The 2024 v the 1984 Democratic Convention. Familiar but different.

Thoughts on TV News, journalism, and digital media. Issue#10

Welcome to my latest Substack newsletter. I’m a former TV news journalist, turned digital and media executive. In this edition, I’m looking at just one subject - the media issues surrounding last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and comparisons with the ground-breaking 1984 convention.

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Image: Kamala Harris Campaign Photo on X

Democratic Conventions and the Media

For this newsletter, I’m looking back 40 years to the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, and comparing it to this year’s 2024 DNC in Chicago.

I was in San Francisco as a young, twenty-something producer, working for the British TV news organisation ITN. Since then, I have been involved with many other US stories and projects, and often travelled to the country, but I can still clearly remember that convention all those years ago.

The comparisons between how the media covered the 2024 Chicago convention and the 1984 San Francisco convention are interesting. So much about the reporting was similar - filming crowds of banner-waving delegates and selecting the high points of speeches. But so much was different about last week – including the scale of the media presence, and, of course, the role played by social media. As I say in the headline to this post, familiar but different.

US Politics

One aspect is the same. Both in the 1980s and now, 40 years later, the UK has a deep fascination with American politics. There’s definitely a media same-language ‘special relationship’.

Indeed, for as long as I can remember, from when I was a young child growing up in London, American political stories have been high up the UK news agenda – from the dramatic days of Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon and Reagan through to more recent political upheavals.

This interest is particularly strong in election years. Besides anything else, US elections are so picture-rich and story-strong, as the schedule moves from the primaries to the conventions, from the rallies to the TV debates, and then onto election night itself. US elections are packed with colour, clamour, and dramatic events. For any journalist or newsroom, it’s a story that just keeps on giving.

The 1984 DNC

The Democratic Convention in July 1984 was held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Walter Mondale was nominated for President, and Geraldine Ferraro for Vice President. They were running against the incumbent President, Ronald Reagan.

An underlying theme at the DNC in Chicago in 2024, not one that was pushed overtly in the speeches, was that Kamala Harris is the first woman of colour to run for President and, if elected, would be the first female President. A sense of history in the making.

1984 had a similar atmosphere of change. Geraldine Ferraro was the first woman to run for Vice President in the US. In her acceptance speech, she made the point clearly:

“Change is in the air... By choosing a woman to run for our nation's second-highest office, you send a powerful signal to all Americans. There are no doors we cannot unlock. We will place no limits on achievement. If we can do this, we can do anything.”

When Geraldine Ferraro died in 2011, Hilary Clinton referred back to 1984, saying: “When I think of Geraldine Ferraro, I smile. To the millions of women who saw their futures open up thanks to her, she was a pioneer.”

Another speech of change at the convention in 1984 was by Jesse Jackson. His famous Rainbow Coalition ‘quilt’ speech argued for a more inclusive approach to politics. He said:

“America is not like a blanket - one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt.”

In the short term, the Mondale/Ferraro ticket went on to a crushing defeat against Reagan in that year’s election, but in the longer term, it had a significant impact on American politics.

ITN Producer

My role back in 1984 was as a producer – watching the speeches, selecting soundbites for the reporters, and then overseeing edits of what we called ‘packages’ for the ITN news programmes, such as News at Ten.

I still have four passes from that convention – a Foreign Broadcast Service pass, two ABC News passes (ITN was affiliated to ABC News in those days), and a day pass to get onto the convention floor.

We had an ITN portacabin-stye production office at the convention, packed with what looks like a jumble of small TV sets, typewriters and newspapers. The following two photos show me working with Jon Snow, then an ITN reporter in his mid-30s and five years before his move to present Channel 4 News, and Alastair Burnet, the famous News at Ten presenter, then in his mid-50s.

ITN reporter Jon Snow, in the centre. I’m standing next to him. Left: video editors Fred Hickey and Alan Thompson

The ITN office at the 1984 convention. Front: news anchor Alastair Burnet. Behind: myself, with headphones, and fellow ITN producer, Simon Bucks

Comparisons

So, what was familiar about how the media approached the two conventions?

