Welcome back to the show! Apologies for the hiatus, but we are ready to tackle Part 2 of Season 1: Yellow Journalism. Great news! Episode 9 was the third most-listened-to episode of the series, and it would be greatly appreciated if you could share this podcast with your friends and family. 

I was really surprised to see how many of our pod listeners are from outside of the U.S. (Welcome!!!), including Germany, the U.K, Canada, New Zealand, France and Japan (to name a few).... U.S. listeners hail from many of our country’s great cities, including Washington, D.C., San Jose, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City (my hometown), Chicago and New York City. Thank you all for listening!

For those of you who have missed any of our previous episodes, including our most recent episode on how TV changed the news, we encourage you to visit www.howthebl--p.com and listen through your favorite podcast provider, including Apple, Spotify, Audible, Pandora, and many more! Links to all are on the website. We also have an entire webpage featuring the resources used to research this season of How the Bleep Did We Get Here?!

Back in 1960, Vice President and Presidential hopeful Richard Nixon blew his shot at the oval office by bungling his T.V. debate appearances. I want to warn you in advance: the next couple of episodes are going to be very Nixon heavy because I strongly argue, he (intentionally or unintentionally) fundamentally changed the way we report about the presidency and created multiple scenarios that inspire generations of journalists, and this also alters the future of yellow journalism. 

Now we are in the 60s! And this decade starts off with a jolt: the first U.S. presidential election to be influenced by television reporting and coverage. Republicans nominated then-VP Richard Nixon, and Democrats nominated newbie Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. 

The level of political experience between these two men could not have been greater -- especially with regard to foreign policy experience. However, something really interesting happened during the four Kennedy/Nixon presidential debates--TV happened.

In the 1930s, the U.S. government worked quickly to address accessibility and programming issues with radio and later, television. In other countries, people had to pay to listen to the radio, whereas the U.S. established a system that would allow the public to access the radio for free, with advertisements of course. But what a gift to have free access to information--and this is something I think we fail to appreciate in certain circumstances. So many countries, even today, have limits on the kinds of information their people have access to, and the U.S. largely does not have these limitations--a true rarity. 

The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) was established in 1934 to oversee that both the broadcasting industry and the airwaves belonged to the public by granting station licenses and requiring stations to demonstrate that “some of the programs the aired were in the ‘public interest.’” There is a really great episode of the West Wing that addresses this when public broadcasting channels want to limit the amount of time they air to R/D conventions, and Josh Lyman refers to this requirement. The FCC also forced RCA to sell its radio network NBC blue, which would later become the American Broadcasting Company (ABC).