Broadcasting Telecasting (Oct-Dec 1956)
Reading and Downloading:
Record Details:
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!
Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.
Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.
View OCR Text
We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
POLITICAL BROADCASTING
SAY RADIO -TV NEWSMEN IT'S IKE, FOUR TO ONE,
B*T survey of nation's news directors shows 80% believe President will win his bid for re-election
THE NATION'S voters will return Dwight D. Eisenhower to the White House for a second term as President, but they'll give him a Congress with both houses controlled by the Democrats.
That's how the presidential campaign outcome appeared to the news directors of a representative sample of U. S. radio and television stations surveyed by B»T less than a month before Election Day.
Those results indicate the judgment of a sizeable majority of the 132 broadcast station news directors returning usable replies to the B*T questionnaires, which were sent to some 500 stations. Four news directors expect the re-election of President Eisenhower to one who anticipates a victory for Adlai Stevenson. Two of these news experts look for a Democratic majority in the Senate to every one who expects to find the Republicans in control of the next session, and there are five who pick the Democrats to control the House of Representatives to every one who thinks the House will be controlled by the GOP.
There's much more agreement among the broadcast station news directors this fall than B«T's first presidential poll revealed in October 1952. Then the division of preelection opinion was pretty much on a 50-50 basis. One presidential candidate got the
votes of 56% of the broadcast newsmen as most likely to win the election, and it is embarrassing to have to report that the choice of the majority was Mr. Stevenson and that small majorities of the broadcast newsmen also thought that there would be a Democratic Senate (58%) and a Democratic House (54% ), which were also bad guesses.
This year, the station news directors are not only in national overall agreement on the election outcome, but their opinions run in about the same ratio throughout all sections of the country, regardless of the political predilections of any particular region. There is virtually no evidence of personal partisanship replacing sound news judgment in the response to this questionnaire.
The broadcast news directors also are in substantial agreement that President Eisenhower has made far more effective use of radio and television in his campaign than have any of the other three top-of-the-ticket candidates, including his own running mate Richard Nixon. More than two-thirds of the votes for most effective use of the broadcast media cast by the stations news directors went for the President, only about onefifth each for Mr. Stevenson and Vice President Nixon, and only 5% of the total for Sen. Kefauver.
This is a reversal of the consensus of radio-tv newsmen in 1952. At that time, 74%
of the votes for most effective use of broadcasting went to Mr. Stevenson and only 10% to Gen. Eisenhower, with the other 16% non-committal on that point. (The 1952 questionnaire did not include the vice presidential candidates in the effective use question as was done this time.)
Here are the questions asked by B«T in its October 1956 poll of radio-tv station news directors, together with their answers: 1 . How many electoral votes do you think each Presidential candidate will receive? Average of the answers:
Eisenhower 313
Stevenson 218
Total 531
Most of the news directors feel that President Eisenhower will receive a comfortable but not spectacular majority of the 531 electoral votes. Few predictions even came close to that of the Florida enthusiast who foresaw 476 electoral votes for the incumbent. These who look for a Stevenson victory were more modest; the highest count he received was 399 electoral votes (from a North Carolina news director). At the other end, two news directors, one in Texas and one in Alabama, gave Stevenson a onevote majority, while a Minnesota news director's prediction of 267 for Eisenhower to 264 for Stevenson was the closest electoral
WHO WILL
WIN
THESE
RACES?
WHO USED
RADIO-TV
MOST EFFECTIVELY?
PRESIDENT
SENATE
HOUSE
A
A
A
o o
c a>
LU
Stevenson
Republicans^
a> t—
Democrats j
Republicans^
Democrats ,
Eisenhower
Stevenson
Nixon
Kefauver
New England
6
1
3
5
1
7
5
1
2
Mid Atlantic
7
4
3
(1)
7
2
9
7
2
1
2
E. No. Central
14
2
4
12
1
15
12
4
2
W. No. Central
20
2
9
(2)
12
5
18
16
5
5
So. Atlantic
19
9
6
22
5
23
16
9
4
E. So. Central
. 3
2
1
4
1
4
3
2
W. So. Central
16
2
7
(2)
9
5
13
14
1
6
Mountain
10
2
2
10
1
11
10
1
7
Pacific
6
2
3
5
1
7
5
2
1
Post Mark
Illegible
3
1
2
3
2
1
104
26
39
(5)
88
22
no
90
28
28
7
Page 60
October 29, 1956
Broadcasting
Telecasting