The medium is the message

On the night of September 26, 1960, Richard Nixon walked into a Chicago television studio and lost the presidency.

The polls had him five points up. He had spent the morning on the campaign trail, the afternoon in pain from a knee infection that had landed him in hospital two weeks earlier, and the early evening refusing makeup. He showed up pale, twenty pounds underweight, sweating under the studio lights, eyes drifting toward a clock the home audience couldn’t see. John Kennedy had spent the weekend in a hotel, fielding practice questions, resting up, getting tan. When the cameras cut on at 8:30 p.m. Central time, 70 million Americans saw two men. One looked like a candidate. The other looked like a corpse with a five-o’clock shadow.

Then something stranger happened. A market-research firm called Sindlinger & Company polled the audience after the broadcast. Television viewers gave Kennedy the win, 28 percent to 19. Radio listeners gave Nixon the win, 43 percent to 20. The candidates had said the same words at the same time, and the medium had handed the verdict to whoever happened to look better in a grey suit.

Nixon’s running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, watched on television and reportedly said: “That son of a bitch just lost us the election.” Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s running mate, listened on the radio and thought his own man had lost.

Both were right, about different debates.

The wrapping paper

Give a one-year-old a present and watch what happens. The wrapping comes off in two seconds. Then the child sits on the floor for the next hour, ignoring the toy, playing with the box.

The toy is the content. The box is the medium. The child has noticed, without being told, that the wrapper is often more interesting than the gift inside.

The man who lost his medium

In 1964, a Canadian English professor named Marshall McLuhan published a book that said the same thing the child knew. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man opened with a chapter titled in ten words: The medium is the message. The wrapping shapes us more than what’s inside it. Watch which one we reach for.

McLuhan had a darker version of the same idea. The content of a medium, he wrote, is the juicy piece of steak the burglar throws to the watchdog of the mind. While the dog is busy with the meat, the burglar climbs through the window and steals the jewelry. The dog is delighted. The dog is also why the burglar got in.

The claim is contested, and worth contesting. Plenty of messages travel unchanged across media. A recipe for bread is the same recipe whether you read it on parchment or in an iPad app. The Pythagorean theorem doesn’t care about its delivery vehicle. McLuhan was making a stronger claim, that the medium reshapes the audience even when the content is held constant, and that claim deserves the standard test: hold the words identical, change only the form, see what happens.

Run the test on Nixon and Kennedy. In 2003, the political scientist James Druckman did. He took 210 students at the University of Minnesota, none with prior knowledge of the 1960 debates, played half the radio audio and showed half the television footage, and surveyed both groups. Same words. Same delivery. The TV group rated Kennedy the winner significantly more often than the radio group did. The variable was the wrapping paper.

Marshall McLuhan spent fifteen years living inside the medium he had described: talk shows, lecture halls, Newsweek and Playboy covers, Lennon and Ono dropping by his Toronto office unannounced. Then in September 1979 a stroke took his speech. The man who taught the world that tools shape their users had lost the one that made him.

Wittenberg

The same experiment had run on a much larger scale, four centuries earlier.

Johannes Gutenberg printed his first Bible around 1455. Within fifty years, over 1,000 presses had produced more books than every European scribe had hand-copied in the previous thousand years combined. The Bible was the same Bible. The medium had moved it from the priest’s mouth to the reader’s hand.

Manuscript culture was spoken. A priest read Latin aloud, a congregation listened, the meaning passed through an authorized translator with the keys to the building. Print culture was silent. You sat alone with a book, in your own language, at your own pace. You could go back. You could compare two passages. You could form your own opinion. You could disagree with it, in private, with no one watching.

That last sentence is the entire Reformation.

When Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church on October 31, 1517, the content was not new. John Wycliffe had made similar arguments in England in the 1380s. Jan Hus had made them in Bohemia in the 1410s. Both were declared heretics. Hus was burned at the stake in 1415. Their message died with them, because their medium was the spoken sermon and the hand-copied tract, and both were small enough for the Church to find and silence.

Luther had a press. Within two weeks the Theses had been printed without his permission and distributed across Germany. Within a month, across Europe. Between 1517 and 1525 he published over half a million works, becoming the first bestselling author of the early modern period.

He did not have a better argument than Hus.

He had a different medium.

The Thirty Years’ War followed. By 1648 a third of the German-speaking population was dead. Print didn’t cause that war. Print made it possible at the speed and scale at which it occurred, by giving every reader a private space to grow more certain.

The 8th great power

Three centuries later, the radio did the same job in reverse.

