Amusing Ourselves to Death, One Last Time

The Rise and Fall of Television in the 2024 Election

It is only by conincidence—but what a coincidence it was—that I finished Amusing Ourselves to Death less than an hour before the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as our 47th president. Neil Postman’s classic polemic against television, published during the Reagan administration, begins with a screed against America’s “Hollywood President,” never realizing—or maybe realizing too well—what other television star would eventually be slouching his way towards Washington.

Postman’s tale of how television has ruined our politics, religion, education, and minds is a classic American jeremiad. He begins with the apogee of our country’s political culture, the Lincoln/Douglas debates, where citizens listened for hours on end to extended rational arguments about a crucial social question. In that era, political discourse was modeled around writing, the ideal format for rational discourse. From that moment, a series of inventions from the telegraph to the photograph and on to television displaced rational typography with ephemeral trivial and visual pathos. Out was reason and the written word; in were talking heads and two-minute debate answers.

Since few people would argue that our political discourse has improved since the 1980s, it is easy to extend Postman’s argument into our present by seeing the Internet, the smartphone, and social media as the next dominos to fall in the story of America’s declining intellectual and political life. If anything, Postman’s fears about television might feel quaint compared to a media landscape dominated by the passions whipped up on X and TikTok. If only we were amusing ourselves to death, rather than marinating in a stew of misinformation and trolling, that might be a relief!

Still, looking at the 2024 election in light of Postman’s analysis, I can’t help but notice some complications to this narrative. Take the role of television, the villain in Postman’s tale. For Postman, the emergence of televised debates made the transition from politicians-as-persuaders to politicians-as-entertainers inevitable and tragic. Television gave a leg up to the slick charms of the JFKs and the Reagans while denying America the political talents of the savvy but unattractive Lincolns and Tafts. Yada, yada, yada, we elected reality-show host to the presidency twice.

But in 2024, televised debates played a surprisingly salutatory role. For months leading up to Trump and Biden’s debate, polls had suggested that voters were unconvinced that Joe Biden was an electable candidate that could serve for another four years, as news stories and video clips raised concerns about Biden’s physical decline. But Biden managed to avoid sustained appearances in the spotlight, and White House officials were able to blunt the impact of those reports and deter the Democratic Party from holding a real primary. Print media never broke through.

It wasn’t until Biden shuffled onto the debate stage and mumbled on live television about beating Medicare did his diminishment become all too obvious. Thanks to that event, watched by millions across the country, Democrats were able to at least avoid an inevitable Biden defeat and take a swing with a last-second replacement. In this case, television was able to break through in ways that more “rational” forms of typographic media was never capable of. Being able to command a stage and speak clearly and forcefully isn’t just an entertainer’s trick—it’s a basic qualification of the office. Without the pressures of television, Biden’s inability to meet that qualification might have remained hidden until it was too late.

Television also dispelled the post-convention glow that Kamala Harris enjoyed and challenged her campaign to rely on something more substantial than just vibes. This occurred even when television was ostensibly trying to entertain rather than inform. In theory, there should be no media property more favorable to a Harris campaign than The View, a daytime women’s talk show. But during her appearance, when asked how she would govern differently from Biden, Harris could only come up with, “there is not a thing to come to mind.” Even her supporters seemed shocked that the vice-president was willing to tie herself to the legacy of a president with cratering approval ratings. That moment was not a gaffe that was instantly corrected but a defining moment for a campaign that tried and failed to explain how it could be both “A New Way Forward” and a rerun of the Biden presidency. Once again, TV ended up revealing far more of substance than its medium would lead you to expect.

Still, despite these moments, one major story of this campaign is how new media, specifically podcasts, was finally beginning to eclipse the dominant role of television. And podcasts present less of a continuation of television’s noxious effects so much as a swerve back towards more traditional forms of rational communication. For Postman, all the evils of television flow from how it elevated the visual image over the over the written or spoken word. The visuals of television are expensive, ephemeral, entertaining, and emotional. They require intensive corporate investments, beautiful actors, slick advertisements, rapid-fire cuts, and polished editing. The energy, production, and capital required to power this technology is immense; there is a reason that we only talk about a handful of broadcast and cable news channels.

Podcasts, on the other hand, even the most successful ones, are comparatively low-tech, low-cost, and inherently grassroots. They lend themselves to dialogue and exploration. They test a candidate’s ability to navigate a wide range of topics without the clear boundary markers of debate moderation. They can keep their guests under the spotlight for hours, with few commercial breaks with which to spare them. And unlike television, they demand more audience buy-in. Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow can show up on your television if it just happens to be tuned in to the right channel at the right time, but nobody listens to a podcast episode by accident.

I don’t want to be overly naive about this. Podcasts are curated, like television, and hosts know how to make their guests look authentic while also making them look good. You rarely, if ever, get substantive, meaningful debates in podcast form (RIP, Bloggingheads). On podcasts, hosts are too focused on selling their audience Athletic Greens and Instacart subscriptions to prepare meaningful pushback to their guests. Still, the sustained conversations we find on podcasts look more like Firing Line than anything else on television today. In fact, they can make televised interviews seem quaint. Harris’s visit to the Call Her Daddy podcast was intended to be inviting but ended up coming across as more stilted than her 60 Minutesinterview. Every question was a softball, and yet she never aimed for more than a double. The impression she left was that even on the most favorable platform imaginable—a podcast aimed towards socially liberal, successful women—she was too afraid to relax and have an open conversation. You can’t blame Harris too much: she is a politician raised on the television era, and she managed the interview like it was going to be broadcast later that evening. But in light of what the podcast format makes possible, it came across as a wasted opportunity.

Compare that with J.D. Vance’s trip to the Joe Rogan and Theo Von podcasts. Vance, our first national Millennial politician, who had put in his reps on the podcast circuit during his Hillbilly Elegy book tour, has clearly mastered the ease of affected authenticity and content production demanded by this new technology. He was able to present himself as a Buckeyes fan who just happened to be on running for president (“They’re giving me the signal to wrap this up, gotta get along to the next stop”) while still subtly dropping his talking points like bread crumbs for his listeners. Even Donald Trump, who has been on television longer than I’ve been alive, never came across as serious, earnest, and savvy in his televised rallies than as when he was doing “the weave” on the Joe Rogan podcast—all explaining what the weave is midstream.

The irony is that television paved the way to the White House for our most televised candidate ever, even while television itself was being silently ushered off the stage.