There’s a famous passage about the interrelationship of media and politics in the beginning of The Powers That Be, David Halberstam’s classic story of the great media empires of postwar America. A CBS television crew was interviewing former President Lyndon Johnson in Texas in the early 1970s as part of an expansive documentary about his memoirs. The interviewer asked Johnson what had changed in politics in the 30 years since he first went to Congress through the end of his presidency. Johnson vehemently shot back: “You guys. All you guys in the media. All of politics has changed because of you.”
Postwar America had gone through a media transformation that was largely driven by the introduction in the 1950s, and eventual flowering in the 1960s, of broadcast television. All politics changed because of it. Newspapers like the Graham family’s’ Washington Post and news magazines like Henry Luce’s Time still had a big impact on politics, as Halberstam describes, but the game-changer, the medium that changed the way the political game was played, was the new medium, with its powerful new capabilities, which was television.
The story bears remembering today because today’s media landscape is undergoing a similar , very fundamental , transformation. Again, one of the drivers of the transformation is the introduction of a new media distribution system with new capabilities – , in this case the Internet. And again, television plays a big role in the transformation, partly because it has grown to be such a dominant incumbent in the American media landscape. One of the main reasons the media industry is in such turmoil right now is because television, or motion media, is finally making its migration towards the digital online world much like the text world did in the 1990s.
The signs of the media transformation are everywhere, playing out in news stories every week this fall. Apple Computer introduces a video iPod that can play downloaded TV shows; Microsoft settles a decade-long feud with its archrival RealNetworks with an eye toward a win-win plan to distribute online video; Google this year will sell $6.1 billion in advertising, and next year’s estimates will put it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales. The action is not just online. In the accompanying study, Luis Ubinas, a director at McKinsey&Company, lays out hard numbers showing that audience migration in all media sectors is heading towards more targeted options and very substantial private sector advertising dollars already are following.
Anyone with any connection to politics needs to pay close attention to the changes taking place in the media world today. Every time the media world changes in fundamental ways, politics is forced to fundamentally change too. If you change the way you reach audiences and consumers, then it changes the way you reach citizens and voters too. Lyndon Johnson understood that, though he did not like how it disrupted the political world he had mastered.
We at the New Politics Institute are making a strong argument that the progressive political community today needs to recognize this integral linkage between changes in media and changes in politics. That means those in politics first need to understand the larger strategic context that explains why the media is changing so fundamentally and why it is happening now. Only then can we fully appreciate the more specific developments happening in all the various media, as the accompanying study documents. With a clear understanding of the larger tectonic shifts that are forcing these unprecedented changes in media, we can then start to devise an effective political strategy that will work in the new media environment in the long run.
The larger strategic context is not just about technological changes, though they are important. In what follows, we lay out several major reasons for the changes in media: the arrival of new distribution channels, the introduction of cheap new tools, the emergence of important new domestic audiences, notably a generation of young people the size of the Baby Boom as well as emerging Latino communities s, and then the reality of a very new form of global competition.
All of these drivers of change can best be understood as the latest phases, or 2.0 versions, of fundamental trends that started in the 1990s. The technology, demographic and globalization trends touted in the 1990s by no means went away with the dotcom crash, the recession and the 9 /11 terrorist attacks in the early 2000s. These trends may have paused, or slowed down somewhat, but the basic trajectory remained on track. To fully understand today’s media convulsions, you need to pick up the track of the Technology 2.0 story, the Demography 2.0 story, and the Globalization 2.0 story. We’ll briefly explain all three in the short sections below.
