Learning To Love The Microphone

Episodes

EpisodeFirst
Broadcast
RepeatedComments
012009061720100613 (R4)How politicians adapt to using new media is highly relevant today, as the internet, social networking and 24-hour TV news transform the political landscape. Yet it was equally relevant in the 1920s and 1930s, when politicians grappled with the new media of radio and newsreels. What lessons can our generation learn from theirs?

Anne examines how two Prime Ministers - Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain - gradually mastered the new media of their day. She reveals how the first spin doctor used his wartime experience spying on the Germans to attack Labour and carefully craft the Conservative leaders' images to appeal to a new mass electorate. She also explains why the other parties were so slow by comparison.

How politicians at the dawn of mass democracy learned to use radio and newsreels.

022009062420100620 (R4)As mass democracy and new mass media were born in the 1920s, the first spin doctors were on hand to help politicians use them. Anne Perkins asks what today's politicians could learn about using new media.

Anne Perkins asks what today's politicians could learn from the spin doctors of the 1920s.