. Today, it's the rapidly evolving world of new media.
Television networks became owned by large corporate conglomerates, and as a result became steadily more cautious and conservative. As organizations and civic engagement waned and the power of money and symbolism gained strength, American political dialogue grew more and more unoriginal and steadily more conservative. Meanwhile, the progressive movement, dominated by single-issue organizations, grew increasingly weaker. The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, the Bush presidency and their electoral successes in 2002 and 2004 were more evidence of the strength of the top-down corporate media and the weakness of progressive politics.
However, something new, generated by changes in media and technology, and fueled by a new generation of innovative activists disgusted by establishment politics, was bubbling up from the outside. The era of television-dominated politics is about to change. And out of these changes in media and technology, a new movement has emerged to challenge the status quo, the old ways of doing politics. This new movement- far more participatory, far more community-minded, far readier to push aggressively for change- has revived progressive and Democratic Party politics.
In the 1950s, the advent of the television era, Americans had greater faith and a more direct connection to their government. At that time, they were more likely to be actively engaged in PTAs, labor unions and local civic organizations. These groups were more likely to be involved in a substantive dialogue with politicians and political parties. Americans were much more likely to be active precinct captains or volunteers in their local political party organizations and were much more likely to read daily newspapers and weekly magazines that had in-depth articles covering local and national politics. I agree with Robert Putnam's compelling case in Bowling Alone that television played a dramatic role in the decline in civic participation, and I think that idea carries over even more into our political life.
Television played a major role in changing all that, making people more passive recipients of political information, and making 30-second ads the dominant way information was disseminated. Because politics shifted toward television advertising and away from grassroots organizing and direct voter contact, and because the expense of television advertising kept rising, campaigns became more and more dependent on big business and wealthy special interest donors. This added further distance between politicians and regular voters and it cheapened the political experience. Finally, as television became more corporatized (with the networks being brought up by corporate conglomerates), the quality, quantity and fairness of TV news coverage about politics, both national and local, slipped dramatically.
Organizing and communicating through the internet - and now increasingly through mobile media - has begun to be an antidote to this poison. Between MoveOn.org, the blogosphere, and other internet organizing, the progressive movement is revitalizing and transforming the Democratic Party and the country. Now, as new technology and new media continue to open doors for organizing, we just have to keep building on what we're already started.
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