media, crisis and the performance of politics
Today’s political and media landscape might seem unprecedented, but reflecting on the intersection of politics, media and entertainment over the past several decades is a worthy investigation. Our current state, now pushed to extremes, can be reverse-engineered.
The merger of politics, media and entertainment evolved hand-in-hand (in-hand) with the rise of media technologies as well as specific crises that defined each era. Political legitimacy, once grounded in governance and institutional authority, now positions around spectacle, perception and media performance.
Throughout the 20th century, as crises grew more visible and media technology became more immersive and pervasive, a new form of political sovereignty emerged based on attention. From President Kennedy’s televised funeral to livestreamed “No Kings” protests, each moment of disruption revealed a deeper entanglement between media and the performance of power. This is not incidental. Crises have always shaped politics, of course. But in the media age, they also reshape society itself.
The Hindenburg Disaster and the Birth of Spectacular Media
On May 6, 1937, the German airship Hindenburg burst into flames while attempting to dock in New Jersey. What might have remained a local transportation accident became one of the first modern media spectacles. The disaster was captured on film, photographed from multiple angles, and broadcast live over radio, most memorably through Herbert Morrison’s anguished audio: “Oh, the humanity!”
This event marked a watershed moment. For the first time, the tools of synchronized media: film, photography, and radio, converged to create a real-time, emotionally resonant experience of catastrophe. The impact of the Hindenburg disaster was felt, across time zones and borders. The intensity of the visuals, paired with the immediacy of radio, brought a new venue of public emotion: shock, awe, and empathy, mediated on a mass scale.
The Hindenburg disaster revealed that the media was no longer just a channel for information or news dissemination. It was a mechanism for collective feeling. It became the model for how future crises would be shaped not simply by what happened, but by how they were captured, framed, and circulated. In the Hindenburg, we see the emergent model of what would later become the dominant logic of televised war, live-streamed violence, and memeified tragedy.
Before Television: Voice, Authority, and the Surrender Broadcast
Not long before the TV age, a media-crisis convergence marked a profound shift in political subjectivity: the radio broadcast of Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II. On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito’s voice was transmitted across the nation. It was the first time anyone, and specifically most Japanese citizens, had ever heard the Emperor speak.
Until that moment, the Emperor’s role was divine, remote, and symbolic. He was seen only in images, his words mediated by imperial decree. But through radio, he was made perceptible and, to a degree, tangible. His voice, measured and barely audible, signaled both the end of the war and the collapse of the political order that had defined imperial Japan. The technology of radio made the sovereign suddenly human, fallible, and present.
This broadcast was not just a historical footnote. It foreshadowed a pattern that would repeat in later media eras in which a crisis forced authority to speak directly, mediated technologically, reshaping public experience. If Hirohito’s voice dissolved the mystical distance of empire, then President Kennedy’s image, nearly 2 decades later, and his televised death, rendered leadership as performance, presence, and visibility. Both moments mark turning points in the transformation of political legitimacy from a sacred and tragic abstraction to a media construct.
Kennedy and Live (Death) TV
John F. Kennedy's presidency represents the first true convergence of political authority and visual media. His 1960 debate with Richard Nixon, viewed by 70 million Americans, demonstrated how television could determine political perception. On radio, Nixon sounded more confident; on television, Kennedy looked composed and photogenic. Television privileged presence, tone, and visual legibility over argument. It rewarded the image of leadership. Marshall McLuhan famously refers to this event through his assertion of hot (radio) and cool (TV) media and their related effects.
Kennedy's assassination in 1963 marked the first American national trauma mediated in real time by television through live breaking news of his death. At the same time, the Zapruder film, specifically the infamous frame 313, captured Kennedy’s death in explicit, graphic detail. Kennedy’s death, experienced both through live TV as well as through static media had lasting effects. Live crisis and disaster media would frame the most impactful experiences of the TV era, while the Zapruder film ushered in the horror genre and fetishizaion of gore.
Kennedy’s live funeral transformed mourning into a collective, screen-based experience. It was a moment of public intimacy through broadcast media. The TV screen did not merely report history as the news, it became the arena in which history unfolded.
Vietnam and the Rise of Mediated Dissonance
The Vietnam War further deepened the role of media in shaping political consciousness. It was the first war to be televised directly into people’s homes. Unlike previous conflicts, Vietnam could not be framed solely through government-controlled messaging or propaganda. The visual record: bodies, burning villages, graphic execution footage, spoke more loudly than any official press conference ever could. The “credibility gap” emerged as citizens began to distrust the divergence between what they were told and what they saw.
Media no longer supported state narratives and had the completely opposite effect as it began to fracture them. Television news crews moved faster than military censors. Public sentiment turned not just because of what was happening, but because of how it was shown. Political legitimacy began to depend on managing optics, not outcomes.
Gulf War and the Invention of 24-Hour Spectacle
The Gulf War marked the convergence of the 24-hour news cycle and the televisual war-as-event. CNN’s live broadcasts from Baghdad, complete with night-vision footage and commentator panels, introduced a new framework for war: immediate, continuous, and strangely sanitized. The war was abstracted into visuals: missile paths, briefings, and patriotic soundtracks.
This was spectacle with a strategic purpose. Real-time media pressure (the “CNN Effect”) influenced military and political decision-making. Leaders were no longer just strategists, they were on-camera performers such as Norman Schwartzkoff and Colin Powell. Control of the narrative became as critical as control of territory. Warfare was now co-produced by generals, presidents, and network producers.
9/11 and the Era of Permanent Emergency
On September 11, 2001, the collapse of the Twin Towers and impacts from terrorist hijakced airplanes were captured from dozens of angles, replayed endlessly in a loop that functioned both as a memorial and trauma, both on TV and the Internet. In the immediate aftermath, political and emotional life fused into a singular atmosphere of mediated crisis. 9/11 was a media event of unprecedented scale and saturation.
The political and media environment consequences became inseparable. Color-coded terror alerts, embedded journalists, presidential addresses, all operated within a framework of continuous spectacle. Fear was not merely expressed but was engineered. Political life entered a state of permanent emergency, justified not through deliberation but through the emotional legitimacy reinforced by mediated trauma. Through 9/11, unprecedented surveillance also began, through both physical and digital technology.
The Pandemic and the Screen as Social Proxy
The COVID-19 pandemic removed physical public space, creating the screen’s role as a substitute for society.
Work, mourning, protest, and governance all migrated online. Politicians livestreamed press briefings while citizens livestreamed grief, confusion, boredom, and rage. What began as a temporary shift would become permanent. The screen became the public sphere.
This shift created a strange dissonance. Political participation often took the form of posting, sharing, and commenting. Memes became protest signs. Livestreams became forums. Human interaction, once the basis for politics, was replaced by digital engagement. The pandemic did not invent this trend, but it acted like a global, digital accelerator of a process already well underway. In the absence of shared phsyical space, political life became fully entangled with the culture and imperative of content production.
The Political Landscape of Today
Today’s politicians are content creators. Social media has rewritten the rules.
Deepfakes and synthetic media only intensify this... when reality itself is up for grabs, spectacle becomes simulation. We no longer distinguish between political performance and political substance because the system does not require us to. What matters is visibility.
Governance now flows through platforms and perception. We inhabit a system where attention is the raw material of power and legitimacy is measured not in votes or policy but in views, shares, and impressions.
If our choice is to meaningfully resist this condition, we must first recognize that the most powerful political institution of our time is not the state. It is the feed.
