On the night of Tuesday, November 4, 1952, Americans across the nation gathered around their television sets to follow the results of the presidential race between Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson. That year, a television could be found in roughly one-third of U.S. households—compared with less than 1 percent in 1948—and politicians were just beginning to experiment with TV as a communication tool.
Many Americans were experiencing election night as they never had before. News networks would be announcing the next president live on TV. Adding to the anticipation: NBC and CBS planned to use new computer forecasting technologies to predict the results based on early returns.
“It was the first real national television campaign with TV ads and then election night coverage,” says Richard Craig, professor of journalism and mass communication at San José State University and author of Polls, Expectations and Elections: TV News Making in U.S. Presidential Campaigns. “It turned it into much more of a televised event.”
TV’s Entry Into Presidential Politics
By the 1950s, in an era of rapid technological innovation following World War II, TVs were rapidly making their way into American households. Ninety percent of households would own one by 1960.
When TV news networks broadcasted election returns in 1948, they reached a much smaller audience than in the years to follow. A lot went wrong for the media that election night, says Ira Chinoy, author of Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting and associate professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
First, TV news organizations’ were criticized for their lackluster presentation of the election returns. Reporters essentially recited the latest vote counts and hand-wrote them on chalkboards. Plus, Chinoy says, many journalists went into 1948 election night expecting that Republican Thomas Dewey would defeat Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman as the pollsters predicted, in what became an embarrassing moment for the news stations. (This was also an issue in print journalism, leading to the infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline published on the front page of the Chicago Tribune.)
“On election night 1952, this was a bit of a crisis for TV news that needed to better show it could live up to its promise as a visual medium instead of a medium where people are just reading things out,” Chinoy says. “And it also needed a way to come back from this sort of error of interpretation on election night 1948.”