Unseeing Eye, the

In 1976, Syracuse political scientists Thomas Patterson and Robert D. McClure published The Unseeing Eye: The Myth of Television Power in National Elections, detailing the controversial and groundbreaking results of one of the first rigorous and systematic studies of television's impacts on the outcomes of an election. This National Science Foundation funded analysis employed a four-wave panel study with interviews of over 600 subjects, as well as content analysis of news and political ads aired by both major parties in the 1972 presidential campaign.

The authors contend that their findings negate the conventional wisdom that political commercials are devoid of political issue information, whereas broadcast news coverage provides a panacea of campaign issue coverage. Conversely, Patterson and McClure reported that political ads actually taught viewers more information about candidates and political parties and their stances than did televised news coverage. Ads, they hypothesized, impart issue knowledge well due to their simple messages and heavy use of repetition. Campaigns' assumed power to manipulate voters' minds is also refuted by the study's findings.

The authors also discovered that television news was no more informative or persuasive than newspaper coverage of the campaign. With these conclusions, the authors criticized television network news for its failure to inform the public rather than simply cover the “horse race” elements of the campaign, hence laying much of the blame for political malaise on television news coverage of campaigns. One of the most telling statistics reported is that the script of a full 30-minute news broadcast could fit on a single newspaper page.

This text is a part of the third generation of mass communication study, the first being that scholarship which attempted to find powerful effects in the media; and the second, after failing to find powerful effects, assuming the media's effects to be minimal. The book marks a return to the belief that the media can impact viewers, tempered with the knowledge that the media's effects are variable-dependent and generally gradual and incremental rather than party-changing, election-winning entities.

The Unseeing Eye was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion. Media scholars and practitioners alike acclaim the significance of Patterson and McClure's contribution to the landscape of political scholarship. Warren Weaver, Jr., then a New York Times reporter, in the book's foreword, predicted that the book would be an eye-opener for broadcasters, political party strategists, and political scientists. Even the book's critics, despite warning readers of possible overstated conclusions, acclaimed the book as a watershed event for the study of political communication.