Cable Guys

Historian Kathryn Cramer Brownell tells us how politics and media merged, and made Donald Trump President of the United States

Photo credit: Kevin McGovern/Shutterstock

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Have you ever wondered how a failed businessman and reality TV star became President—not once, but twice? It’s a long story, beginning just after World War II, when television salesmen figured out that they could sell units to people who couldn’t get a signal by putting up a tower and stringing coaxial cable down the street. But the technology we rely on today to get all television—yes, even if you have cut the cord, and watch to on your iPad—was successfully resisted by the major broadcasting networks for decades. That is, until President Richard Nixon, who blamed mainstream news outlets for his lack of popularity and earlier political defeats, decided to get the networks back by opening up multiple channels to other news entrepreneurs.

Thus was born the crazy news ecosystem that we inhabit today, and that Donald J. Trump rode to the presidency not once, but twice. In 24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News (Princeton University Press, 2023), Kathryn Cramer Brownell tells that story, and much, much more. Katie and I share a mutual fascination with political media, so we sat down to talk.

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Claire Potter: I think you make a central point about the history of cable news: that even though we imagine the media as having been more recently politicized, television has a long political history.

I wonder if you could tell that story.

Kathryn Cramer Brownell: That was really one of the things that drew me to this project. I wrote my first book about the role of entertainment and celebrity in politics, and discovered just how important debates over TV—how to structure and how to use it—were by the 1960s. That book ends in 1968 with President Richard Nixon's administration, and I began the research for 24-7 Politics thinking about TV as the path to political power, and what that means for how politicians govern.

As I dug into the topic, what I found was that in the broadcasting era where you have three networks dominating the airwaves—ABC, CBS, and NBC—these legacy networks had a lucrative, monopoly arrangement with the government. And they did this in partnership with many elected officials who found that they could benefit from being able to reach millions of television viewers.

A captive audience, in other words.

Yes, and this monopolistic structure defined how TV functioned in the 1950s and 1960s. This relationship between broadcasters, members of Congress and presidents determined not just how television was structured, but also the types of information that people could get in their TV screens. Cable operators recognized this, and realized that they did not have economic opportunities because they didn't have the political power major broadcasters had.

There's a kind of nostalgic hindsight that mainstream pundits perpetuate, which is the idea that before the mediascape fragmented, there was a “golden age” of television where trusted voices helped to unite the nation. In other words, everybody listened to Walter Cronkite and thought, oh, great, now we all know what to think, we have the same facts. And your book really interrupts that.

It’s true that everyone was informed with similar facts, and as a result, there was a consensus about what political reality was. But it was a manufactured consensus, and it was exclusionary. Many people were not a part of the shared culture and shared politics that TV helped to cultivate. Women were not included, people of color were not included, conservatives were not included. It really was an elite, liberal, white, male, heterosexual view of the world that shaped not only TV or entertainment offerings, but also interpretation of the news.

That whole idea of the “golden age” is also foolish because you've got radio running alongside of TV. You've got community radio; you've got pirate radio; you've got Black radio, and Christian radio—there are, in fact, all these other, more diverse, voices in another medium. So, people aren't just watching television.

How does cable television emerge as part of this more diverse mix?

Well, initially, cable television emerged alongside TV broadcasting. It was simply a technology that allowed broadcasting signals to expand to cover hard-to-reach areas. If you lived in a small rural town and had rabbit ears on top of your television to capture the signal, you might not be able to get that signal at all. So, an entrepreneurial person found that in hard-to-reach communities, a technician could go to the top of a hotel or a mountain, capture a signal broadcast from a bigger city nearby, and then send it via a coaxial cable wire to homes that could not access broadcasting. The first cable systems were called Community Antenna Systems, and they expanded the reach of broadcasting rather than competing against it.

You also show how cable linked smaller towns to communities hundreds, or even, thousands of miles away. My grandparents lived in Twin Falls, Idaho, which was bordered on the south by the Wasatch Mountain Range and on the West by the Rocky Mountains. We had cable in the 1960s, and although I never thought about it at all, we got one station from Salt Lake City another station from Boise, and then a local station, KTFI. So, we got adds for local car dealerships, but also for a waterpark in Salt Lake, and restaurants in Boise.

How did cable operators begin to have bigger aspirations beyond selling televisions and television service in places unserved by broadcast?

There was a frustration about the limitations of network broadcasting: its monopoly structure, and the fact that there really were only three stations available for most people to consume. Cable had the potential to interrupt that because the technology could not only bring in the local city, its stations, and stations based in a nearby city, but also more distant signals as well. And early cable televisions had the capacity for 12, even 13 channels, which was exciting at the time.