The Tragedy of Jimmy Carter

The 39th President of the United States, James Earl Carter II (D-Georgia) was a strange and tragic figure.

To explain, Carter was the first president created and destroyed by television. Carter was not the first president to appear on television — that honor belongs to Herbert Hoover (R-California). Nor was Carter the first president to campaign on TV or use television as a governance tool.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (R-Kansas) used TV commercials as early 1952. John F. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) was the first to use TV to govern. To explain, Kennedy used TV interviews to reach out to the American people and television addresses to unite the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (D-Texas), Richard M. Nixon (R-California) and Gerald R. Ford (R-Michigan) all used television as Kennedy did. Yet TV did not create nor control them. To explain, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Kennedy, and Eisenhower came from an earlier age politics. To them, TV was one of many political tools.

Carter was the first president to begin his political career in the TV age. He began seeking office in 1962. Moreover, Carter arrived on the national stage after the collapse of the old media ecosystem.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the older newspaper centered media system retained much of its power. The wire services, the…