Americans witnessed an unprecedented event 50 years ago: live television coverage on all three national networks of a speech by the vice president of the United States.Speeches by vice presidents never received such attention. But the address on Nov. 13, 1969, by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew to the Midwest Regional Republican Committee Meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, blandly titled “The Responsibilities of Television,” set off a public uproar.
Almost overnight, it made Agnew one of the most significant conservative political leaders in the country.
‘Querulous criticism’
Agnew argued that the television network news programs, and the “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men” who produced them, had acquired “a profound influence over public opinion,” with few checks on their “vast power.”
He then attacked their treatment of President Richard Nixon’s recent speech on the Vietnam War, known now as the “Silent Majority” speech.
According to Agnew, after the president finished the “most important address of his administration,” a “small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts” subjected it to instant and “querulous criticism,” demonstrating their outright hostility to the president’s policy.
In Agnew’s view, their opposition was at odds with how the majority of Americans viewed the speech.
Although he said he was not calling for any censorship, Agnew posed the question of whether it was “time that the networks were made more responsive to the views of the nation and more responsible to the people they serve.”
Suspicious of the media
In many respects, Agnew was Donald Trump before Donald Trump. He was a polarizing political figure, beloved by conservatives, hated and mocked by liberals, yet favored as the likely Republican nominee to succeed Richard Nixon.
In his attacks on television news, Agnew struck a chord with conservatives who had long regarded the media with suspicion. Nixon later called Agnew’s speech a “turning point” in his presidency. He described how “within a few hours telegrams began arriving at the White House; the switchboards were tied up all night by people calling to express their relief that someone had finally spoken up.”
The networks themselves calculated that the messages they were receiving were running almost five to one in support of Agnew.
Why did Agnew speak out when he did?
The immediate background to the speech involves the intersection of two developments, both connected to the long, bloody war in Vietnam that appeared to have no end.
The first was the rise of adversarial journalism during the Vietnam War. Before Vietnam most news coverage “tended to be bland and deferential to government.” The government’s lies and false optimism about the war, revealed most dramatically after the losses of the Tet Offensive, fundamentally changed the relationship.
Vietnam, as the historian of journalism Matthew Pressman argues, “established a baseline level of antagonism between the press and the government.”