Television on the new frontier

John Kennedy’s presidential press conferences earned such good ratings, he called television his favorite propaganda weapon. His good looks, well-prepared statements, and smooth ad libs played extremely well on the air, and the medium became his chosen tool for renewing government activism and public participation. In 1960, television reached 87 percent of American households, up from 9 percent a decade earlier. ¹ Kennedy especially wanted television to educate Americans to their global responsibility to fight communism, rather than insulating the public with wall-to-wall game shows and westerns. In the wake of the 1959 quiz show scandals, it seemed appropriate that a repentant industry should participate in the New Frontier agenda of showing people what they could do for their country. For such purposes, the Kennedy administration and the television networks both favored the documentary genre. But the President’s glib use of the word propaganda demands closer attention. Should television share in a public policy agenda, no matter how telegenic or popular?

Michael Curtin’s Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics examines in depth the relationship of television documentaries to the New Frontier, and provides a complicated answer to the question of whether these programs constituted propaganda. Following the quiz show scandals, the three networks agreed to increase their documentary programming, and the years 1960 to 1963 became the “golden age” of television documentary. The networks collectively produced more than four hundred in 1962 alone, most of them about foreign policy. Curtin examines why the networks turned to this particular genre, how the programs portrayed the world struggle, and how the television audience understood them. He sees the programs as cultural artifacts produced by the sometimes conflicting demands of journalistic conventions, news division politics, and corporate strategies, all within the broader political economy, particularly the drive to protect overseas markets by containing communism. In brief, Curtin’s answer to whether television documentary served as New Frontier propaganda is that the Kennedy administration, network executives, and film makers shared a dual agenda of containing communism and using television as a weapon in the cold war, but that the conventions of the documentary form, realism and storytelling, undermined the party line by allowing viewers to identify personally with political enemies. And since the programs typically reached only about ten million people in the United States, he deems the efforts to use documentaries for political purposes a failure.

Why did New Frontiersmen in the administration and at the networks choose documentary above other forms of news programming? Curtin provides several answers to this question, all convincing. In the wake of Sputnik in 1957, many cultural critics pointed to television as symptom and cause of a dangerous softness in American society. Too much entertainment television would rot the body and the brain, they said. We had to use the medium for more serious purposes, for “enlightenment.” Kennedy appointed Newton Minow to put some teeth into Federal Communications Commission regulation of the industry. Minow threatened to use federal power to insure a more “balanced” schedule, one that would rise above being, in his famous phrase, a vast wasteland.

So why use documentaries rather than Leonard Bernstein or Ingmar Bergman to enrich television’s content? Sputnik had also kindled a cultural romance with science and objectivity. Guys in white lab coats were no longer egghead weaklings, but heroes leading us to victory against the Soviets, whose minds were numbed by ideology. Documentaries claimed to show true stories, exactly as they happened. The camera never lied. Science, in the form of exciting true stories, thus replaced the symphony or the highbrow drama as exemplary public service programming.

Such realism is of course the product of highly conventionalized technique. Curtin examines this tension between objectivity and interpretation. Paradoxically, documentary’s cool objectivity was meant to mobilize the public. Journalists had learned a lesson in the early 1950s about the limits of a strict objectivity from Senator Joseph McCarthy. Reporting McCarthy’s...