America rewired its political system this year, plugging into cable television, watching its candidates come through ”unfiltered” on talk shows, call-in shows and shows where a person running for the highest office in the land had never trod.
Bill Clinton and Ross Perot got with the program-the cable and talk-show program-early on. George Bush stepped cautiously toward media settings he once characterized as ”weird talk shows.” But, trailing in the polls, the president went.
In a startling political year, no element was more eye-catching than the emergence of what is coming to be called ”New News.”
The men who would be president come January courted voters on ”Larry King Live,” ”Arsenio,” ”Good Morning America” and MTV. They answered questions from callers on the network morning shows, schmoozed on the Nashville Network and the Home Shopping Network and bought blocks of air time all over the dial.
”It`s been a marriage of mutually compatible interests,” said University of Pennsylvania scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson.
”The audience went searching for information because they cared about this election. The candidates were favorably disposed, especially if they could get free air time over paid air time. And the broadcasters stay interested as long there`s an economic incentive for the broadcasters.”
Four years ago, Bush and his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, spurned the video blandishments of ”Donahue” and ”Larry King Live.”
Earlier this year, the president groused about his dignity and moved his campaign from speech to speech as his rivals moved around the dial.
But with anxious voters looking for information-and perhaps an alternative-candidates made themselves relentlessly available to the new multichannel TV universe.
In 1992 the candidates understood that cable reached into more than 60 percent of America`s TV households and that the Big 3 network audience share had been in steep decline for a decade.
Perot, who understood early, started his campaign on CNN in February and became a fixture on Larry King`s set.
After quitting the race in mid-July, the Texas billionaire re-entered the campaign on the crest of an unprecedented, $40 million purchase of network TV time for 60-second ads and program-length ”infomercials.”
Clinton had salvaged his primary campaign in New Hampshire after the Gennifer Flowers flap in part by buying half-hours of TV time in Manchester. He used TV town meeting formats in almost every primary state, honing skills that would serve him well in the October presidential debates.
The Arkansas governor`s saxophone-tooting appearance on ”Arsenio” in June became the poster for the non-traditional media campaign, but all the candidates went looking where the voters were.
”Larry King typically has not been interested in politicians as guests,” said Everette E. Dennis, director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University.
”King may have ignited the whole thing, this idea that politicians in this year were celebrities. Ratings were good. Suddenly, there were so many outlets beyond what we were used to in the process,” said Dennis, whose forum has studied the impact of ”new media” on politics.
Clinton and his running mate, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore, seemed comfortable moving to the beat of MTV`s ”Choose or Lose” format. But Perot, an industrialist with the deepest of pockets, proved it wasn`t all new-wave, kicky graphics and rock music.
Perot`s decidedly low-tech infomercials, some of them spaced around the major league baseball playoffs and the World Series, drew viewing audiences that were the envy of prime-time network sitcoms.
The production values in Perot`s presentations recalled the lowest moments of black-and-white Sunday morning roundtables in the 1950s. But Americans tuned in by the millions.
Using hand-held charts and a pointer to explain his economic message, or being interviewed with great deference about his family life and childhood by a paid campaign aide, Perot laid out his deficit-reduction argument in 30-minute and hour segments.
In 1992 Americans learned that only cable-CNN and C-Span-would provide gavel-to-gavel coverage of the national political conventions.
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They already were in the habit of watching these channels. Millions of Americans had watched Operation Desert Storm through the CNN lens.
They had witnessed the collapse of communism, the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, a host of earthquakes and natural disasters through cable, as the news-gathering influence of the broadcast networks receded.
”Inside Politics,” CNN`s 30-minute, late-afternoon political wrapup, earned a devoted following, particularly among opinion-makers. Down in Hot Springs, Ark., Clinton`s mother, Virginia Kelley, told visiting reporters she never missed the program.
CNN was the only network to climb aboard the Clinton campaign full-time during the primary season. And its daily tracking poll, conducted by the Gallup Organization, drove election coverage, particularly in the last week, when a change in survey procedures transformed an 11-point Clinton lead into a 2-point advantage in just two days.
In a presidential campaign that played out as never before in a wide range of broadcast arenas, viewers and listeners experienced the good, the bad and the occasionally perverse.
Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh opened his heart and his 500-station network to Bush, faithfully savaging the Clinton-Gore ticket, attacking liberals and ”environmental wackos” and ”feminazis.” Limbaugh was rewarded with a seat in Vice President Dan Quayle`s box at the Republican National Convention.
But the Bush camp discovered that wild rides down new media avenues could end in surprises. For example, after White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater dismissed the possibility of a presidential visit to ”Arsenio,” millions of TV viewers heard this from the late-night host:
”Excuse me, George Herbert irregular-heart-beating, read-my-lipping, slipping-in-the-polls, do-nothing, deficit-raising, make-less-money-than-Millie- the-White-House-dog-last-year, Quayle-loving, sushi-puking Bush. I don`t remember inviting your ass to my show.”
If all that weren`t enough, the fictional baby birthed by a fictional TV personality in May became a cause celebre in the campaign.
Quayle chastised the title character in CBS` ”Murphy Brown” (actress Candice Bergen, in whatever remains of real life) for ”mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”
Quayle`s remarks set off a national debate over family values, single-parent households and alternative lifestyles that ran right into the GOP convention in mid-August, where further controversies ensued.
Conservatives Patrick J. Buchanan and Pat Robertson, served up in prime time on the first two night of the convention, spread unease among independent voters and moderate Republicans, particularly women.
The Bush-Quayle ticket came away disappointed in the inevitable post-convention bounce in the polls that ordinarily accompanies a four-night advertisement for the party. Buchanan, whose public endorsement had been coveted by Bush, was never again seen in proximity to the president.
And in September, 70 million viewers tuned in the season premiere of
”Murphy Brown,” in which she offered her prime-time response to Quayle`s remarks.
The verdict on the ”New News” is mostly positive. Certainly there is evidence that potential voters are engaged by this election.
Voter registration figures are up. And as many as 90 million Americans may have watched the final presidential debate Oct. 19.
A recent poll commissioned by the Bush-Quayle campaign asked potential voters if they were ”very interested” in the 1992 race, and 66 percent said they were.
The polling operation, Market Strategies Inc., had asked the same question four years earlier, and 43 percent said they were very interested. Only 7 percent of those asked said they were not very interested.
”It may be that this has been an idiosyncratic year,” Everette Dennis said. ”Some of what we`ve seen seems strange, but there`s nothing irrational about it. Politicians were responding to the audience`s desire for information.”
The University of Pennsylvania`s Jamieson agrees, with some reservations.
”Politicians are always eager to use free (TV) time, providing they can use it as advertising,” she said. ”A lot of good things can be said about what`s gone on, but that fact remains. Politicians like these formats, because they do see it as advertising.”