Antisemitism was not new in August 1933 when Joseph Goebbels opened the 10th International Radio Show in Berlin with a speech titled “Radio as the Eighth Great Power.” It had been on European streets for a thousand years, in pamphlets, in sermons, in folk songs. What was new was the Volksempfänger, the People’s Receiver, a three-tube set Goebbels commissioned from an engineer named Otto Griessing, subsidized to 76 Reichsmarks, half the price of any other radio on the market. By 1941, two-thirds of German households owned one. Hitler’s voice could now enter a kitchen in Bavaria without passing through a single intermediary. No priest. No editor. No schoolteacher. No town council.

The same decade in Detroit, Father Charles Coughlin reached 30 million weekly American listeners on the radio, drifting from New Deal supporter to open antisemite over seven years, reading from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the air. CBS dropped him. He kept going on his own network. The same medium that built Roosevelt’s fireside chat built the platform for Coughlin’s poison.

Sixty years later, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines went on the air in Kigali in July 1993, mixing Hutu nationalism with Zairean rumba and call-in shows. After President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on April 6, 1994, RTLM started reading out names and addresses of Tutsi families and calling for “work,” the station’s code word for killing. The genocide ran 100 days. 800,000 died. Roméo Dallaire, the UN commander on the ground, asked Western governments to jam the broadcasts. The Pentagon refused on free-speech grounds. “We could have saved thousands of lives by silencing one radio,” Dallaire said later.

The hatreds were old. The voice in the kitchen was new.

The For You Page

The internet was supposed to fix all of this. Distributed, decentralized, peer-to-peer. Anyone could publish; anyone could read; the marketplace of ideas would do its sorting. For about a decade, that’s roughly what happened. People built blogs and forums and free encyclopedias of obscure music. The wrapping was finally just paper.

Then the algorithm arrived, and almost nobody noticed.

In 2021, a study by Steve Rathje and colleagues in PNAS analyzed 2.7 million posts from US politicians and news media on Facebook and Twitter between 2016 and 2020. The biggest predictor of engagement, by likes and shares and comments, was negative emotion directed at the political out-group. Each additional out-group word in a post increased shares by 67 percent. Posts about your own side did almost nothing.

The platforms had not been programmed to favor anger. They had been programmed to favor engagement, and the human nervous system engages most reliably with anger. When Facebook tested an internal change to down-rank posts that internal raters labeled “bad for the world,” engagement decreased and the change was scrapped. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, testified to the US Senate in October 2021 that the company’s own research had found the same pattern, and the company had chosen to suppress it.

The content remained what humans have always argued about: politics, identity, religion, taste. The medium added no new topics. What it did was filter for the most arousing version of each topic and put that version at the top of the feed.

Anger became the message because anger was what the medium could see.

The rear-view mirror

The first printed books in the 1450s and ’60s were designed to look exactly like manuscripts. The fonts mimicked scribal handwriting. The pages were laid out the same way. Some were even rubricated by hand after printing, so monks would feel at home with them. Print’s first job was to pretend it wasn’t print.

Cars were called horseless carriages for thirty years. Radio was wireless telegraphy. Films were photographed plays. Television was radio with pictures. Email was a faster letter, and the inbox is still called an inbox. We are calling AI “artificial intelligence” because intelligence is the previous category we have available, and we will be calling it something more accurate fifty years from now, by which point it will have been replaced by whatever comes after it.

McLuhan called this the rear-view mirror. “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror,” he wrote. “We march backwards into the future.” We don’t see a new medium for what it is until we have a newer one to compare it against. By then it has already done its work.

This is the part of his argument that is hardest to escape. To see a medium clearly you would need to step outside it, and there is no outside; the eyes you would step out with were trained by the medium you are trying to see.

McLuhan saw this in 1964. It hasn’t slowed any of it down.

The patron saint

Marshall McLuhan never recovered his speech. He could listen and read, but he could not respond. His son Eric stayed with him through the last year. He died in his sleep on December 31, 1980, in Toronto.

Within a decade the world had moved on, and the global-village idea had been taken over by techno-utopians who didn’t always know who McLuhan was or what he’d been saying. Then, in 1993, Wired magazine launched and named him its “patron saint” on the masthead. The new medium pulled him back, repackaged him, and made him useful again.

The pattern is what he predicted, applied to him. Print made him, television amplified him, but cable forgot him. Then the web revived him, and social media has now distilled him into a graphic quote in a serif font:

“The medium is the message.”

Nixon learned the lesson, late. He won the presidency in 1968 by mastering the same television that had defeated him eight years earlier, and then in 1974 he resigned because of an audio recording, an older medium catching him from behind.

