David Halberstam’s conclusion, or what I draw as his conclusion from his 736 pages of The Powers That Be, is: The changes in the media from the 1930s to the 1970s changed politics, and especially the presidency.

Duh. Did he really need 736 tedious pages to come to this conclusion? As I said or implied in my previous posts about this book (here and here), I had a tough time getting though this book. The writing style, the length of chapters, the flood of names, all worked against easy reading. But Halberstam’s main point was obvious throughout, and he makes a fair case. Of course, that seems somewhat obvious. How could politics and the presidency not be changed when the main way news is disseminated changes from twice daily newspapers to sound-bite television? It has to change.

One interesting aspect of the narrative is how the four media highlighted in the book (CBS, Washington Post, Time Inc., and the Los Angeles Times) shifted from conservative-Republican outlets–or in the case of CBS a non-ideological outlet–to become liberal, Democratic-leaning outlets. I’d have to do some more study to necessarily agree with this conclusion, but I won’t dismiss it outright. Maybe these media outlets were conservative once. Interesting concept.

I cannot recommend this book to others. Oh, if you are a media junkie who loves history and easily retains names and facts repeated or updated on widely separated pages, this book may be for you. This will go immediately to the “books for sale box” in the garage, not to a shelf of books being kept. And, to keep from repeating what I feel was Halberstam’s primary error, I will cut this review short.

Since some time in October 2008 I have been slogging my way through The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, 1979 [ISBN 0-394-50381-3]. I finished this tome on February 23rd.

Yes, tome is the way to describe these 736 pages. I picked up this book at a thrift store in Mississippi while passing through on vacation last year. While waiting on my wife to finish her shopping, I read about five pages of the Prelude, telling a story about a Democratic Party rally in El Paso, Texas in September 1960, with Sam Rayburn waiting the arrival of JFK and LBJ. Rayburn’s thoughts on how the media was negatively impacting politics were told in an entertaining way. The subject being interesting and the writing good, I took the plunge, paid a buck, and toted it back to Arkansas.

David Halberstam explains his purpose in writing the book, not in the Prelude, but in the end of the book Acknowledgements: “This book is the product of five years of work. It began as a small idea in 1973 and it grew, constantly changing incarnations. At first it was going to be merely a book on a television network and the presidency; gradually it evolved into a book on the rise of modern media and their effect on the way we perceive events.”

Halberstam had set himself an immense task. So many years between the New Deal and Watergate, so many media outlets, so many politicians, so many media personalities. How to sift through and refine? You can’t cover everything in a single volume, even at 736 pages. Once again Halberstam covers this in the Acknowledgements: “In selecting the four institutions that have the major role in this book, I tried to give as fair a cross section of the national press as I could. I chose CBS because it has traditionally represented the best in broadcast journalism; Time because among national magazines it reflects something special in the American character; the Washington Post because it has become a serious national newspaper and because this is in part a book about the road to Watergate; and the Los Angeles Times for those reasons and also because it played so large a part in the career of Richard Nixon.”

An eastern newspaper. A weekly news magazine. A radio and television network. A western newspaper. Obviously radio was new, television newer, weekly magazines a little older, while newspapers were, at the time of FDR’s first inaugural, the mainstay of how Americans learned the news.

Technology changed everything. Radio allowed voices to be heard. Printing technology allowed pictures to be seen weekly at reasonable prices. Television brought movement and voice together. Politicians needed to embrace and adapt to these new technologies or they would find themselves voted home. Halberstam does a good job of showing how the changing technologies changed how the different types of media interacted with each other; how the jealousies and competition between owners, publishers, editors, and reporters all had their impact. He describes the rise of investigative journalism and its role, as well as how radio then television rang the death knell for evening newspapers.

In two additional posts, I’ll write something about Halberstam’s writing style, and draw some conclusions from the book–his and mine.