President Trump’s First Term

The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Volume 5

Robert X. Browning

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781557538826
• eBook ISBN: 9781612496184
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

C-SPAN is the network of record for US political affairs, broadcasting live gavel-to-gavel proceedings of the House of Representatives and the Senate, and to other forums where public policy is discussed, debated, and decided––without editing, commentary, or analysis and with a balanced presentation of points of view.

The C-SPAN Archives, located adjacent to Purdue University, is the home of the online C-SPAN Video Library. The Archives has recorded all of C-SPAN's television content since 1987. Extensive indexing, captioning, and other enhanced online features provide researchers, policy analysts, students, teachers, and public officials with an unparalleled chronological and internally cross-referenced record for deeper study.

Books in this series present the finest interdisciplinary research utilizing tools of the C-SPAN Video Library. Each volume highlights recent scholarship and comprises leading experts and emerging voices in political science, journalism, psychology, computer science, communication, and a variety of other disciplines. Each section within each volume includes responses from expert discussants. Developed in partnership with the Center for C-SPAN Scholarship & Engagement in the Purdue University Brian Lamb School of Communication with support from the C-SPAN Education Foundation, this volume is guided by the ideal that research based on C-SPAN video can increase our understanding of American politics and democracy based on the ideals of our American experiment.

The fifth volume of the C-SPAN Archives research focuses primarily on the Trump presidency in the first term. Chapters address his moral language, his rhetoric on climate change, and African American support for Trump. Other chapters use the C-SPAN Archives to study congressional influence on immigration policy, nonverbal cues in congressional speeches, and local and national perspectives on congressional debates.

PART 1

C-SPAN and Historical Research

Edited by Kathryn Cramer Brownell

On March 19, 1979, the recently elected representative from Tennessee, Albert Gore Jr., took the floor of the House chamber and addressed both his colleagues and a national cable audience. The Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN) had just launched, bringing television coverage of the House of Representatives to the homes of cable subscribers across the country. As the first representative to appear on C-SPAN, Representative Gore delivered a hopeful speech about how cable television could serve as an antidote to media coverage that overwhelmingly favored the president over Congress. “Television will change this institution just as it has changed the executive branch,” predicted Gore. He anticipated that the “good will outweigh the bad” because the “solution for the lack of confidence in government … is more open government at all levels.”¹

He and other supporters of C-SPAN agreed that a central problem in American political life stemmed from the narrow coverage of political events that appeared on network broadcast television. With less than an hour each day dedicated to public affairs, the network news programs determined what events counted as “news” and how such stories were framed and packaged for national audiences. As one telecommunications policy maker from the Nixon administration noted, television networks harnessed a tremendous amount of power because of their “ability to control the flow of information and of ideas to the people” (Brownell, 2017). Activists on the Left and the Right and politicians from both parties could all agree on one thing by the late 1970s: a new approach to television that could provide more comprehensive media coverage of the news was needed (Gitlin, 1980; Hemmer, 2016).

Scholars have debated the ways that the 24/7 news cycle that C-SPAN helped to spawn has shaped politics. It has expanded civic debate and participation while also elevating the place of performative media politics in American government in ways that have brought new challenges to democratic governance (Brownell, 2015; Smith, 2012). But the range and depth of the events that C-SPAN has since captured—from congressional proceedings and committee hearings to campaign stops and partisan gatherings—have created a wealth of resources for scholars. By studying material from the C-SPAN Video Library, historians, political scientists, and communication scholars can follow in the path forged by C-SPAN programming innovations. Notably, they can study people, movements, policies, and ideas that may have gone unnoticed in a national news cycle, which may now extend for 24 hours but remains driven by ideological and market agendas that continue to infringe on providing nuance and complexity (Hemmer, 2016; Jamieson & Waldman, 2003; Ponce de Leon, 2015).

These first three chapters on political debates, political gaslighting, and African American Trump supporters demonstrate a variety of ways in which scholars can use the C-SPAN Video Library to better understand the nuances behind the 24/7 news narrative and even pierce holes into the accepted political logic it frequently advances. Stephen Llano’s chapter, “Congressional Election Debates: Between the National and the Local,” offers an antidote to the problematic coverage of political debates while Farah Latif breaks down the misleading media narratives some Republicans have created on climate change. Ray Block Jr. and Christina S. Haynes use content from political rallies and oral histories to explain how and why a variety of prominent African American supporters stumped for Donald Trump in 2016. These essays demonstrate how scholars can use the C-SPAN Video Library to advance research in political science and communication that has tremendous potential to continue the project of transparency and diversity of perspective that C-SPAN itself elevated in politics over 40 years ago.

Do we still need political debates when they fail to inform voters on specific issues and simply have become staged press conferences? This is a question that Stephen Llano poses before he examines the valuable role that debates play in the democratic process. The challenge, he contents, hinges on a better understanding of what exactly debates reveal, and this demands an overhauling of the dominant ways in which we currently analyze these events. Rather than viewing debates as time during which candidates dispute “superior facts or truths” and battle one another to present a more powerful image of a leader, Llano presents an alternative rubric for watching and judging debate performance. “The way forward,” he argues, is to see them less as “contests of facts, policy, and formal reason” and more as “contests of advocacy: Can they prove they are the best advocate for the values of the constituents while at the same time proving they can act on those beliefs in Washington?”

