Media and Politics: How Television Changed Democracy

Introduction: A Visit to the Museum of Australian Democracy

About a year ago, my wife and I visited a museum in Canberra called the Museum of Australian Democracy. The museum occupies Australia’s old Parliament House (the Parliament now works in a new building). Inside, there are all sorts of texts and explanations about political and democratic events in Australia, as well as information about former Prime Ministers. Taking photos outside is free, but entry costs 2 AUD per person. We thought it was well worth it. Here are a few photos of us.

Special thanks to my wife’s friend Ennoy, who visited Canberra and invited us out. Yes, she was the guest yet she was the one who dragged us out of the house – that is how lazy we were.

Besides reading and watching video clips of Australian politicians’ speeches from bygone eras, the museum also offers a free tour called the highlights tour. This free tour is led by a volunteer at scheduled times. Visitors simply gather at a designated point – in our case, the hall – and when the appointed time arrives, the group sets off together led by the tour guide. Our guide was an elderly gentleman whose name we unfortunately forgot (sorry, grandpa). Let us call him “The Elder.”

The Elder walked us through the museum while explaining historically significant rooms from when the building served as Parliament House, recounting the dramatic and historic moments associated with each space. Although the tour lasted about 45 minutes, we were so captivated by The Elder’s storytelling that fatigue barely registered, and his passion for Australian politics was palpable.

The Elder’s tour inspired me in two ways. First, I was inspired to do the same in Indonesia when I am old. Volunteer for tours at the DPR building, pointing and saying “to my right is the seat where the honourable Mr Roy Suryo was caught on camera sleeping.” Second, I was inspired at the tour’s final stop, in the office of the last Prime Minister to work there before moving to the new building. The Elder blamed the invention of television (TV) as the turning point that marked the decline of Australian democracy.

What Does TV Have to Do with Politics?

According to The Elder, before TV, democracy was about public policy. Politicians debated the pros and cons of public policies. The mass media of the time – mostly newspapers and radio – covered these policy debates. Not everyone participated in the discussion either. According to The Elder, only educated people with access to newspapers (and sufficient reading comprehension) engaged in public policy debates. As a result, during elections, people voted for candidates with the best policies.

When TV arrived, democracy shifted to being about personality. Since the advent of TV, politicians became more interested in showing their faces than debating public policy. Debates may still have occurred, but according to The Elder, the focus of campaigning shifted from public policy to the candidate’s persona. Elections became popularity contests about figures, no longer about public policy.

The Elder’s complaint about TV sounds a lot like my complaint about social media.

Anyway, returning to the TV-and-politics story, I became curious whether The Elder’s concern could be generalised. It turns out he is not alone. This article by David Kaiser tells a similar story. According to Kaiser, TV helps people forget real problems and focus on fleeting pleasures. Worse, TV helps create demagogues – politicians whose image is polished to perfection but who are actually incompetent. The Apprentice has even been accused of being a major factor behind Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election.

This article by Matt Sailor echoes the same point. TV allows politicians to speak face-to-face with a far larger audience than any previous medium. TV also enables campaign content that is less factual and more negative than what other media of the era produced. And yes, Sailor also concludes that TV helped create popularity contests among candidates rather than policy contests.

There are several other articles you can find online, most with a similar tone. Unfortunately, I have no intention of committing to a deep dive into academic journals on this topic. But at my university, a PhD student named Chris Hoy researched the role of TV in shaping perceptions of inequality, and his preliminary findings indicate a positive correlation.

Why might this happen? Perhaps because visual media has more features? Unlike newspapers, on TV we can see the politician’s body language, which – consciously or not – matters a great deal. Perhaps even more than verbal communication. It is also possible that on TV, characteristics like attractiveness and height can be leveraged more than in print. That reminds me of the claim that President SBY won partly because he is tall and handsome.

Indeed, if we look here, books are almost always better than their film adaptations. According to this article, one reason is that when reading a book, you visualise the scenes yourself, and each reader may imagine something different. Film constrains that imaginative space. Someone with an average face like mine might be better off writing than vlogging. Who knows, a reader who has never seen my face might imagine the author as handsome – then see the real thing and lose all interest.

OK, enough speculation. If you are exploring the role of TV (or social media) in democracy and politics, I would love to hear from you or at least get a comment! Thanks in advance!

Public Policy Academics Who Have Not Evolved

As an academic working in public policy, this naturally led me to reflect. Suppose it is true that the evolution of media has changed how we do politics and democracy. What about academics? When I read about Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, Hicks, Arrow, Slutsky, and others, not once do I think about who they are as people. What ethnicity? What gender? Old, young, overweight, good-looking? None of it matters. It does not come up on the exam.

The same goes for discussing public policy. If you think about it, academics seem to have stayed in place when it comes to discussing public policy. Perhaps some of us have been “infected” by society – focusing on figures rather than policies. But academics as a whole still seem to focus on issues rather than personalities. In public policy journals, the authors still discuss the policies taken by a figure, not the figure themselves. The language in academic journals is always neutral and very different from what you find on Twitter, for example.

Could this be because academics still primarily operate through written media – in Scopus-indexed journal articles? Perhaps if activities in other media, such as TED Talks, tweeting, and so on, counted toward academic credit, academics could also shift their focus to personalities. Perhaps we too would start being snarky, getting into fights, hurling insults, and having Twitter wars with strangers, instead of focusing on policy pros and cons. If Twitter wars counted toward academic credit, perhaps academics would evolve along with the rest of society, and better understand how people think outside the ivory tower.

OK, time for a Twitter war!

That said, there is a lot of encouragement for academics to use non-written platforms. At my university, for instance, promoting your research on social media is strongly encouraged. We now also have many TED-Talk-style videos, and we have come to know celebrity scientists like Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson. In Indonesia, the most famous economist is perhaps Faisal Basri Batubara, and even he is not that mainstream. Maybe soon we can slowly evolve too. Not now. Maybe in five years?