We march backwards into the future, holding a phone in one hand and sharing a quote with the other, engaged by the box.

The information is not the message.

The box always was.

The burglar has already left.

You just haven’t noticed or do not care.

Resources

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill, 1964. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media Relevance: The foundational text. The watchdog-and-meat metaphor, the medium-is-the-message thesis, the rear-view mirror are all here. Used for: The wrapping paper section, the rear-view mirror section, throughout.
Wikipedia, “The medium is the message.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message Relevance: Source for the burglar-and-watchdog metaphor as McLuhan articulated it. Used for: The wrapping paper section.
Wikipedia, “Marshall McLuhan.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan Relevance: Biographical anchor and the Wired “patron saint” detail. Used for: The patron saint section.
James N. Druckman, “The Power of Television Images: The First Kennedy-Nixon Debate Revisited,” Journal of Politics 65 (May 2003): 559–571. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3449832 Relevance: The controlled experiment that isolates the medium effect from confounders. Used for: The wrapping paper section.
Wikipedia, “1960 United States presidential election.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_presidential_election Relevance: September 26, 1960 debate specifics: the 70 million viewer figure, the Sindlinger poll, Nixon’s appearance. Used for: The opening.
National Constitution Center, “How the Kennedy-Nixon debate changed the world of politics.” https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-debate-that-changed-the-world-of-politics Relevance: The Lodge and Johnson reactions to the debate, the cleanest illustration of the medium splitting the verdict. Used for: The opening.
Steve Rathje, Jay J. Van Bavel, Sander van der Linden, “Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media,” PNAS, 2021. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8256037/ Relevance: The 67 percent figure, the 2.7-million-post analysis, the “bad for the world” Facebook test. Used for: The For You Page section.
Wikipedia, “Volksempfänger.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger Relevance: Goebbels’s August 18, 1933 speech, Otto Griessing’s design, the 76 Reichsmarks subsidy. Used for: The eighth great power section.
IEEE Spectrum, “Inside the Third Reich’s Radio.” https://spectrum.ieee.org/inside-the-third-reichs-radio Relevance: Engineering and political detail on the Volksempfänger and the two-thirds household figure. Used for: The eighth great power section.
Wikipedia, “Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Libre_des_Mille_Collines Relevance: RTLM’s role in the 1994 genocide, “work” as a code word, the post-April 6 broadcasts. Used for: The eighth great power section.
Explaining History, “Hate on the Airwaves: The Role of RTLM Radio in Inciting a Genocide.” https://explaininghistory.org/2025/10/31/hate-on-the-airwaves-the-role-of-rtlm-radio-in-inciting-a-genocide/ Relevance: Roméo Dallaire’s quote about silencing one radio. Used for: The eighth great power section.
World History Encyclopedia, “The Printing Press & the Protestant Reformation.” https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2039/the-printing-press–the-protestant-reformation/ Relevance: The half-million-works figure and the speed of the Theses’ diffusion across Europe. Used for: The Wittenberg section.
Wikipedia, “Reformation.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation Relevance: The October 31, 1517 date and Luther’s posting of the Ninety-five Theses. Used for: The Wittenberg section.
Wikipedia, “Father Coughlin.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Coughlin Relevance: The 30 million weekly listeners, the CBS drop, the Protocols readings on air. Used for: The eighth great power section.
Marshall McLuhan biographical site. https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/biography/ Relevance: Source for the Lennon and Ono visit to McLuhan’s Toronto office. Used for: The wrapping paper section.
Senate Commerce Committee, “Frances Haugen testimony, October 2021.” https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2021/10/protecting-kids-online-testimony-from-a-facebook-whistleblower Relevance: The whistleblower’s claims about Facebook’s internal research being suppressed. Used for: The For You Page section.
Andrew Prescott / Medium, “Avoiding the Rear View Mirror.” https://medium.com/digital-transformations-talks-and-presentations/avoiding-the-rear-view-mirror-870319290bb2 Relevance: Clean explanation of McLuhan’s “rear-view mirror” concept and the supporting quote. Used for: The rear-view mirror section.
The Famous People, Marshall McLuhan biography. https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/marshall-mcluhan-8242.php Relevance: The September 1979 stroke that took his speech and the December 31, 1980 death. Used for: The wrapping paper section and the patron saint section.
Wikipedia, “Rwandan genocide.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide Relevance: Confirms the 800,000 figure and the 100-day duration. Used for: The eighth great power section.
Wikipedia, “Thirty Years’ War.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War Relevance: The “third of the German-speaking population” mortality figure. Used for: The Wittenberg section.