he 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 communication, it indicated that this form of media was now the pre-eminent tool of political communication. Television allowed the president to seemingly directly speak to the people and be able to communicate important policy decisions such as Johnson’s decision not to seek a second term – the first time such an announcement had been made. To this day “American U.S. consumers watch more TV at an average of 3.8 hours per day” (Miller and McKerrow 68) and its impact affects the political landscape, due to television’s widespread ability to showcase information and present the president live. However, despite the appearance of a direct line of communication between the president and the public through television, such is not the case. As with radio, television appearances by the president are heavily scripted by speechwriters whose r