For about 50 years, America shared a universal popular culture—the radio of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the movies of the 1930s and 1940s, and the television of the 1950s and 1960s. The reach of these media was amazing. Radio ownership increased to 61% of American households in 1932, from 27% in 1928—a period when one-fourth of households didn't have electricity. Movie attendance in 1930, when talkies became dominant, was 90 million weekly, in a nation of 123 million. Television ownership increased to 88% of American households in 1960, from 9% in 1950.
With only three or four radio and TV networks, and movie theaters controlled by half a dozen studios, the way to huge commercial success was to produce content that appealed to just about everybody. Popular entertainment exuded a sense of Americanness that long rang true.
A universal popular culture provided politicians with a common language and frame of reference through which they could speak convincingly to the nation as a whole. Franklin Roosevelt's rather formal oratory was supplemented by the friendly, familial tone of his radio fireside chats. Harry Truman's plain-spokenness and Dwight Eisenhower's somewhat stiffer discourse also resonated with a national audience. John Kennedy's stylized rhetoric was leavened by the ready wit of his televised news conferences. The next four presidents, more or less clumsily, also spoke in this universal American idiom.
Ronald Reagan, the master communicator, had made his living in each of the three dominant media—radio, movies, television. He always knew his lines, and they came naturally to him, reflecting the values he cherished from his days as a liberal Democrat in Republican downstate Illinois, and from his days as a conservative Republican in increasingly Democratic Hollywood: tolerance, decency, respect for ordinary people, their troubles and their often unheralded achievements.
Today's world is one of niche popular cultures, available on hundreds of cable TV channels and the Internet. Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart are gifted entertainers and political commentators, but they do not seek a universal audience as Will Rogers did. Current pop-culture hits like "Duck Dynasty" on TV or "Gravity" in movie theaters have largely non-overlapping audiences, which are tiny in market share compared with "I Love Lucy" or "It's a Wonderful Life."
Thus, the language of a universal popular culture is no longer available to politicians...
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