(A) Neta Alexander, Paper, Glass, Algorithm Teleprompters and The Invisibility of Screens

JOURNAL OF
20.2
VISUAL CULTURE
Paper, glass, algorithm: teleprompters and
the invisibility of screens
Neta Alexander and Tali Keren
Abstract. The teleprompter, invented in 1948 as a memory aid for show

business, has become a ubiquitous technology in modern politics. Yet,
the hidden ways in which this device shapes our understanding of
performance, newscasting, and political rhetoric are rarely studied by
media scholars. Recognizing this lacuna, this article traces the evolution
of the teleprompter from a cumbersome, human-operated device to an
invisible system of screens designed to conceal its own existence. The
teleprompter has not only shaped the standardization of speech, but also
restructured the televised spectacle by collapsing the sonic, the tactile,
and the optical. By focusing on teleprompter fiascos and moments of
breakdown from President Eisenhower to President Trump, we make a
broader argument regarding the importance of failure and the accidental
to the study of visual culture.
Keywords. black box • Donald Trump • failure studies • liveness • opacity •

sound studies • teleprompter
Introduction: ‘Damn you, teleprompter!’

In most cases, new technologies move from the margins to the mainstream by
way of gradual exposure and expanding their pool of users from early adopters
to the general public. The teleprompter, by contrast, gained recognition by
failing to function properly. The introduction of the teleprompter into the
American political arena was not as smooth as its inventors had hoped.
Describing a campaign speech given by presidential candidate Dwight
D Eisenhower in Indianapolis on 9 September 1952, The New York Times
reported:
General Eisenhower, who was speaking with the aid of a Teleprompter,

a device that unreels the speaker’s text, was heard by a national radio
audience, but not those in the hall, to say this: ‘Go ahead! Go ahead! Go
ahead! Yah, damn it, I want him to move up. (quoted in Stromberg, 2012)
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DOI 10.1177/14704129211026358
396 journal of visual culture 20.2
As retold by the Smithsonian Institution historian Joseph Stromberg:
The outburst was reprinted in thousands of press accounts nationally,

letting the world know about the new invention. Later, Eisenhower
told reporters he didn’t have the ‘slightest memory’ of having said what
was then considered a strong curse word, but apologized nonetheless.
(Stromberg, 2012)
Despite the fact that President Harry S Truman used a teleprompter for his
State of the Union Address a year earlier, this was the first time the word
‘teleprompter’ received nationwide publicity. The tension between General
Eisenhower and the operator of the hidden device erupted in a manner that
forever changed his public image, not only because he lost control of his
tongue and cursed on national radio, but also because Eisenhower exposed
himself as a political leader dependent on memory aids. This might explain
why TV camera operators were instructed to cut teleprompters out of the
frame during the 1952 Republican Party convention (Stromberg, 2012). To
lower the risk that the bulky black boxes would appear in the frame, the side-
by-side teleprompter was introduced in the early 1960s.
Bearing Eisenhower’s fiasco in mind, this article will not provide a fully
detailed history of the teleprompter. Instead, we wish to ask why a ubiquitous
device that has been shaping our political and public sphere for almost 70
years rarely draws the attention of media scholars and historians. In short,
why has the history of the teleprompter yet to be written? We answer this
question by focusing on several historical moments when this invisible
screen was suddenly made visible. In these brief moments of breakdown,
the teleprompter was introduced to the public, its opacity was questioned,
and the forces behind it were revealed. Expanding on previous studies of the
importance of the accidental to the history and theory of media, we explore
how ‘forces of chance and contingency impact regimes of representation and
mediated modes of perception’ (Bruckner et al., 2008: 280).
The teleprompter fiascos studied below reconfigure the accidental beyond

existing media theories of ‘newsworthy’ catastrophes (Doane, 1990), ‘forensic
media’ (Siegel, 2014), and the broader category of the ‘media event’ (Couldry,
2003; Dayan and Katz, 1992). Instead, we build on Sarah Kember and Joanna
Zylinska’s (2012) distinction between ‘liveness’ and ‘lifeness’. Replacing the
representational approach to media events with what they call ‘performative
liveness’, or ‘lifeness’, they define this concept as ‘the possibility of the
emergence of forms always new, or its potentiality to generate unprecedented
connections and unexpected events’ (p. xvii). This framework allows us to read
moments of teleprompter disasters as case studies of the inherent instability
of mediation. The growing dependency on teleprompters, we argue, produces
new forms of lifeness by imbuing the televisual event with a constant tension
Alexander and Keren. Paper, glass, algorithm 397
between programmability and disruption, the script and the live performance.
Theorizing this device therefore expands our understanding of mediation as a
‘key trope for articulating our being in, and becoming with, the technological
world’ (p. xv).
Moving between the entertainment industry, major political events, military

training and educational settings, the teleprompter seems to always hide in the
shadows, existing in the margins of the frame, the viewer’s consciousness, and
the public discourse.1 The evolution of the teleprompter from a cumbersome
roll of butcher paper to a sophisticated system of four glass screens – including
a huge, centralized screen tellingly called a ‘confidence monitor’ – reveals a
paradoxical tale of invisibility achieved by multiplicity. The more ubiquitous
a technology becomes, the less we ‘see’ it. Whether or not we notice their
existence, these screens have been shaping norms of behavior for decades,
from standardizing human speech to controlling the aesthetics of media events.
To unpack this process, we read the teleprompter as a machine that collapses

