While we're on the subjects of gaffes though, this is from the bottom of your first link:
quote:
Palin’s opponent, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, has also committed high-profile gaffes, including claiming in a recent interview that President Franklin D. Roosevelt calmed fears in a TV address at the beginning of the Great Depression. There was no TV in 1929 ” Roosevelt wasn’t president at the time.
Actually, as I recall, Hoover was the first President to be televised. That is to say, before FDR's presidency. And people in Hitler's Germany watched TV (Fernsehen), though I think that was only in Berlin.
Of course, those events did predate TV broadcasting and wide commercial usage (not sure what the setup was for Hoover, probably experimental in what we would now call "closed-circuit TV" and the Nazi TV programming was shown in a theater -- as I recall, one of the German secret weapons towards the end was an operator-controlled guided missile that had a TV camera in its nose).
However, the point does still stand that Biden made a gaffe. FDR's "Fireside Chats" were indeed broadcast on radio, since we did not yet have any TV broadcasting system.
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