How Media Coverage of U.S. Politics Has Changed Since the 1960s

From Optimism, Love of Democracy, to Cynicism

Renowned journalist Theodore H. White, author of The Making of the President series (1960, 1964, 1968, 1972) was writing during the Cold War when he thought the United States was in a worldwide battle with authoritarian communists of the Soviet Union and “Red” China. He wanted to believe in and display the superiority of democratic self-government to citizens in a bipolar world that might be attracted to these other systems.

White “discovered” the story or journalistic narrative of presidential elections, and in doing so, changed it.

A Love of Democracy in Action

White portrayed American presidential campaigns as heroic, ennobling quests of public servants. He celebrated democracy.

“American politics is one of the noblest arts of mankind, and I cannot do anything else but write about it,” White wrote.

While average journalists simply covered events, White explored big ideas, saw patterns and trends, and employed novelistic techniques with the perspective of a real student of history who, having lived outside the U.S. for a chunk of his life, could dig deep into the psyche of the American people.

Today’s cynical journalists and cynical citizens, if they read White’s accounts at all, often react as if his accounts are no longer about the U.S. but another country:

In 2021, one reader wrote on Amazon that “the respect shown to both sides of the political fence, both to candidates and voters, is a foreign concept today.”

“It’s fascinating how utterly, utterly different a country it was then,” wrote a reader in 2016.

“As hard as that must be to imagine today, there once was a reporter named Theodore H. White who wrote novel-like books about presidential elections, and actually made his readers feel good about the democratic process afterward,” wrote a reader in 2006. White is “able to bring us closer to the people, the issues, and the sheer joy of politics in the working than any other author could conceivably dream of doing.”

Skeptical Reaction To White’s Approach

Journalists younger than White, trained by the Vietnam and Watergate fiascos to be more skeptical if not adversaries of presidents, considered White too close to his subjects. Yet his books are still in print and endure while horse-race accounts, and scandal-mongering “tell-alls” tend to quickly fade into trivia or fall to the $1 discount shelves at bookstores. Yes, White’s techniques did raise questions about how protective a journalist should be of candidates and how much he inflated their images to make them appear wiser than ordinary mortals.

Legions of journalists sought to follow in his footsteps, in part because it seemed like such great fun. Inspired by White, Timothy Crouse wrote “The Boys on the Bus,” a seminal account of life on the road for journalists covering the 1972 presidential campaign.

Jules Witcover and Jack Germond, primarily of The Baltimore Sun, followed White in prolific coverage of presidential campaigns through a daily column and nearly two dozen books between them, in what you might call saturation coverage that to historians, might seem like overkill with trivia and minutia. Germond wrote two memoirs: Fat Man in a Middle Seat: Forty Years of Covering Politics (2002) and Fat Man Fed Up: How American Politics Went Bad (2005).

For about 20 years, from 1960 to 1980, candidates and political parties struggled to gain control of the images being broadcast on television to the nation from political conventions. This made for fascinating TV, from 1960 to 1980, because candidates would be caught in candid moments saying and doing impolitic things.

By 1984, political consultants, public relations executives, and television producers had almost completely gained control of political conventions from the journalists. They became meticulously staged media events “made for television,” and now, for social media.

By the 1980s, journalistic influence or interference in elections began to seem almost malevolent, as exemplified by

• 1980: The Made-for-TV Election. Hype, drama, and entertainment values prevailed.

• 1987-88: Media Scandal-Mongering Deprived Democrats Of Their Strongest Candidate.

• Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics (1991), by Larry Sabato.

Essentially, journalists displaced party leaders as power brokers, and not to democracy's benefit. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign staff thought of journalists as “sharks.” Presidential politics became what James B. Stewart called “Bloodsport: The Truth Behind the Scandals in the Clinton White House.”

Presidential campaigns and the White House, for many staffers, became a “Madhouse: The Private Turmoil of Working for the President,” as Jeffrey Birnbaum wrote in 1996. Professional politics was where good people went bad or did wrong.

But First, Hero Worship and Myth-Making

I read White’s books as a teenager and loved them. I now see them as conscious myth-making. He engaged in the hero-worship of such figures as John F. Kennedy, Chiang Kai-shek, and Ambassador David Bruce. The last “Making of the President 1972” book came out in 1973 when President Nixon was embroiled in the Watergate crisis that would end his presidency. White gave Nixon the benefit of the doubt on Watergate and nearly everything else, which did not survive well retrospectively.

To retrieve his reputation for astute observations of politics with a historical perspective, White in 1976 published “Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon.” The Nixon team, he wrote,

“came to see politics as war without quarter, in which the White House was a command post where ordinary rules didn’t apply, where power could be used without restraint.”

White eventually deplored what the blockbuster success of his Making of the President series had done to journalism,