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Super Tuesday was Story of the Day as all three networks kicked off their newscasts with the final day of campaigning before the multistate Presidential primary. CBS tried a new approach: anchor Katie Couric jettisoned coverage by her network's correspondents and substituted clips from her own one-on-one interviews with the five of the six extant candidates (sorry Ron Paul). NBC used a conventional approach with a pair of taped packages--an overview for each party's race. NBC anchor Brian Williams also secured an interview with Barack Obama but his scheduled q-&-a with Hillary Rodham Clinton fell through. ABC adopted a wheel format with reporters following the four leading campaigns (sorry Mike Huckabee), each filing from the stump. In all campaign coverage accounted for 60% (34 min out of 57) of the three-network newshole.

Whatever their format, all three newscasts chose the two-way Democratic race for their lead item. NBC's Andrea Mitchell found Barack Obama apparently "surging, even threatening to overtake Hillary Clinton in California, a state she once dominated." Rodham Clinton, meanwhile, is "losing her voice as her lead has evaporated in many polls." On ABC Kate Snow also noted the strain on Rodham Clinton: she called the race "exhausting" and found the candidate "hoarse from the strain of a grueling schedule." ABC's David Wright (at the tail of the Snow videostream), with the Obama campaign, saw less of an emphasis on California. He delineated Obama's strategy as "to win as many smaller states as possible to offset any Clinton victories in the big states."

ABC's Snow previewed Rodham Clinton's last minute appeal on primary eve, "a virtual town hall meeting on the female-friendly Hallmark Channel" coupled with a television advertising campaign showcasing "maternal images." In his political analysis, NBC's Tim Russert pinpointed the women's vote as key: "If Obama does not cut that gender gap and start tapping into the women's vote, he cannot win this nomination." ABC's political analysis focused on geography instead. George Stephanopoulos (no link) isolated Massachusetts, Missouri and California: "If Obama can win two or three of those states he is going to have momentum. He is already leading in money. I think he will be very hard to stop."


Andrew Tyndall 2/5/08 9:13:49 pm

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