65 YEARS AGO TODAY: Revisiting the first presidential debate — and its improbable audience split.

Over the decades, memories of Nixon’s baffling tactics have been obscured by enduring fascination with a phenomenon that has come to define the first debate — a phenomenon that almost surely did not occur.

The phenomenon is known as “viewer-listener disagreement,” which means that Kennedy won the debate among television viewers while Nixon won among radio listeners. It’s an optics-driven interpretation that serves to confirm the presumed decisiveness of visual cues. It also is useful shorthand for explaining the debate’s outcome — that Nixon lost because he was gaunt and sweated under the studio lights.

The notion of viewer-listener disagreement endures, even though it was thoroughly dismantled 33 years ago in a scholarly journal article that pointed out the phenomenon is supported by almost no empirical data. The little survey data collected about the debate’s television and radio audiences were flawed, incomplete, and wholly inadequate to support such a sweeping theory. The authors, David Vancil and Sue Pendell, wrote in the Central States Speech Journal that “the inference that appearance caused Nixon’s loss or Kennedy’s victory is classic post hoc fallacy.”

Even if television viewers “disliked Nixon’s physical appearance,” they added, “the relative importance of this factor in viewers’ selection of a debate winner is a matter of conjecture.”

Read the whole thing.