How does television affect political behavior? Has the rise of television caused
citizens to focus more on images than issues? How does television affect what
citizens learn about politics? Are television’s effects deleterious for the conduct
of politics? These questions have captured the interests of a broad set of
scholars, pundits, and citizens who worry about a political system based on image
(e.g., Lang and Lang 1968; Schudson 1995). Yet, clear answers remain elusive,
especially when it comes to competitive political settings such as political
debates.
Much of the difficulty in assessing television’s impact comes from the challenge
of establishing definitive causal relationships with nonexperimental studies.
As Putnam (2000, 218) explains, “Without controlled experiments, we can’t be
certain which causes which. Virtually all nonexperimental studies of the media
find it hard to distinguish between ‘selection effects’ (people with a certain trait
seek out a particular medium) and ‘media effects’ (people develop that trait by