the sonic, the tactile, and the optical. The story we are about to tell is therefore
one of shadows, erasures, and absences. As there is scarcely any scholarly
writing on the teleprompter, we base our historical investigation on archival
research and close readings of patent applications as well as on essays by
Stromberg (2012) and Mark Hayward (2013). While Hayward’s work focused on
the absence of an audience, we wish to update and extend it by focusing on
the absence of the machine itself. As we shall see, a new visual culture of both
liveness and tactility was brought to life by an invisible screen mostly residing
outside the televisual frame. This ‘performative liveness’ focuses on micro-
temporalities and moments of hesitation, disconnection, and silence. These
are not the deadly disasters or shocking accidents media scholars have been
studying for decades, but rather the uncanny glimpses of the technological
infrastructure shaping our media and politics.
A brief history of the teleprompter

The teleprompter is a device invented to compensate for the limitations of
human memory and the resulting contingency of sonic articulation. Much
like film, through its ‘apparent capacity to represent the contingent’, the
teleprompter participates in the project of symbolically ‘taming chance’
that is crucial to capitalist modernity (Doane, 2002: 22). The teleprompter,
however, feeds into a system of mediation rather than representation.
Providing a prewritten script for a media event, this apparatus is performative
to the extent it ‘brings about the things of which it speaks’ (Kember and
Zylinska, 2012: xvi). As Kember and Zylinska argue, a performative approach
to the study of mediation should focus on ‘how media produce or enact the
social’, rather than assume a binary distinction between ‘media’ and ‘society’
(p. 31). In the case of the teleprompter, this performativity is achieved by the
speaker’s direct address, the production of ‘tactile vision’ (a concept explored

below), and the tension between contingency and control.2
To fully understand how the teleprompter partakes in the production of

‘performative liveness’, we must briefly explore its understudied history. The
first teleprompter was invented in 1948 by Fred Barton, a television actor,
and Hubert Schlafly, an electrical engineer who worked for CBS. As reported
in Newsweek in 1952, ‘the TelePrompTer Corp started when president Fred
Barton, then playing one of the sailors in “Mr. Roberts”, got the idea of a
machine that could roll a TV script in front of actors but away from the eyes
of the home audience’ (quoted in Russell, 1953: 296). The first model was a roll
of butcher paper rigged up inside half a suitcase (see Figure 1). By the early
1950s, American actors in soap operas such as CBS’s The First Hundred Years
started to use the teleprompter as a memory aid (see Figure 2).
From the very beginning, efficiency was the name of the game. In an essay titled
‘TelePrompTer – New Production Tool’ (1952), Barton and Schlafly explained
the rationale behind their groundbreaking device: It was meant to save time
by eliminating the need to dedicate hours to rehearsals and memorizing lines.
By feeding the actors their lines in real time and without the need to implant
hidden radio transmitters in their ears, the teleprompter could defeat ‘the fear
of forgetting the lines and the resulting tension, tightness, and unnaturalness
unconsciously generated by such fear’ (p. 515). This nascent invention could
therefore save the studios money by reducing the need for retakes and breaks.
The teleprompter was not the first attempt to solve the problem of
memorizing dialogue ‘away from the eyes of the home audience’. In the
early days of broadcasting, television studios used cue cards or employed
‘whisperers’ – also known as ‘prompters’ – to feed actors their lines in case
of confusion or amnesia. Human whisperers, however, offered an imperfect
solution for the problem of live recording. Actors would often get confused
by their instructions, and studio executives were eager to find a less
expensive and more reliable way to ease their burden. The whisper, as a
memory aid, proved a failure and was eventually replaced by an economy
of echoes: from the writer to the machine operator, to the glass screen,
and to the actor. Later, this shadow economy expanded into politics, when
professional actors trained politicians on how to use teleprompters for their
speeches (Allen, 1993: 33).
In April 1949, The New York Times noted that the prompter ‘coaches television
actors into letter-perfect delivery of their lines and permits news commentators
to simulate prodigious feats of memory’ (quoted in Stromberg, 2012). Yet, to
master these ‘prodigious feats’, actors were required to synchronize themselves
with both the machine and its human operator. The 1949 patent included a
mechanical speed changer that could be controlled from afar, ideally aligning
Figure 1. Paper feed for the TelePrompTer used by General Dwight Eisenhower during the 1952
Presidential campaign. Source: Joe Scherschel/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.
Figure 2. Schlafly and Barton’s TelePrompTer manned by crew on the set of pioneer soap opera The
First One Hundred Years in 1951. Source: Al Fenn/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.
the script motion with the exact tempo of the speaker. As we shall see, however,
the fear of desynchronization has never been fully eliminated.
Barton and Schlafly were not the only ones who invented a prompting device.
Hayward (2013), for example, studies the optical teleprompter of Luther George
Simjian, an Armenian-born prodigy who immigrated to the United States in
1920. While Schlafly’s (1949) patent application stresses the ability to save time
for actors, the selling point of the alternative device proposed by Simjian in
1955 was its ability ‘to allow for direct eye contact on the part of the presenter
with the camera aperture’ (p. 197) (see Figures 3 and Figure 4). Simjian explained
the improvements his optical system made to the existing technology, writing
that the older method of prompting had proved insufficient because ‘if the
speaker focuses his eyes on a screen located in a place materially beyond the
camera, the personal ‘touch’ between the speaker and the viewing audience is
lost’ (quoted in Hayward, 2013: 197, emphasis added).
Figure 3. The patent for the original ‘Television Prompting Apparatus’ was filed on 21 April 1949 by
Fred Barkau, the legal name of actor Fred Barton. Source: US Patent Office #2,635,373.
The teleprompter, in this telling, is not simply a storage device compensating

for the cognitive limitations of the human brain. Rather, it is an obscured
device producing the conditions by which the eye transforms into a hand. Vision
becomes tactile. By looking directly into the camera lens, political leaders can
touch millions of citizens from afar.
This unique form of ‘tactile vision’ can be read as a reversal of yet another
marginalized and forgotten technique meant to establish eye contact between
the presenter and the television viewer. The tactile capacity proved especially
crucial for newscasters, who had to read news off the page. One solution to this
problem was to teach them Braille, so they could read the news with their fingers
(Alan and Lane, 2003: 59). The invention of the teleprompter was a much more
efficient solution. Yet, it came with a price tag: ‘Journalists became aware that
their looks, facial expressions, mannerisms, and demeanor all came into play
with audiences who could see them on the screen’ (p. 59). In order to touch the
domestic viewer, the newscaster had to be seen. Her face became the center of
attention, in a striking opposition to radio broadcasting and its emphasis on the
human voice. The standardization of speech, which will be explored in the next
section, has gone hand-in-hand with a teleprompter-driven standardization
of the desirable onscreen persona. This can be seen, for example, in a 1960s
advertisement for a teleprompter – referred to here as an ‘autocue’ – in which
a model is passionately wrapping the device with her arms while the tagline
reads ‘relax with autocue’ (see Figure 5). This advertisement, as well as several
others, eroticize the nascent technology by marketing it as a tool for enhanced
relaxation and confidence that might even provoke sexual desire.
Figure 4. Simjian’s prompting device, showing the line of sight towards both the camera’s aperture
and the script. Source: US Patent Office #2,796,801.
Today, this confusion of touch and sight might seem overstated. After all,
the viewers are very much aware that the speech is mediated through
screens, and the ‘ideology of liveness’ promoted by the television
industry for decades cannot compete with the knowledge that televised
events are first and foremost a well-orchestrated spectacle (Feuer, 1983;
Spigel, 2009). This ‘collapse of the sensorial’ (Crary, 1990), however, is not
entirely new. As demonstrated by Jonathan Crary, the sense of touch was
an integral part of classical theories of vision. He traces the shift from a
multi-sensory experience to the consumption-focused obsession with the
human eye, arguing that the ‘dissociation of touch from sight occurs within
a pervasive “separation of the senses” and industrial remapping of the body
in the nineteenth century . . . rebuilding an observer fitted for the tasks of
“spectacular” consumption’ (p. 19).
While studying painting, photography, and television, Crary never

mentions the teleprompter. Still, his historical narrative, which brings
together techniques of vision and the construction of new subjectivities
and habitual behaviors, reminds us that sight and touch were not always
easily separated, as can also be observed in advertisements for television
sets from the 1950s (see Figure 6). In the context of the teleprompter, we
should bear in mind that these senses hold a different relationship to trust.
The eye, as well as the human mind, is deceitful and mediates the world
to us by way of optical illusions and cognitive biases; the hand, conversely,
is trustworthy, as it transmits empirical information regarding our
surroundings, warning us if something might hurt or harm us and alerting
us to the proximity of danger.
Figure 5. A model poses with an autocue, circa 1965. Part of a series of teleprompter ads which
fetishized and sexualized this device. Source: Jamie Hodgson/Getty Images.
To truly ‘touch’ an audience, presenters must train themselves to use the

prompting device without drawing attention to the apparatus. This personalized
address makes the prompter an ideal tool for propaganda. This alarming potential
might explain why, since its invention, the teleprompter has germinated debates
regarding the trustworthiness and authenticity of those who choose to employ
it. Because it mostly remains hidden, the use of a teleprompter was once a legal
question. In 1955, Senator Richard Neuberger of Oregon proposed an amendment
Figure 6. A new television set is advertised by emphasizing the ability to ‘touch’ an audience from
afar. Source: Broadcasting Telecasting, 22 August 1955.
to the Communications Act of 1934 to require a public announcement when a

politician uses either a teleprompter or a makeup. According to a brief report
in Broadcasting and Telecasting, Neuberger believed that such alerts would
help viewers ‘find it easier to spot the ornamented phonies’. Without them, he
warned, ‘the democratic process might be in danger.’3
It is ironic, then, that President Trump, whose four years in power were
often described as a threat to democracy, is also a politician who ‘declared
that teleprompters should be outlawed on the campaign trail and who has
colorfully criticized his rivals for using the machines while he takes the
stage with simple, rough notes containing mostly brag-worthy poll numbers’
(Johnson, 2016). President Trump never mentioned Senator Neuberger’s futile
fight against the prompter, yet his attacks on prompting devices exemplify
how this mechanical and ideological apparatus come together.
While Trump literally and symbolically attacked the use of prompting devices,
as we shall explore later, their ubiquity paradoxically achieves opacity by way
of multiplicity. Their ability to collapse the sonic, tactile, and optical has been
supported and expanded by changes to the technological apparatus of the
teleprompter since its invention. In 1996, speakers at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago replaced the traditional two-teleprompter set-up with
a four-teleprompter system, including a large ‘confidence monitor’ located
immediately below the lenses of the TV broadcast cameras. As described in
Detroit Free Press (1996: 6), ‘This placement of the center prompter creates
the illusion that the speaker is periodically looking straight into the camera
lens, and thereby appears to directly address the TV audience.’ The three- or
four-prompter system allows the speaker to abandon the podium lectern and
roam the stage. This performative liveness, or ‘lifeness’, creates the illusion
of spontaneity, while in fact three large screens placed throughout the
conference hall constantly assist the speaker. The multiplicity of glass screens
paradoxically makes the device less noticeable, as audiences grow accustomed
to confidence monitors and side-by-side prompters. Yet, this multiplicity also
makes teleprompter systems more susceptible to errors and malfunction. The
‘confidence monitor’, as demonstrated below, often perpetuates anxiety.
The standardization of speech

By standardizing the distance between the camera operator and the speaker
needed to sustain the illusion of tactile vision, the teleprompter reframed
the aesthetics of political conventions. This new machine, camera operators
were told, must be eliminated from the televisual frame, therefore prioritizing
specific framing techniques such as the close-up over others, like establishing
shots. But what exactly is being eliminated as a result of the ubiquity of
teleprompters? When a given technology is strategically designed to hide
its own existence, what, in the long term, is being hidden from public view?
Building on the growing literature on sound studies (Rangan, 2019; Sterne,

2012) and speech-recognition software (Li and Mills, 2019; Turow, 2021), the
teleprompter can help us rethink how technology is used to standardize speech,
recasting some voices as failed attempts to communicate. It shapes what Pooja
Rangan (2019: 31) calls the ‘audit’: ‘a mode of speaking and organizing that both
produces and is produced by unspoken norms of perceptual discipline or
attention’. Rangan’s work on the use of voice in documentary films provides
a useful model for studying the creation of an audible sphere. The boundaries
of this ‘audibility’ are determined by perpetuating a distinction between the
phonic qualities of the voice in speech (accent, intonations, timbre, affectations)
and non-linguistic, gestural, or pre-phonic utterances such as sighs, echolalia,
affectations, laughter, hiccups, accents, and stammers – all of which are
‘considered potential obstacles to voice, and thus to the sovereignty of the
subject’ (p. 33). This distinction is crucial to the study of the teleprompter since
this device has come to fetishize the phonic qualities of the human voice while
opting to eliminate any other kind of audible utterance. Under ideal conditions,
it promises to create a seamless fluency of speech, leaving no room for silence
or hesitation. Sustaining a logocentric tradition that ‘conflates the voice with
meaning and specifically with logos’ (p. 32), the teleprompter is a device
that helps us rethink how rhetorical norms are created and how we listen to
mediated-yet-personalized voices and public addresses.
It is therefore not a coincidence that the teleprompter was invented in the

1950s, when the discipline of speech therapy gained popularity. Studying
the pathologization of speech in the early and mid-20th century, Mara
Mills (2020) reminds us that many human voices were once deemed ‘queer,
impaired’. The fascination with the human voice regained urgency as ‘new
telephone, radio, and microphone technologies, which amplified and isolated
the voice, encouraged scientists to inspect speech ever more closely.’ This led
to a hierarchy of voices within which many sonic articulations were seen as
pathologies. A ‘shrill voice’, for example, was studied as female, white, ‘intrusive
and piercing’, while the ‘husky feminine voice was often racialized as black
and unpleasant’. Mills’s study is a recent example of how timbre, pitch, and
pace can be medicalized and subsequently excluded from the public sphere.
When read in front of the camera, teleprompter speeches risk broadcasting

moments in which the confident, mostly male voice transforms into a stutter,
cough, or other vocal manifestations that might be experienced by some viewers
as ‘unpleasant’. It is these moments that imbue the prompter with symbolic and
performative meaning. In the words of Kember and Zylinska (2012: 36):
If news events are indeed ‘disruptive’, then there has to be an object –

namely society – that is disrupted by them. This presumes a degree of
separation between events and their mediation, and such presumptions
are ultimately associated with representationalist thinking.
The teleprompter, however, demonstrates how mediation in itself can be a

form of disruption. Imagine, for example, a world leader giving a scripted
speech about controlling the spread of the deadly coronavirus while trying
to hide his increasingly audible coughs. His is the horror of a pandemic that
neither technology nor politics can fully eradicate. Such a speech might
become a media event not as a result of a real-time catastrophe, but rather
as a secular manifestation of ‘modern forms of government’ and the many
conflicts they wish to manage and mitigate (Couldry, 2003: 4). We will explore
this sense of mitigation more closely when looking at President Trump’s
encounters with prompting devices.
The human voice is therefore subjected to both pathologization and

standardization. In the 1960s, the side-by-side teleprompter gave birth to
what could be described as a ‘teleprompter cadence’, since the speaker was
forced to read one line, pause, and shift his gaze to the other side to read the
next line. This orchestration of speech has become so natural for television
hosts and experienced politicians that we can hardly identify it as governed by
machines. Yet, this rhythm is as artificial and tightly controlled as the ‘laugh
machine’ invented in the 1950s as part of the broadcasting industry’s growing
need to save money by automating human voices (Smith, 2008).4
Today, when many teleprompters are equipped with voice recognition

algorithms, these questions of standardization are more crucial than ever, as
the prompters can exclude accented or otherwise ‘deviant’ voices from being
heard. These automated devices work best with ‘neutral voices’ – meaning
mostly white, male voices devoid of speech impediments or audible mumble,
and their use can therefore ‘extend the application of bias’ (Carter and Egliston,
2020). As we move into a future of ubiquitous personal assistants and other
voice-activated home appliances and electronic devices, the standardization
of machine–intangible human voices is a problem gaining urgency. The ‘voice
intelligence industry’ (Turow, 2021) uses data collected via speech recognition
algorithms to profile millions by automating the connections between an
individual’s sonic articulations and their characteristics (weight, height, gender,
age, ethnicity, etc.). Merging big data, machine learning, and deep neural
networks, this new industry maps human voices in order to target potential
consumers and voters. Alongside this alarming commodification of the human
voice, the rising popularity of teleprompter apps such as PromptSmart and
Teleprompt.me provides still another example of how screens are used to
standardized pitch and tempo.5 While technology companies are listening to us
all, teleprompter-supported media events provide a model of an ‘ideal’ human
speech manifested as fluency and confidence. Returning to Doane’s (2002)
analysis of cinema, both technologies perpetuate the logic of predictability
by ‘taming chance’ – which here becomes a euphemism for the need to ‘tame
because deviant’ the voices of people of color, of the working class, of those
with speech disabilities, regional accents, and so forth.
Teleprompter scholarship can provide a productive entry into the study

of the standardization of speech. As it has come to shape the televised
spectacle for decades, it alerts us to long-term effects of technologies aimed
at fetishizing the fluency and efficiency of human voices and what Rangan
(2019) calls the ‘audit’. As the next section demonstrates, the history of the
prompter can also serve to expand our understanding of technological
failure.
‘It’s always a human error’

Whether it is operated by a human or an automated speech recognition
algorithm, ‘teleprompter cadence’ and seamlessness require both standardi
zation and synchronization. Paradoxically, the use of the teleprompter, while
invented to create the illusion of direct, personal address, deprives the audience
of an authentic human encounter, with all its messiness, contingency, and risk.
In fact, there exists an inherent tension between the promised spontaneity
– and ‘potential explosiveness’ (Doane, 1990) – of the televisual event and
the scripted speech perpetuated by the prompter. Moments of teleprompter
failure or breakdown make those tensions manifest, as they draw our attention
to what is hidden from the frame.
Teleprompters might seem to deprive the media event of its potential

explosiveness by adhering to a pre-written script. However, teleprompter
fiascos imbue live speeches with a sense of risk and contingency, making
their liveness ‘performative’ rather than representational. As such, they
bring together the televisual temporality famously explored by Feuer (1983)
and Doane (1990) with the rising interest in technological failure (Alexander,
2017). These quotidian failures are different from the disasters associated
with live television, from terror attacks to plane crashes (Siegel, 2014). They
also stand apart from the cinematic obsessions with risk, impermeability
and penetration embedded in the trope of the car crash (Redrobe Beckman,
2010). Instead, teleprompter failures belong to the category of ‘techno-
failure’ that one of us previously explored in her study of buffering and digital
latency. These are recurrent moments in which the intricate dependency on
ubiquitous machines results in a sense of ‘perpetual anxiety’, as they reveal
the extent to which technology has come to shape and control our lives
(Alexander, 2017).6
This is a notable reversal to the modernist idea that technological failures

are to be redeemed as ‘teachable moments’ as part of the belief in endless
progress (Siegel, 2014: 29). With the invention of the ‘black box’ and other
recording devices, for example, ‘forensic media’ have been used to trace the
root of the problem and turn ‘present failures into future successes’ (p. 30).
Teleprompter fiascos, on the other hand, are quickly attributed to the human
agent rather than to the technology.
More generally, the teleprompter is a technology that forces us to rethink

the definition of ‘breakdown’, ‘failure’, or ‘malfunction’. It is prone to different
types of breakdown: a power outage or a shattered screen may prevent it from
presenting the text to the speaker; the wrong text being fed into the machine
can result in moments of silence, confusion, and anxiety; desynchronization
between the operator and the speaker can affect the fluency of speech and
lead to stammers and ‘dead moments’; the lack of light or too much light
will make it hard to read the text on the glass screen. In addition to these
common scenarios, the teleprompter risks being revealed to the viewer by
way of framing, such as showing the speaker through the teleprompter glass
(see Figure 7).
While the device itself can break, freeze, or slow down, the teleprompter
fiascos that find their way onto the front page are almost always results of
human error. Take, for example, a New York Times report published in May
1965 under the title ‘Teleprompters Can’t Do It All’. It opens with the following
description of President Lyndon Johnson’s nightmarish encounter with a
prompter:
The 36th President of the United States had his first mishap in using a
television prompting device last Sunday night while making a televised
address from the White House. Reading a speech on the Dominican
Republic revolution as the paper rolled through the prompting device
not visible on camera, President Johnson began to repeat a passage just
beyond the halfway point of his talk. Viewers who knew that the President
was using a prompting device may have assumed that the mechanical
device had broken down. But later an authoritative source said the mishap
was not the fault of the device itself. Mr. Johnson had made a last-minute
insert in his speech, but someone failed to make this insert in the device.
(Adams, 1965)
The reporter goes on to describe the President’s confusion and frustration,

which resulted in a long and awkward silence. Irving Kahn, the then-president
of the Teleprompter Corporation, told the Times that ‘when a public speaker
gets in trouble with a prompting device, in most cases it is the result of human
error and not the fault of the prompter’ (Adams, 1965).
It can be useful to unpack this early report on the misbehaving prompter.

