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Jefferson, who valued the press, could turn apoplectic when he considered the newspapers of his day. Said he: "The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."
Imagine what the sage of Monticello would have had to say about television. Today, in the perhaps hyperbolic words of Theodore White (The Making of the President), "television is the political process."
Though the myriad channels of cable TV may eventually provide greater exposure to aspirants on the political fringes, network TV has so far been and still remains the force that decides which candidate will be seen and heard and which will not be seen and heard. Though he speaks with the tongues of men and of angels and has not television, he is become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, for it is television that beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things. Says defeated Presidential Aspirant Jerry Brown: "If a person isn't on tele vision, he is a political nonbeing. He does not exist for the voter, even if that voter meets him in person."
The problem with television's political omnipotence is that it turns issues into slogans. TV concentrates almost exclusively on confrontations, statement and counterstatement, all reduced to brief segments of video tape. TV also demands filmable ritual: the waving placards and red-white-and-blue streamers of the quadrennial conventions, celebrated with the ceremonial jollity of an Easter egg hunt perpetuated for children who have grown into sullen adolescence. When TV has finally crowned its Muppety candidates, it reaches for their purses. Of the $60 million in federal funds that Reagan and Carter spent to campaign against each other, more than half went to television. Overall, candidates for federal office spent an estimated $150 million on television in the 1980 campaign.
Although TV has come to dominate and manipulate U.S. politics, much the way it dominates sports and entertainment, the shrewdest politicians have found that it is perfectly possible to decipher the camera's needs and then take advantage of them. TV enables a politician to elude all the controls of party and policy and present himself directly to the people. "Television is a miracle that American society has manage," never according learned to to onetime CBS News President Fred Friendly, "and in its relationship to politics it has been permitted to run wild." There is certainly no reason to alter the First Amendment's declaration that the Government should impose no restrictions on the freedom of the press. There are two important aspects of political campaigning in the age of television, however, that would benefit by change: