How Television Transformed American Political Discourse
Can reasoned public debate survive in a media age driven by ego and viewer ratings?
In BEST OF ENEMIES, How Television Transformed American Political Discourse, the 1968 U.S. presidential election becomes the backdrop for a televised showdown that still feels uncannily current. Through the on-air clashes between conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. and liberal author Gore Vidal, the film traces How Television Changed Politics by turning intellectual sparring into mass entertainment, where personality, performance, and ratings can matter as much as ideas. What begins as a high-minded attempt to bring sharp minds to a national audience steadily reveals how quickly “debate” can become spectacle.
Built from archival footage and shaped by commentary from observers and participants, the documentary reconstructs a late-1960s America riven by cultural anxiety and ideological combat. Buckley and Vidal are not merely representatives of right and left; their rivalry is personal, and the camera catches how easily political identity bleeds into ego, resentment, and provocation. As the debates progress, tensions escalate and the tone hardens, culminating in a moment when Buckley visibly loses his composure after personal insults push the exchange past the bounds of civility. The film treats that rupture as more than a scandalous highlight: it’s a pivot point that hints at a broader shift in American public discourse.
Without offering a tidy reconciliation, the story leaves viewers with an unsettled question about whether reasoned argument can survive when television rewards conflict and charisma. By revisiting this televised duel, the film makes a case that How Television Changed Politics not only by expanding the audience for political talk, but by reshaping what counts as persuasive, memorable, and “watchable” in the first place. Watch to see how two brilliant antagonists helped redefine the rules of political media—and what their legacy suggests about the debates we live with now.
In 1968, the United States was shaken by the Vietnam War, civil rights unrest, urban riots, and political assassinations as trust in institutions frayed. Television became the dominant national arena, and networks chased ratings by turning convention politics and cultural conflict into mass spectacle.
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This film’s dominant mode is expository. It uses archival debate footage shaped by interviews and commentary to frame what matters and why. That guided approach underscores the film’s view that television rewards confrontation, making ego and ratings central to political talk and weakening reasoned public debate.
Director & Year: Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, released in 2015.
ABC Ratings Strategy: In summer 1968 ABC News—then trailing in network news ratings—hired William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal as on-air commentators to add ideological conflict to its national-convention coverage.
William F. Buckley Jr founded the magazine National Review in 1955, which became a major platform for modern U.S. conservatism. He later hosted the public-affairs TV show Firing Line from 1966 to 1999.
Gore Vidal was not only an American novelist, he was also a high-profile political essayist and media commentator—the kind of figure Americans recognized as a provocative “ideas person” on TV. His novel The City and the Pillar (1948) is famous for its controversy and lasting significance in LGBTQ+ literary history.
Chicago protest violence becomes televised theater: Police confrontations with antiwar protesters during the convention were broadcast nationally—turning politics into a visual drama that shaped public perception in real time.
A three-way presidential race: The 1968 election wasn’t just Nixon vs. Humphrey—George Wallace’s third-party run made it a deeply polarized, multi-front contest. Nixon won.
Vietnam dominates U.S. politics: The Tet Offensive began in late January 1968, with widespread attacks that were intensely covered on television and helped deepen the sense that the war—and leadership—was spiraling.
Political assasinations shaped emotional temperature in 1968: Before the TV-debates in August, the country had already been shaken by Martin Luther King’s death (April 4, 1968) and soon after by Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June)
“Law and order” becomes a defining campaign theme: Nixon and Wallace both leaned hard into “law and order” rhetoric, reflecting (and amplifying) public anxiety about unrest—exactly the kind of conflict TV could package as spectacle1Presidency.ucsb.edu | Nixon’s address accepting the 1968 Presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida.
Infamous On-Air Clash, During ABC’s Chicago coverage on August 28, 1968, Vidal labeled Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” prompting Buckley to angrily threaten violence—cementing the moment as a landmark in televised political conflict.
Topical context
This film is part of the World Map of Conflict dataset—an interactive documentary collection that combines curated films with conflict data and country context to explain geopolitical developments since 1945.
Within the collection, the film sits in the Tradition and Religion educational pathway, which examines tensions that arise when globalist forces collide with currents of traditionalism.