First, the article stresses that the device was ‘not visible on camera’. Existing
in the margins or off-screen is therefore a double-edged sword. It creates
and sustains the illusion of a public leader who is capable of ‘touching’ his
audience via the camera lens by looking into their eyes, but at the same
time it exposes the presenter to a host of new anxieties, such as losing one’s
words on national television. The fear that Kahn and others were hoping to
eliminate – that of forgetting part of the script – has been replaced by the fear
Figure 7. President Obama framed through a teleprompter at the Savannah Technical College on
creating jobs and the economy on 2 March 2010. Source: Stephen Morton/Getty Images.
of dependency on a device that both functions and looks like a black box. The
history of the teleprompter can teach us how technologies that promise to
solve one problem often end up germinating new, unforeseen problems. Not
surprisingly, the solution was not to get rid of the machine, but rather to train
politicians and television hosts to use it better. If, as Kahn insisted, the failure
should be attributed to a human error, the humans are the ones who require
re-education.
These low-stakes moments of failure can supposedly be prevented or

eliminated by training politicians to use this memory aid more seamlessly.
Indeed, in an attempt to improve his delivery skills, President Eisenhower
hired Hollywood actor Robert Montgomery, who ‘tried to coach him in using a
teleprompter, thus abandoning the written text’ (Allen, 1993: 33). By subjecting
politicians and public servants to the standards of the entertainment industry,
the teleprompter blurred the lines between these two spheres.
Yet, even politicians trained in televised performance are not immune to

teleprompter scandals. In 1994, for example, Bill Clinton’s State of the Union
Speech was delayed by several minutes once it turned out that the wrong
speech was fed into his prompter. Putting his charisma to work, he apologized
and started over, this time reading his speech off the printed hard copy placed
in front of him. More recently, politicians who heavily rely on prompters
have come under attack. Former President Barak Obama was called ‘reader-
in-chief’ by Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania because of his reliance
on prompting devices, while President Trump repeatedly mocked Hillary
Clinton’s dependency on the prompter during the 2016 presidential campaign
(Schulman, 2012). Trump later used a similar strategy when attacking Joe
Biden in 2020 (Dale and O’Sullivan, 2020). As we can see, political leaders are
forced to strike a balance between skillfully using prompting devices while
hiding the fact that they do so.
To break a teleprompter
Our historical research can serve to reassess the role of prompting devices in
contemporary American politics. A close reading of two teleprompter fiascos
involving President Trump, the first accidental, the second intentional, can
complicate our understanding of both liveness and techno-failure. Returning
to Kahn’s argument that every teleprompter fiasco is ‘the result of human
error’, Trump’s public engagement with the device desperately tries to tell an
entirely different story.
One of the most memorable teleprompter fiascos involving Trump took

place in July 2019, when the then-president gave a 45-mintue speech titled
‘Salute to America’ as part of the Independence Day celebration on the Mall in
Washington. Providing a historical account of the Revolutionary War, Trump
praised the American military for ‘taking over airports’, despite the fact that
no airport existed in the 18th century. The next day, Trump confirmed he had
problems with the teleprompter, telling journalists:
I guess the rain knocked out the teleprompter, so it’s not that, but I knew
the speech very well, so I was able to do it without a teleprompter. But

the teleprompter did go out. And it was actually hard to look at anyway
because there was rain all over it . . . it went out in the middle of a sentence,
and it was not a good feeling. (quoted in Brockell, 2019)
This rambling and self-contradictory explanation brings together the various

anxieties associated with the use of memory aids: the optical dependency on
reflection and lighting (‘the rain was all over it’), the risk that the screen will
break down (‘it did go out’), and the potential gaps between the written text
and the spoken voice (‘but I knew the speech very well’). More importantly, this
attack on the machine echoes broader ideological and political ideas promoted
by Trump, including first and foremost his insistence that automation and the
ubiquity of machines are to blame for the loss of millions of jobs in the United
States.7 According to this narrative, human workers are set up to fail by these
new machines (especially those manufactured by Chinese companies). The
discourse of authenticity and his refusal to use a prompter unless required
have helped Trump present himself as a neo-Luddite who fully understands
and deeply sympathizes with the frustration of American workers whose jobs
have been taken by the tech revolution. As these workers could easily attest,
it is not a ‘good feeling’.
It is therefore tempting to read this incident through a representational lens,

focusing on the historical inaccuracy of Trump’s account of the Revolutionary
War. However, applying the framework of performative liveness to an earlier
incident provides a more complex narrative.
On 15 October 2016, Trump gave a speech at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina,

when his teleprompter supposedly broke down mid-sentence. In response,
Trump dismantled his teleprompter, violently pushing it aside while shattering
the glass screen. One of the most astonishing things about this incident is the
audience reaction to Trump’s provocation. Once he returned to his stand and
told his supporters ‘You know what? I like it better without the teleprompter’,
the audience went wild, clapping and laughing enthusiastically.8 What are we
to make of this unexpected moment of ‘lifeness’, in which the screen designed
to be concealed became the center of attention, simultaneously exposing the
technological infrastructure needed for televisual mediation while recasting
Trump as an ‘authentic’ speaker?
Returning to Kember and Zylinska (2012), this literal and symbolic attack on
the prompter resulted in ‘a media event with a difference’ as it ‘highlights
the role of media and mediation, exposing the tension between performative
and representational accounts of all media events’ (p. 41). It is impossible to
disconnect the visible pleasure of hundreds of Trump supporters from the
violent destruction of a cutting-edge machine, a one-sided glass screen
that can barely be noticed. It is a potent metaphor for an era in which many
have come to associate ubiquitous screens and opaque technologies with

