Professor Nicole Hemmer
speaker
296 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Professor Nicole Hemmer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And Ron Nussin is really interesting throughout that performance, which kind of gets to these dynamics that we've been talking about, about that search for more transparency and authenticity, but also this escalation of image construction. Because so Ron Nussin plays the press secretary talking about you know, how Gerald Ford should deal with this bumbling image, right?
So it's this inside look to the Oval Office. And they make fun of all of the, you know, the press secretary not always telling the truth and spinning the truth, right? And so that's actually a theme of the broader episode.
Yeah, one of the things that I've looked at in my work are, you know, he made regulatory reform a pillar of his presidency. And he really wanted to pursue this to kind of think about agencies that had too much bureaucratic oversight, too much red tape.
How could they function more efficiently and not just serve the corporate interests that had kind of gained regulatory control over them or what's called regulatory capture? So he's really taking on some powerful lobbying industries in a way that he sees as really making regulations more responsive to citizens and consumers.
And so he takes on, I watched him take on in the archives that I've done for my book on cable television, he took on the broadcast lobby, which was incredibly powerful. and really initiated the start of the decentralization of our media landscape that we have today.
During his presidency, you had the big three, ABC, CBS, and NBC, that dominated what people saw on their television screens and fought against any newcomers coming in. And he was willing initially, I should say, he was willing initially to kind of stand up to that and question these regulatory assumptions of power that had been in place for decades.
However, I will say that, you know, 1975, you see him take a lot of action. By early 1976, he's focused all on re-election. By that spring, he's being challenged by Ronald Reagan in primaries. And all of a sudden, he kind of pulls back on some of those more assertive measures because he's looking to kind of create political capital and political friends that can help him win re-elections.
Absolutely. So in 72, the Democratic Party, for the first time, implements these primaries and, you know, allows different voices to come in and kind of compete for the presidential nomination. And the Republican Party is moving towards that in 76 and is trying to make it a more open process.
And Ronald Reagan capitalizes on it, especially he goes to New Hampshire, but also does very, very well in the South, where this more conservative wing of the Republican Party understood that their message of small government and states' rights was that that would play very well in the South with those Southern Democrats that had left the Democratic Party over the issues of civil rights.
And so Ronald Reagan is critiquing his legitimacy, his leadership abilities. And so, again, a lot of these attacks on Ford begin with Reagan. And and then Jimmy Carter is able to, you know, capitalize on them because they're already out there. There are these narratives that have already emerged.
And I think, you know, when we kind of talked about this broader media environment where the press is more cynical, where entertainment shows like Saturday Night Live are, you know, poking fun at him. Ronald Reagan and his critique is tapping into that and then further escalating that as well.
Absolutely. There had not been a television debate since 1960. And part of that is because those debates loomed large in the mind of Richard Nixon. He firmly believed that he lost the election because of those debates. The reality is much more complicated. But in his mind, it was those debates that like that really that triggered his downfall there. Lyndon Johnson in 64 is not going to debate.
He's, you know, he's the incumbent at that moment is running for election, right, as president. And so he's certainly not going, there's no incentive for him to debate. In 68, Richard Nixon sure is not going to do it. And he's not going to do it in 72. And so finally, you have these debates that
this question of will debates bring more transparency, more accountability by, you know, forcing the candidates to answer questions on TV directly to citizens. And there was a consensus that, yes, these are good things. It was about restoring accountability. And again, more of this transparency to the political process.
Absolutely. And they're all about getting women to turn out, getting all of these different citizens engaged in the political process. And so, yes, absolutely. The League of Women Voters, they take charge, you know, they sponsor these debates. And both the parties agreed to them because they realized that in this broader environment where there's more scrutiny,
This scrutiny was originally seen as essential to ensuring that there's no corruption or unethical behavior. Of course, this is part of this broader tension is that you have more and more media scrutiny, but also then more efforts to control images. And so both sides are polling responses and polling issues. So it's actually less authentic.
but it was deemed as part of restoring authenticity to politics. And so it's this mass-mediated tension that really comes out of these debates. And it's part of this broader landscape that Ford and Carter are both navigating.
I think that he really is this transition person, a person that attempted to restore faith and integrity in democratic institutions after they were really called in to question. And he really does try to fulfill that role. You know, he says that, look, this is an example that the system works.
And he tried to show that, you know, it tried to restore faith in the presidency and restore integrity in the presidency. But he's also in this transition role and where media and cynicism and entertainment become more of a factor in how people are consuming politics.
And so you mentioned Saturday Night Live earlier, but I think that's actually really significant, especially when we look at our current political landscape, is that he saw this criticism and Chevy Chase's performance gained resonance with the American public because it tapped into this broader narrative of this accidental president, right?
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