NEW YORK:\u00a0Millions of viewers, some estimates predict up to 100 million in the U.S. alone, will be watching the presidential debate tonight between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
While all the attention is on what is at stake tonight and in this election between two candidates who couldn\u2019t be further apart in temperament, tone and experience, it is worth noting that today actually marks the anniversary of the very first televised presidential debate, the one between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, which took place on September 26, 1960.<\/p>\n
With that debate, and tragically with Kennedy\u2019s assassination and funeral three years later, television catapulted over newspapers as the go-to source of information for breaking news. Television\u2019s unmatched ability to transmit sound and images live drew millions of viewers and opened up the political arena to voters who would otherwise never have the chance to hear the candidates\u2014some who didn\u2019t have a television or couldn\u2019t afford to read newspapers every day. Yes, there was radio, and it held a much greater role in providing news than it does today, but television, again, offered both sound and images\u2014what the candidates said and how they looked when they said it, or how they looked when they reacted to their opponent\u2019s remarks, which in this case made all the difference.<\/p>\n
No one at the time could have imagined television\u2019s impact on the political process. Back on that night in 1960, people who had only heard the debate on the radio deemed it a tie between Kennedy and Nixon, while viewers who had watched the debate live on TV clearly thought Kennedy had won. JFK was poised, eloquent, good looking\u2014\u201ctelegenic\u201d\u2014a new word coined from television. Nixon, on the other hand, was perspiring, nervous, and looked awful.<\/p>\n
In 2010, Ricardo Guise, World Screen<\/em>\u2019s president and publisher, and I had the huge privilege of speaking to Don Hewitt, the creator and executive producer of 60 Minutes<\/em>. Hewitt was also the producer of that first historic televised debate. This is how he described the candidates:<\/p>\n \u201cJack Kennedy was Cary Grant. That night, he walked into that room, he looked like a Harvard undergrad, perfectly tailored, he was tan, he was in command, he looked like he owned the world. Nixon had a staph infection. He looked green. He had banged his knee on the car. He looked like death warmed over. So it was no contest.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat night, incidentally a historic night, we got the right guy for the wrong reason,\u201d continued Hewitt. \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t pick a president according to who\u2019s the better looking of the two. You should pick Mr. America that way, but not your president. But we did and we got the right guy.\u201d<\/p>\n Through the decades I have often felt that television\u2019s potential to entertain, inform and enlighten has too often been squandered in the chase for ratings; in the desire to highlight individuals who are seeking their 15 minutes of fame in this celebrity-driven world; in the quest for the easy pithy attention-grabbing sound bite. Just look at how tonight\u2019s debate between Clinton and Trump is being promoted by some channels\u2014like a boxing match, or a major reality TV event.<\/p>\n How far television has come from its earnest, almost happenstance beginnings in 1960. During our conversation with Hewitt, he went on to give a somewhat bone-chilling analysis of another development that emerged from that first debate on September 26.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know what was wrong about that night? That was the first night that politicians looked at us in television and said, \u2018That\u2019s the only way to run for office.’\u201d And we looked at them and said, \u2018That\u2019s a bottomless pit of advertising dollars.\u2019 From that day on, no one can even think about running for office in the greatest democracy on Earth unless they\u2019ve got money for television time. And you can\u2019t get money for television unless you are doing something with a lobbyist you shouldn\u2019t be doing. A word was born that night called \u2018fundraising\u2019. I had never heard about fundraising before. In politics it\u2019s called fundraising, in business it\u2019s called bribery. You\u2019re giving money at a fundraiser to get someone to do what you want them to do. Politics in America has been ruined by television because it\u2019s become a money game. If you don\u2019t have the money, don\u2019t even think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n As I watch the debate tonight and the next two, I hope the discourse will be civilized and dignified as it was in 1960 without incendiary comments or catchy sound bites devoid of meaning. I hope to hear concrete stands on issues, substantive proposals for creating jobs, protecting our country, fighting terrorism, establishing fair immigration policies, keeping\u00a0automatic weapons out of the wrong hands, improving our schools and infrastructure, and reforming campaign financing laws.<\/p>\n And I hope television lives up to its potential, with moderators who are up to the unquestionably challenging task of keeping candidates on topic, and news divisions that provide us with analysis devoid of partisan commentary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NEW YORK: Millions of viewers, some estimates predict up to 100 million in the U.S. alone, will be watching the presidential debate tonight between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":7343,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-top-stories"],"yoast_head":"\n