Television's Impact on American Politics and Civil Rights
This essay examines the profound influence of television on American society since its widespread adoption in the late 1940s and 1950s. It traces how television supplanted radio and newspapers as the primary source of political information, reshaped presidential campaigning through televised debates and spot commercials, and brought landmark political events — including the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, and Iran-Contra — directly into American homes. The paper also explores how television coverage of the civil rights movement, from the Montgomery bus boycotts to the March on Washington, exposed a national audience to racial injustice and accelerated legal progress. Together, these examples illustrate television's enduring and immeasurable impact on the nation's political and social landscape.
- Introduction: Television and American Life: Television's rise as America's dominant information medium
- Television and American Politics: Political events shaped by televised coverage
- Presidential Campaigns in the Television Age: How TV transformed presidential campaigning since 1952
- Television and the Civil Rights Movement: TV imagery accelerating civil rights progress
- Conclusion: A Nation Transformed: Television's lasting, immeasurable impact on America
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its argument in concrete historical examples — Nixon's "Checkers" speech, Eisenhower's spot commercials, the March on Washington — giving abstract claims about media influence tangible support.
- It moves logically from the invention of television through its political applications to its social impact on civil rights, creating a coherent chronological and thematic arc.
- Direct quotations from secondary sources (Kaid, Everet, Schatzkin) are integrated smoothly and used to reinforce, rather than substitute for, the student's own analysis.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of secondary source synthesis. Rather than simply summarizing one source at a time, the student weaves together multiple scholarly perspectives to build a cumulative argument about television's transformative role in American public life. This technique — drawing on Kaid for political process, Everet for civil rights coverage, and Schatzkin for historical context — models how to use sources as evidence for an original thesis.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a broad claim about television's dominance in American homes, then narrows to its political influence, with an extended section on how presidential campaigning was reshaped starting in 1952. It then pivots to the civil rights movement as a second major case study, showing how visual media accelerated social change. A brief conclusion ties both threads together and returns to the paper's opening framing of television's inventor, Philo Farnsworth, providing satisfying structural closure.
Introduction: Television and American Life
There have been many technological advances within the past sixty years that have fundamentally influenced the way we live in the United States. Among the most influential is the invention and proliferation of the television.
Though there are other equally important advances, it is still the television that dominates the background noise of nearly every home. In fact, most homes have more televisions than they have bathrooms. It is not unusual for television to be the single most used avenue for national and international information. "From its early position as a new medium for political coverage in the 1950s, television quickly supplanted radio and eventually newspapers to become, by the early 1960s, the major source of public information about politics."
This information includes political, social, and popular issues that have helped shape the culture of America. It is through the influence of television and the media that American politics have become what they are. It is through television that the civil rights movement reached far more people than it would have otherwise, and it is through television that, to some degree, the Americanization of foreign peoples has occurred.
Though television was invented in 1927 by Philo Farnsworth (Schatzkin 2002), the proliferation of the technology did not begin to occur until the mid-1940s and early 1950s. "The introduction of television was stalled while the nation devoted its technical might to winning the Second World War, but by the late 1940s television swept the nation and the world." (Schatzkin 2002) It wasn't until the picture gained color in 1946 that the invention truly exploded as something every home needed. (Bellis 2003)
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.