Rupert Murdoch has the right idea.
Earlier this year the Australian-born international media baron offered Americans a taste of what the British have enjoyed for decades: Free air time right before the November elections for the top presidential candidates. It would be an antidote, he said, to big-money interests and “horse-race coverage” that is insensitive to “what this election may mean to the lives of the people.”
He’s right about the coverage. One recently released study by a Washington-based media watchdog group indicates that, despite promises by various media moguls to expand the emphasis on issues, horse-race coverage by the three major American television networks actually has become three times more dominant than it was four years ago.
In a study of 315 election stories broadcast on ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts, the Center for Media and Public Affairs found the amount of horse-race news tripledrom 1992 levels. Half of the coverage studied dealt with the candidates’ political prospects instead of their political views, the study reported, as “reporters tended to discuss policy issues in terms of their impact on the race rather than their implications for the public.”
Worse, the length of the average candidate’s “sound bite” (television lingo for a quote captured on tape) shrunk to an average of seven seconds, which the center described as an all-time low, compared to 1968 when sound bites averaged 42 seconds, unbelievably long-winded by today’s standards.
Filling the dead air left by the incredible shrinking sound bite was more sound from network reporters. The nine GOP candidates together received less than one-fifth as much air time as the journalists who covered them–79 minutes versus 453 minutes for the reporters.
The center conducted the study for the non-partisan Markle Foundation in the hope, spokesmen said, of motivating greater substance in campaign content and coverage. This early “report card” was conducted from New Year’s Day until the Feb. 19, the date of the New Hampshire primary and less than a week before Murdoch made his announcement. Murdoch could hardly have picked a more vulnerable target than the big networks.
Since then, my unscientific survey found little has changed. Coverage continued to be dominated by horse-race stories. Even the Sunday morning news panel programs, where there was more time to talk about issues, drifted instead into talk about odds: Will Forbes drop out? Will Buchanan beat Dole? Will party elders jettison the weakened Dole in favor of Lamar Alexander? Will there be a brokered convention? Will Colin Powell be drafted into the fight? When will Dick Lugar and the other also-rans get out of the way?
In a recent address to the National Press Club, Murdoch offered an hour of prime time on his Fox TV network won election eve night for “final presentations by the leading candidates for president,” free of editing, censorship or “interviews by some all-knowing correspondent.” He also offered to run one-minute position statements on 10 key issues from each of the candidates during prime time and called on his competitors to join him in offering additional free time in simultaneous broadcasts.
So far, the other networks have maintained that they already provide plenty of time to the candidates. In fairness, if they are comparing themselves to Fox, they have a point. Although Fox has produced some very good local news operations, it has yet to put together a network evening news program. In the meantime, we shall see how many Fox affiliates are willing to pre-empt “The Simpsons,” “Melrose Place” or “A Current Affair” to bring us, say, the party conventions this summer or the candidate debates in the fall.
Ironically, Murdoch’s success is partly responsible for the incredible shrinking sound bite. The success of his network and other new choices on cable and free TV have been taking big chunks of audience away from the three big networks since 1980. Tougher competition to grab-and-hold audience attention has speeded up the pace of broadcast news and often pushed politicians aside in favor of professional pundits and personalities who enliven the news with entertaining arguments.
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Journalists often like horse-race analysis because it is fun and less controversial than analysis of issues. Rather than risk being charged with bias on sensitive values issues of the day, it is easier to cling to polls and the “conventional wisdom” about who’s ahead and who’s not.
Politicians also must bear part of the blame. They have learned to embrace the language of the horse race to tell interviewers in grand detail how they are going to pull ahead of the pack and leave their opponents in the dust. Issues in such discussions become mere pawns in the game of personal ambition.
Unfortunately, when politics is reduced to quick sound bites and Machiavellian questions of campaign strategies, it encourages a public cynicism that chills voter participation and endangers the very democracy that a free press is supposed to strengthen.
“When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion,” Walter Lippmann, the late Washington columnist, wrote in 1955. “The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.”
And legitimate concerns of the voting public are ground into hash.