Sample Solution

rom political communication theory and is argued to be witnessed when “a decline in party strength and a changing media environment led presidents to bypass the bargaining processing in DC and “go public” with their policies instead” (Pluta 2). Rhetorical presidencies began in the 1930s, when Roosevelt, facing strong Congressional opposition to the New Deal policies that he was espousing to defeat the Great Depression, used radio to create a stronger relationship with the American people by appearing to be open, upfront and honest with them. Roosevelt’s rhetorical presidency accelerated in World War II, when Roosevelt used the radio to recreate the direct and immediate communication modes of earlier presidencies. However, while Roosevelt’s fireside chats and radio addresses were direct and immediate, they were also tightly scripted in order to garner ever-deeper support for the American war effort. In this way, presidential communications remained, as they had been with newspapers, heavily mediated.

The next transformation in communications tools would be the emergence of mass market television two decades later, and this too would alter the character of presidential political communications. Television not only had live news coverage but had the capability to visually stimulate and inform the viewer. This meant that public expectations of presidents changed, being now distinguished by the way they looked, what they were said, and the way that they said it. The television became an official tool of presidential communication when Harry Truman publicly addressed Americans through the medium in 1943 (Morgan 2016). From the period of the end of World War II and over the succeeding 40 years television would enter into more and more people’s homes. As access to television increased “survey evidence from the 1950s-1970s shows that roughly twice as many people chose television as their most important source of information about presidential campaigns as chose newspapers” (Gentzkow et al. 2986). Television was pivotal in the 1960 presidential contest, when the image of a sweating and stubbled Richard Nixon contrasted with that of John F Kennedy during the Presidential debate. The telegenic Kennedy thereafter used television as a nationwide platform to bring the president and the people closer together and garner support for controversial policies like the Bay of Pigs, the race to the moon, and the Vietnam war. When the far less telegenic Lyndon B. Johnson regularly used television as a tool of presidential political communic