negative feelings such as helplessness, dishonesty, and surveillance. Instead
of a memory aid, the teleprompter has come to symbolize the kind of ‘old
politics’ that populist leaders around the world are promising to replace. The
danger of ‘phoniness’ indicated by Senator Neuberger in 1955 is now used as a
prevailing political weapon that, paradoxically, endangers the future of liberal
democracy as a form of governance.
Dismantling a teleprompter is a media event invoking the ‘lifeness’ potential of

television to surprise, shock, or delight the home viewer. Trump ‘touches’ his
audience not by staring at the camera and reading a speech written by others;
instead, he is ‘taming chance’ by exposing the very same apparatus invented
to provide political leaders with the powerful weapon of tactile vision. His is
a populist game of neo-Luddism reminding us that media are generative and
do not exist apart from the world: ‘Neither a reflection of nor a mask for the
social, media actively contribute to the production of the social’ (p. 38).
During his speech, Trump broke the fourth wall by touching the prompting
device. This final reading returns us to the collapse of the sonic, tactile, and
optical in the manifestation and reconfiguration of the teleprompter. When
touched, the prompter is dismantled from its ability to perform the ‘magic’
of tactile vision. Instead of a system of screens enabling a speaker to roam
the stage, Trump recast this device and the decades-long political tradition it
embodies as an electronic handcuff; an act of performative lifeness, of national
populism that also exposes, it must be acknowledged, not just the Democratic
Party but democracy itself as ‘phony’, as ‘old politics’, a puppet in the thrall of
technology that actively generates helplessness, dishonesty, and surveillance
to perpetuate liberal democracy as a form of governance into the future. In
so doing, he was able to set a meaningful precedent: turning a teleprompter
fiasco into a campaign highlight, a failure masquerading as success.
Conclusion
The teleprompter, as we have seen, is a technology sustaining a set of tensions and
paradoxes. First, there exists a tension between a device designed to empower
the speaker by eliminating the need of memorization and a black box controlling
the speaker like a puppet. Second, there is a tension between the ability to deliver
longer and possibly more demanding texts on live television and the fact that the
prompter has played a crucial role in turning politics into a spectacle. Lastly, the
attempt to outlaw its use helped populist leaders like Trump tie together their
political agenda with the refusal of using opaque technology.
Within this discourse, it is no surprise that teleprompter failures have been

recast as technical issues rather than human errors. This returns us to the
prompter’s humble beginnings, when it was invented as a roll of butcher paper

