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The road from studio to statehouse is older than television. Ronald Reagan began as a radio sports announcer, recreating Chicago Cubs games in a Des Moines studio from pitch by pitch wire reports, then hosted General Electric Theater and toured the country giving speeches for the company, before a televised address for Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 launched his political career. He kept this habit in office, delivering a radio address every Saturday in the manner of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s iconic fireside chats. 40 years later, Volodymyr Zelenskyy made the pipeline literal. He starred in Servant of the People as a teacher who becomes president after a viral rant against corruption, and staff at his production company registered a party of the same name that won 254 of 424 seats in July 2019. The pattern is vivid, but what proves it is another matter entirely.

What the studio teaches

Start with the skill. In 1956, sociologists Horton and Wohl described how broadcast personalities use a conversational style and direct address to create an illusion of intimacy, a familiarity that runs in one direction only. Voters who feel they know a candidate extend credit before the argument even begins, a phenomenon that Australians have watched up close. Kevin Rudd and Treasurer Joe Hockey became regulars on Sunrise from 2001, where they traded blows in a weekly Friday segment, with one commentator judging in 2006 that Rudd’s rise to the Labor leadership would have been unthinkable without the profile he built there. In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson first appeared on Have I Got News For You in 1998, and it was widely believed the exposure helped carry him to the London mayoralty, although journalist Ian Hislop has always denied it.

Linguistically, the tell is the first name. Johnson became simply ‘Boris’ to the press as well as the public, to such an extent that a Channel 4 editor publicly urged journalists to stop referring to him as such. After all, a first name is what we reserve for people we think we know. Notice what Rudd and Johnson share – they were not broadcasters, but guests. The transferable asset seems to be a practised plain voice and years of rehearsal before an audience, rather than any job title.

A weaker theory than expected

The causal narrative is shakier still, with the most famous example being Donald Trump’s decade of hosting The Apprentice. A study in the American Political Science Review found that electoral regions with higher viewership of the show gave him a larger share of the Republican primary vote, using an accident of channel inertia, viewers who simply stayed tuned after the preceding sitcom, to argue the effect was causal. A second study, in The Leadership Quarterly, found the correlation vanishes once earlier voting patterns and NBC viewing habits are controlled for, and that viewership was unrelated to congressional results. Even sceptical researchers conclude only that television’s importance to political leadership depends strictly on context. It is thus essential to acknowledge that we often find ourselves narrating backwards from winners. We remember the announcer who became the president of the United States and forget the presenters who never got past a failed preselection.

The studio as a vetting room

These days, the pipeline also runs in reverse. NPR reported in January 2025 that Trump had selected at least 19 former Fox News hosts, journalists and commentators for senior positions, among them Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy. Coverage at the time ridiculed it as a TV cabinet, expected to sell the agenda and defend the administration against media scrutiny. As performance under questioning becomes an increasingly important qualification, the studio itself becomes a selection mechanism. Indeed, the skill the pipeline rewards, conversational fluency, is the one voters can easily verify, while the those it ignores, notably administration, are the ones they cannot.

Reagan served two terms as governor of California before the presidency, and Johnson spent eight years as mayor of London, whereas Trump and Zelenskyy arrived with no prior executive office behind them. Rudd himself returned to Sunrise as prime minister, answering viewers’ questions in a weekly Friday slot. Zelenskyy is the obvious counterexample, since the world has come to know him through wartime briefings and frontline visits, which suggests the register can survive a crisis.

The broadcaster to leader pipeline is better understood as one of register than of personnel. What flows through is a plain, practised, apparently unscripted voice, which buys trust in advance of evidence. Voters should treat it as an introduction rather than a reference. A unidirectional relationship built at a distance is a fine place to begin a political career, but a poor place to end the inquiry.

Read more: The Insight Corner