The Rise of Populism in the United States, which is the film’s overarching topic, links media-fueled cultural grievance to tradition-versus-modernity battles, clarifying how outrage politics realigns authority and community.
The film traces how televised Buckley–Vidal clashes turned tradition-versus-counterculture conflict into spectacle, helping drive the Rise of Populism in the United States within the pathway’s Battle Over Modernity.
Learning Throughlines
From sober news to televised theater.
In 1968, ABC replaced conventional gavel-to-gavel convention reporting with a nightly debate segment pitting William F. Buckley Jr. against Gore Vidal, trading measured analysis for personal combat between two men who despised each other. By the final broadcast, the shift was named out loud: the exchange had stopped being journalism and become performance. 'You are doing theater when you should be doing debate' — the format named its own drift
Outrage as a ratings strategy.
ABC was the perennial third-place network with, as one voice in the film puts it, “less money to spend” on full convention coverage — so it gambled on unscripted verbal combat instead of expensive gavel-to-gavel reporting. The gamble paid off so decisively that the industry itself changed permanently: no network ever again attempted the kind of exhaustive, sober coverage ABC had abandoned. 'No network ever again did wall-to-wall coverage' — the Buckley-Vidal ratings coup rewired convention TV
A precedent that outlived its moment.
The film closes by reaching past 1968 to name what the format left behind: a public that, in one interviewee’s words, has lost “the ability to talk the same language” and increasingly lives inside its own world rather than a shared one. That fracture — first modeled on air by two men who treated debate as combat — is the throughline connecting a single 1968 broadcast to decades of politics built on the same us-versus-them logic. 'The ability to talk the same language is gone' — the film's closing diagnosis of a fractured public
Media authority undermined from within.
Near the end, the film asks point-blank whether television runs America, and answers with an admission: an “implicit conflict of interest between that which is highly viewable and that which is highly illuminating.” Once televised conflict became more valuable to broadcasters than televised consensus, the medium’s own claim to informing the public began to erode — opening space for voices that framed themselves as outsiders challenging a discredited establishment. 'Does television run America?' — the film's own reckoning with viewability vs. illumination
Related topics
Documentary Mode
This film’s dominant mode is expository. It uses archival debate footage shaped by interviews and commentary to frame what matters and why. That guided approach underscores the film’s view that television rewards confrontation, making ego and ratings central to political talk and weakening reasoned public debate.
Key Facts
Director & Year: Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, released in 2015.
ABC Ratings Strategy: In summer 1968 ABC News—then trailing in network news ratings—hired William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal as on-air commentators to add ideological conflict to its national-convention coverage.
William F. Buckley Jr founded the magazine National Review in 1955, which became a major platform for modern U.S. conservatism. He later hosted the public-affairs TV show Firing Line from 1966 to 1999.
Gore Vidal was not only an American novelist, he was also a high-profile political essayist and media commentator—the kind of figure Americans recognized as a provocative “ideas person” on TV. His novel The City and the Pillar (1948) is famous for its controversy and lasting significance in LGBTQ+ literary history.
Chicago protest violence becomes televised theater: Police confrontations with antiwar protesters during the convention were broadcast nationally—turning politics into a visual drama that shaped public perception in real time.
A three-way presidential race: The 1968 election wasn’t just Nixon vs. Humphrey—George Wallace’s third-party run made it a deeply polarized, multi-front contest. Nixon won.
Vietnam dominates U.S. politics: The Tet Offensive began in late January 1968, with widespread attacks that were intensely covered on television and helped deepen the sense that the war—and leadership—was spiraling.
Political assasinations shaped emotional temperature in 1968: Before the TV-debates in August, the country had already been shaken by Martin Luther King’s death (April 4, 1968) and soon after by Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June)
“Law and order” becomes a defining campaign theme: Nixon and Wallace both leaned hard into “law and order” rhetoric, reflecting (and amplifying) public anxiety about unrest—exactly the kind of conflict TV could package as spectacle1Presidency.ucsb.edu | Nixon’s address accepting the 1968 Presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida.
Infamous On-Air Clash, During ABC’s Chicago coverage on August 28, 1968, Vidal labeled Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” prompting Buckley to angrily threaten violence—cementing the moment as a landmark in televised political conflict.