Besides covering the razzmatazz of the US conventions, with their packed audience of delegates waving placards and slogans, and doing interviews and ‘pieces to camera’ with delegates on the convention floor, the other job of journalists, then and now, was to report on that enduring feature of US party conventions - the keynote speeches.

At last week’s DNC, we had Kamala Harris proclaiming “We are not going back”, Michelle Obama calling on fellow Democrats to “Do something”, and Tim Walz saying it was “time to turn the page” on Donald Trump. All delivered with an emotional punch that would seem over the top in many other countries.

Back in 1984, we had those equally powerful speeches by Geraldine Ferraro and Jesse Jackson. And there were others. It’s largely forgotten now, but Mario Cuomo’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ speech had an enormous impact at the time.

But what about the media differences between 1984 and 2024?

A major one was scale. Incredibly, there were 15,000 media staff in Chicago last week. I don’t have an equivalent figure for San Francisco, but my memory is of far less than that.

Furthermore, as a snapshot of the two media worlds of 1984 and 2024, they are about as different as you can get - the contrast between an age of a limited number of TV channels, typewriters and influential newspapers, to today’s media fragmentation, digital technologies, and all-prevalent social media.

And, of course, we didn’t feel we had to fact-check any of the speeches 40 years ago, and there were fewer personal attacks on political rivals. It was a different era of political discourse.

Content Creators and Gen Z

Deja Foxx on TikTok at the 2024 DNC

The most significant media difference between the two conventions, though, was the invitation for 200 content creators to attend the convention. The social media influencers, with large followings on TikTok and Instagram, were given accreditation to the convention arena, access to political interviewees, and a special lounge in the convention centre.

Their posts and uploads were less about political influence and more about getting younger voters to get involved and, crucially, for the Democrats, to turn out to vote.

In this election, it is reported that around 40 million members of Gen Z (ages 18-27) will be eligible to vote in the US, including just over 8 million who will have become old enough to vote since the 2022 mid-term elections. So, the Democrats are, quite rightly, trying to get through to this important demographic.

As someone steeped in legacy media habits, it was interesting to watch the output of some of these influencers, and press photographers had a field day taking pictures of young content creators walking around the crowded convention arena, talking animatedly to their phone cameras.

But it was also instructive listening to the influencers explaining their role during interviews with, well, legacy media outlets. It was in old-fashioned TV interviews, but what they said had an up-to-date message.

In an interview with CNN, Jeremy Jacobowitz (a food influencer with 825,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok) said:

“The audience that I’m reaching, this is what they watch. They don’t have cable. They don’t watch the news. They don’t even read the news. They don’t trust news organisations. They’ll trust us more than mainstream media.”

The CNN reporter David Rind then asked another content creator, the activist Malynda Hale, whether she felt she was being used by the Democratic party to get their message across. She replied:

“I think we’re the direct line to the demographic they are trying to reach… If my content will get more people to vote, get people to be involved in the issues and care more, then use me!”

In a Sky News report by Martha Kelner, a creator said: “People aren’t on legacy news. They’re just not. People are on TikTok. There is no universal sameness anymore.”

And 24-year-old influencer Deja Foxx told Martha that this approach was about “winning the narrative battle”. She went on:

“The content creators, like the ones you see here, have the opportunity to shape a generation’s political understanding.”

In summary

In purely political and event-staging terms, Chicago, in 2024, was, in general, the same kind of convention that I witnessed as a young journalist 40 years ago. Crowds, banners, speeches, even the protests in the streets outside. The massive digital monitors added scale and pazazz to the gathering. But the core elements felt similar.

But what was vastly different in 2024 was the size and breadth of the media presence, the more critical style of speeches, and the role social media played, both in covering the event and with the presence of those TikTok influencers.

With digital media changing at an exponential rate, it’s interesting to think what the Democratic National Convention will be like in another 40 years. DNC 2064!

Of course, some of Gen Z will be reaching retirement age by then!

For many, the year 1984 has, of course, Orwellian connections, but the integrated presence of that vanguard of 200 content creators at the convention in 2024 felt more like Aldous Huxley. It very much spoke of a brave new media world.

1984 to 2024 has been one heck of a media journey. We all need to brace ourselves for what will happen in the media world in the next 40 years.

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