By analyzing a range of congressional debates that took shape during the 2016 election, Llano provides an effective model for how scholars can use the C-SPAN Video Library to study the intersection of local and national politics. From the beginning, C-SPAN programming provided a more comprehensive look at national political events—legislative procedures, presidential addresses, and party conventions starting in 1980. But programs also valued local politics, like its Grassroots ’84 coverage of state political races and issues (Brownell, 2014). Moreover, media-savvy politicians—from Al Gore to Newt Gingrich—have long recognized the ways in which C-SPAN has connected local and national issues, and they have used coverage of the legislative process to elevate their national reputation and transform debate in the House of Representatives into national discussions of issues that have ranged from tax policy to regulation to foreign policy (Smith, 2012). C-SPAN became a tool to advance a modern local-national legislative strategy; thus its archives are essential for scholars seeking to understand this process. As Farah Latif argues, this legislative strategy has, at times, invoked “political gaslighting.” Her examination of Republican conversations about climate change issues reveals a recent effort “to construct populist narratives and stringent attitudes toward climate issues” that advance partisan principles rather than scientific facts. By deconstructing political communication on the cable dial, scholars like Llano and Latif are advancing a new way of understanding and evaluating the changes embedded in political communication in the age of 24/7 news.

The C-SPAN Video Library also provides material for scholars to explore questions that have simply befuddled contemporary pundits, notably, why would a variety of African Americans mobilize for Donald Trump, a candidate known for cultivating support among White nationalists in a party that has long valued White supporters over Black constituents with its policies and rhetoric? By analyzing a “small but outspoken group of African Americans who once backed, or currently endorse the president and his policies,” Ray Block Jr. and Christina S. Haynes have excavated speeches, interviews, and oral histories of individuals who identified as part of #Blacks4Trump. A range of scholarship has shown that for White voters, race was a motivating factor in their decision to vote for Donald Trump. This builds on a strategy that the Republican Party has cultivated since the 1960s as it turned to the South and to the suburbs in an appeal to traditional Democratic voters who had become disgruntled that the party had endorsed and fought for the civil rights agenda (Crespino, 2012; Kruse, 2005; Lassiter, 2006). Racial concerns have made African Americans, notably women, very loyal to the Democratic Party for the same reasons. And yet, a small, but consistent, demographic of Black voters have cast ballots for the GOP, professing a belief in conservative ideology or support for the GOP economic platform (Wright Rigueur, 2015). Block and Haynes examine C-SPAN footage to explore these voting decisions and how they played out in the contentious 2016 election. With their research, they outline how Black Trump supporters fall into four different categories: “entrepreneurial, doctrinaire, iconoclastic, and complicated.”

This research pierces a variety of holes into dominant assumptions about partisanship and identity politics. As Block and Haynes argue, the political orientation and racial motivators of their subjects “show the fragility of the presumably strong bond between Black Americans and the Democratic Party.” Party operatives on both sides should take note, recognizing that voter loyalty can change and outreach strategies do make a difference. By making sense of seemingly unexplainable moments, like Kayne West’s 2018 controversial visit to the Oval Office, this research advances a better understanding of the connections between race and party politics that forces a more complicated understanding of voting behavior today.

Nuance is overwhelmingly missing from political narratives today, and this has contributed to a more polarizing discussion of current affairs as simply a liberal versus conservative debate (Hemmer, 2016; Kruse & Zelizer, 2019.) But while this makes for accessible and highly rated television, it obscures other political realities (Cebul, Geismer, & Williams, 2019). To truly combat political polarization, a deeper understanding of the complexity and even the overlooked consensus behind divisive issues is needed, and the C-SPAN Video Library is a useful place for scholars to begin. Over 40 years ago, Al Gore saw C-SPAN as a solution to public cynicism and distrust in government. Television itself did not solve the grave problems facing society then, and in fact, the reliance on television shifted attention toward performance and away from actual governance. But C-SPAN captured the process by which this happened, and its archives might just be the solution for understanding and then advancing new solutions, to solve the pressing political challenges of today.

NOTE

1. Rep. Al Gore (D-TN) gives first House televised floor speech televised on C-SPAN. March 19, 1979. https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4600904/rep-al-gore-house-floor-speech-televised-span.

REFERENCES

Brownell, K. C. (2017). “Ideological plugola,” “elitist gossip,” and the need for cable television. In B. Schulman & J. Zelizer (Eds.), Media nation (pp. 160–175). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Brownell, K. C. (2015). Beyond the anecdote: The C-SPAN Archives and uncovering the ritual of presidential debates in the age of cable news. In R. Browning (Ed.), Exploring the C-SPAN Archives: Advancing the research agenda (pp. 1–18). West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

Brownell, K. C. (2014). Beyond the headlines: The C-SPAN Archives, Grassroots ’84, and new directions in American political history. In R. Browning & P. Buzzanell (Eds.), The C-SPAN Archives: An interdisciplinary resource for discovery, learning, and engagement (pp. 45–58). West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

Crespino, J. (2012). Strom Thurmond’s America. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.

Cebul, B., Geismer, L., & Williams, M. (Eds.). (2019). Shaped by the state: Toward a new political history of the twentieth century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gitlin, T. (1980). The whole world is watching: Mass media and the unmaking of the new left. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Greenberg, D. (2009). Torchlight parades for the television age: The presidential debates as political ritual. Daedalus, 138(2), 6–19.

Hemmer, N. (2016). Messengers of the right: Conservative media and the transformation of American politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jamieson, K. H., & Waldman, P. (2003). The press effect: Politicians, journalists, and the stories that shape the political world. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Kruse, K. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: C-SPAN and Historical Research
• Part 2: Using the C-SPAN Video Library to Study Congressional Rhetoric
• Part 3: C-SPAN in Critical Scholarship
• Conclusion
• About the Contributors
• Index