Page 100 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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campaign – equivalent to about $10 million now – to “arouse public op-
position to compulsory health insurance,” with the expenditures divided
among radio, newspaper, and magazine advertisements.
The AMA also purchased campaign ads through subsidiary commit-
tees that endorsed congressional candidates directly. 141 By the 1960s, the
AMA’s embrace of television was complete. Howard Wolinsky and Tom
BrunedescribetheAMA’seffortsagainstnationalhealthinsuranceasbat-
tling President Kennedy “on his own turf, and in his favorite medium,
television.” 142 When the Medicare Act passed in 1965, the AMA had be-
come one of the nation’s largest nonparty political advertisers, using both
radioandtelevision.Itseffortsforeshadowedthe“HarryandLouise”tele-
vision campaign run so successfully by the Health Insurance Association
of America in 1993 and 1994 against President Clinton’s health insurance
proposal.
In the 1960s and ’70s other industries and groups employed television
selectively. In the 1960 campaign, the group Seniors for Kennedy, which
later became National Council for Senior Citizens, ran spot ads on tele-
vision and radio. 143 Two years later and at the other end of the political
spectrum,theKuKluxKlanusedtelevisiontopromoteaRepublicancan-
didate for Congress in Tennessee. 144 By the 1970s, various public service
announcements with politically relevant messages were common, and
by the 1980s some groups ran occasional advertisements for their issues.
Not all interest organizations made an aggressive shift from radio to
television, and certainly no groups came to rely mainly on television for
external communication, as did campaign organizations. This fact is im-
portant to understanding the differences between radio and television.
Radio with its thousands of stations spread around the country provided
opportunities for comparatively focused, targeted political communi-
cation. Television offered something quite different: a mass audience
dominated by three major broadcast firms, at least prior to the 1980s.
From the perspective of many groups, this made radio and television very
different for reasons beyond cost. Television offered something valuable

141 Donald C. Blaisdell et al., “Unofficial Government: Pressure Groups and Lobbies.”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 319 (Sept. 1958);
David R. Hyde et al., The American Medical Association: Power, Purpose, and Politics
in Organized Medicine (Washington, D.C.: Committee for the Nation’s Health, 1955).
142
Howard Wolinsky and Tom Brune, The Serpent on the Staff: The Unhealthy Politics of
the American Medical Association (NewYork:G.P.Putnam’s Sons, 1994), p. 27.
143
Henry J. Pratt, The Gray Lobby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
144
David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987).
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