It is a myth that Kennedy won the debate among people who watched it on TV. The polls all agree, whether it was listened to on radio or watched on tv- Nixon won. The problem is- people dont make up their decision based on who won a debate. Kennedy had youth and good looks, which didnt help him win the debate, but it also allowed him to negate that people thought Nixon did better.
Uh, no, it's more complex than that:
"It turns out that aside from a few anecdotal accounts from journalists, only one true survey attempted to gauge reactions to the debate among both radio and television audiences. It involved a few questions asked on a larger omnibus telephone survey conducted by Sindlinger and Company, and the cross-tabulation by audience (television and radio) was published only once, in the November 7, 1960 issue of
Broadcasting (from Kraus, 1996, p. 80):
'Kennedy supporters may be grateful that television was invented before the "Great Debates" took place. The Sindlinger research showed that Mr. Kennedy was routed by Mr. Nixon on radio.
'In answer to the question who won the debates, 48.7% of the radio audience named Mr. Nixon and only 21% picked Mr. Kennedy. Among those who watched the debates on tv, 30.2% named Mr. Kennedy the winner and 28.6% picked Mr. Nixon.
'According to the Sindlinger projections, the total television audience was about 4 - ½ times the radio audience - 270 millions viewers of 5v to 61.4 million listeners to radio.
"That result, however, has a few problems, the most important of which is the relatively small size and unrepresentative nature of the radio audience. It amounted to must 282 responses from Sindlinger's sample of 2138 respondents, but the pollster apparently misplaced the original data, because no information survived regarding the partisanship or vote preference of the radio or television subgroups. That omission is critical because, as Steven Chafee, a professor of communications at the University of California Santa Barbara has observed (2000, p. 334):
"By 1960, those who could listen to debates only on radio were far from a random lot. Situated for the most part in remote rural areas, they were overwhelmingly Protestants and skeptical of Kennedy as a Roman Catholic candidate.
"University of Minnesota Political Scientist James N. Druckman, sums up (p. 563):
'Put another way, relative to television viewers, radio listeners may have been predisposed to favor Nixon over Kennedy. This lack of reliable causal evidence means that a prime example of the power of television images may be nothing more than "telemythology" (Schudson, 1995, 116). '
"Or is it? After all, much of the power of this debate anecdote is that most observers and commentators thought Nixon lost the debate to Kennedy on the basis of his appearance. It certainly seems plausible that had the same debate occurred on radio, Nixon may have fared better.
"Druckman took the matter one step further. In the article quoted above, he describes an intriguing experiment conducted about five years ago. He recruited 171 respondents - mostly students - who demonstrated little or no knowledge of the Kennedy-Nixon debates. He then randomly divided the subjects into two groups. Half watched a video tape of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate and the other half listed to just the audio. All later answered questions about Nixon and Kennedy, yielding the results Druckman had expected (pp. 569-570):
'Television images matter - they prime people to rely more on personality perceptions when evaluating candidates, which in turn, can affect overall evaluations. Images also enhance political learning, at least among nonsophisticates. The experiment provides evidence that Kennedy may have done better on television because of his superior image.
"So there we have it. A great example of how not to interpret a post-debate survey, and a clever experiment by a social scientist that provides a bit of evidence to support the underlying truth beneath the well established 'telemyth.'"
http://www.pollster.com/blogs/did_nixon_win_with_radio_liste.html