to help television studios minimize the time needed for retakes and reshoots.
Since the 1950s, this device has given birth to new and complex anxieties
that can be found in other technologies designed as black boxes. It arrived
at a moment when the human voice has increasingly become subjected to
regimes of classification and pathologization: initially through speech therapy
and more recently by voice-recognition algorithms and the ‘voice intelligence
industry’ (Turow, 2021). Its changing materiality – from paper to glass and,
more recently, to an algorithmically-controlled system of multiple screens
– tells a story of both ubiquity and opacity. With every iteration of this
mnemonic technology, the need to embed it in lecterns, stadiums, lecture
halls and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic settings, has posed new
challenges that gradually reshaped the televisual spectacle and our idea of
public speaking.
The teleprompter promised and enabled tactile vision converging the eye and
the hand. Still, the ubiquity of teleprompter fiascos, despite being attributed
to ‘human errors’, exposed the precariousness of televisual ‘lifeness’ and
germinated a new set of anxieties. These mostly forgotten historical anecdotes
should not be studied as an exception to the rule. If cinema ‘represents the
contingent’, the teleprompter denies its existence by achieving opacity
through multiplicity.
Barton, Schlafly and Simjian envisioned a tool that could free actors, politicians,
and educators from the need to memorize text. Simjian understood the extent to
which the success of this invention relies on its ability to enable ‘direct address’
by staring directly into the camera. Thanks to this newfound synesthesia, the
prompter has since been employed not just by actors and politicians, but also
by filmmakers (most famously Errol Morris), artists, and YouTube stars.9 That
its ubiquity has yet to draw the attention of media scholars might attest to
our prevalent attachment to representational frameworks of liveness and
mediation. As we demonstrated, a performative lens can open up new avenues
of investigation, bringing together contingency and control by expanding the
category of the media event to include quotidian, yet meaningful, moments of
human-machine negotiations.
ORCID iD
Neta Alexander https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6370-3112
Notes
1. Early advertisements made by the TelePrompTer Corp marketed it as a pedagogical tool that
could be used in classrooms and lecture halls. The involvement of the TelePrompTer Corp in
the military–industrial complex is beyond the scope of this article. In 1960, for example, The
New York Times enthusiastically reported that ‘Cadets [were] lectured on missiles by TV’ as
part of a program called ‘A Mission in Missiles’. More than 1,000 cadets in Huntsville, Alabama
were lectured by officers who ‘looked the cameras squarely in the eye’ while using a prompter
(see Fowle, 1960).
2. We use the term ‘tactile vision’ rather than the more familiar ‘haptic vision’ throughout the
article as existing theories of haptic media tend to privilege the cinematic spectator or the
video-art maker, rather than the televisual viewer historically targeted by the teleprompter.
For an exploration of ‘haptic vision’, see Marks (2000).
3. According to the report, Senator Neuberger hoped to ‘set standards of honesty in television
broadcasts of public affairs’. For the full article, see ‘GOP Politicking on TV Charged by Sen.
Neuberger’ (1955).
4. It is noteworthy that Jess Oppenheimer, the producer of I Love Lucy, held patents for both his
own version of the optical teleprompter and for a ‘laugh machine’ named ‘Jayo Laughter’. These
different patents, both filed in the 1950s, were designed to set new standards of human voices in
the entertainment industry by way of automation (see Oppenheimer and Oppenheimer (1996).
5. There are several mobile apps that turn a smartphone’s screen into an improvised
teleprompter by offering voice-triggered scrolling, such as Teleprompt.me and PromptSmart
Pro. For a survey of speech recognition algorithms and how they are being used in automated
prompters, see Wolber (2019).
6. Unlike accidents and other disasters essential to the allure of both the televisual and the
cinematic spectacle, techno-failures are simultaneously acknowledged and denied. Buffering,
for example, is either ignored or described by users and media scholars as the exception
rather than the rule, a process denying the ubiquity of technological fragmentation (e.g.
limited connectivity, packet switching, lossy compression, the digital divide, and so forth). For
an elaborate discussion of techno-failure and its inherent tensions, see Alexander (2017).
7. For a detailed analysis of Trump’s multilayered relationship to automation, see Frey et al. (2017).
8. For the full clip, see ‘Donald Trump destroys his teleprompter’, YouTube, uploaded 15 October
2016. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXgUKkzDv9E (accessed 16 June 2021).
9. Filmmaker Errol Morris famously employs a prompter in his documentary films. He created a
device called an ‘interrotron’ that enables him to interview subjects from afar while creating a
sense of intimacy and direct address (see Morris, 2004).
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Neta Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Colgate University, New York. She
has published articles in Cinema Journal, Media Fields Journal, Cinergie and Flow Journal, among
other venues. Her first book, Failure (2020; co-written with Arjun Appadurai), studies how Silicon
Valley and Wall Street monetize failure and forgetfulness.
Address: Colgate University, 13 Oak St, Hamilton, New York, NY 13346–1338, USA. [email:
nalexander@colgate.edu]
Tali Keren is a Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary artist and educator. Her interactive installation
‘The Great Seal’ explored the mechanisms of the teleprompter within the context of propaganda
and crowd manipulation. Keren’s installations and videos have been shown at museums and
galleries such as The Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, The Center of Contemporary Art,
Tel Aviv, Anthology Film Archive, New York, and The Queens Museum, New York.
Address: Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. [email: talik.keren@gmail.com]

(A) Neta Alexander, Paper, Glass, Algorithm Teleprompters and The Invisibility of Screens

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JOURNAL OF

Abstract. The teleprompter, invented in 1948 as a memory aid for show

Keywords. black box • Donald Trump • failure studies • liveness • opacity •

Introduction: ‘Damn you, teleprompter!’

General Eisenhower, who was speaking with the aid of a Teleprompter,

journal of visual culture [journals.sagepub.com/home/vcu]

As retold by the Smithsonian Institution historian Joseph Stromberg:

The outburst was reprinted in thousands of press accounts nationally,

The teleprompter fiascos studied below reconfigure the accidental beyond

Moving between the entertainment industry, major political events, military

To unpack this process, we read the teleprompter as a machine that collapses

A brief history of the teleprompter

speaker’s direct address, the production of ‘tactile vision’ (a concept explored

To fully understand how the teleprompter partakes in the production of

The teleprompter, in this telling, is not simply a storage device compensating

While studying painting, photography, and television, Crary never

To truly ‘touch’ an audience, presenters must train themselves to use the

to the Communications Act of 1934 to require a public announcement when a

The standardization of speech

Building on the growing literature on sound studies (Rangan, 2019; Sterne,

It is therefore not a coincidence that the teleprompter was invented in the

When read in front of the camera, teleprompter speeches risk broadcasting

If news events are indeed ‘disruptive’, then there has to be an object –

The teleprompter, however, demonstrates how mediation in itself can be a

The human voice is therefore subjected to both pathologization and

Today, when many teleprompters are equipped with voice recognition

Teleprompter scholarship can provide a productive entry into the study

‘It’s always a human error’

Teleprompters might seem to deprive the media event of its potential

This is a notable reversal to the modernist idea that technological failures

More generally, the teleprompter is a technology that forces us to rethink

The reporter goes on to describe the President’s confusion and frustration,

It can be useful to unpack this early report on the misbehaving prompter.

These low-stakes moments of failure can supposedly be prevented or

Yet, even politicians trained in televised performance are not immune to

One of the most memorable teleprompter fiascos involving Trump took

the speech very well, so I was able to do it without a teleprompter. But

This rambling and self-contradictory explanation brings together the various

It is therefore tempting to read this incident through a representational lens,

On 15 October 2016, Trump gave a speech at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina,

have come to associate ubiquitous screens and opaque technologies with

Dismantling a teleprompter is a media event invoking the ‘lifeness’ potential of

Within this discourse, it is no surprise that teleprompter failures have been

prompter’s humble beginnings, when it was invented as a roll of butcher paper

Address: Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. [email: talik.keren@gmail.com]

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