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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 31, 2008
With ABC anchor Charles Gibson hosting his taped one-on-one interview with candidate John McCain and NBC anchor Brian Williams airing the second part of his one-one-one interview with Barack Obama, campaign coverage dominated the networks' news agenda. And quite appropriate news judgment it was too going into the final weekend before Election Day. It was unfortunate that the escalation of the civil war in the Congo should suffer such neglect as a result. Only ABC filed a report from the warzone--and that was handled by Orla Guerin (no link) of its British newsgathering partner BBC. Anyway CBS and NBC led their newscasts with McCain while ABC led with Obama. Of the two, Obama (11 min v 10) received fractionally more coverage and so technically qualified as Story of the Day.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 31, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
CANDIDATE Q&AS MAKE US FORGET ABOUT CONGO With ABC anchor Charles Gibson hosting his taped one-on-one interview with candidate John McCain and NBC anchor Brian Williams airing the second part of his one-one-one interview with Barack Obama, campaign coverage dominated the networks' news agenda. And quite appropriate news judgment it was too going into the final weekend before Election Day. It was unfortunate that the escalation of the civil war in the Congo should suffer such neglect as a result. Only ABC filed a report from the warzone--and that was handled by Orla Guerin (no link) of its British newsgathering partner BBC. Anyway CBS and NBC led their newscasts with McCain while ABC led with Obama. Of the two, Obama (11 min v 10) received fractionally more coverage and so technically qualified as Story of the Day.
ABC's Jake Tapper (no link) and CBS' Dean Reynolds and NBC's Lee Cowan all ended the day in Chicago for Halloween as candidate Obama took time off the campaign trail to admire his daughters' costumes. He started the day in Iowa, site of the caucus triumph in Iowa that was his first win of the primary season--and one of several states that George Bush won in 2004 that he hopes to turn from red to blue. Cowan was quite certain that Iowa would switch: "Today's return is a sentimental journey not one of necessity. Polls show him with a solid lead here."
Besides Iowa, CBS' Reynolds ticked off eight states that may be ripe for "flipping"--Ohio, NC, Fla, Va, Colo, Nev, Mo, Ind. All three correspondents gave publicity to the Obama campaign's announcement of three late TV ad buy additions to that list--Georgia, North Dakota and "shockingly" Arizona, as ABC's Tapper saw it, given that it is John McCain's home base.
In a mangle of mathematical confusion, NBC anchor Brian Williams listed just six of those states, on which he claimed the election is "hinging"--Ohio, NC, Fla, Nev, Mo, Ind--with "a combined 89 electoral votes that will get you a long way to 270." The reason why this was confusing was that Williams' map had already assigned Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado to Obama's likely column, thereby giving him 286 votes, enough to win without any of those undecided 89.
Williams should have left the map in political director Chuck Todd's safer hands. In Todd We Trust. All Others Must Bring Data as the saying goes.
OHIO STATE & PENN STATE Republican John McCain rested his hopes for victory on doing the unexpected. "I think we are going to fool the pundits one more time," he predicted in his interview with ABC anchor Charles Gibson. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell repeated the claim by McCain's advisors that he has "enough resources, the money and manpower to get out the vote." She promoted his upcoming appearance on her network's Saturday Night Live, "hoping satire and a final push can give an underdog the last laugh." As for his state-by-state strategy, CBS' Chip Reid found McCain playing little defense in five of those vulnerable red states from 2004: NC, Fla, Nev, Mo, Ind. Instead all of McCain's eggs are in the baskets of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Reid contrasted the stump visits in those two states by each ticket over the last five days: Obama-Biden 7 vs McCain-Palin 25.
PLEADING FOR A FOLLOW-UP The technique of airing longer-than-usual one-on-one interview segments with the network anchors during the nightly newscasts has always been a hallmark of the waning days of a Presidential election campaign: so ABC gave six minutes to Charles Gibson and John McCain and NBC gave four minutes (in addition to Thursday's five minutes) to Brian Williams and Barack Obama.
It is a problem to let these interviews stand alone without accompanying reportage when the candidates say things that just do not make sense. McCain showed us a couple of cases in point. To illustrate his accusation that the motive for Obama's tax proposals is not to raise revenue but to redistribute wealth, McCain said this: "The fact is that 50% of small business income in America--you can check it--would be under his tax plan and would be taxed." This means that the other 50% of small business income would be tax-free. Does that make sense?
Then Gibson asked McCain what he would be glad to stop doing after Election Day: "Frankly, probably, ask for money. You know that is what I am not very good at. I am good at asking for votes, support, volunteers. I have just never been really good at asking for money." But is it not true that a key differences between McCain and Obama this fall has been that McCain is funded from the federal finance system. Does that not prohibit him from soliciting? Surely Obama is the one asking for money; McCain is the one free of it? Does this make sense?
NO CONGRESSIONAL CONTEST The anchors telegraphed a complete lack of suspense or curiosity about Tuesday's elections for House and Senate. Both ABC's Charles Gibson and NBC's Brian Williams assumed massive Democratic majorities in both houses in their hypotheticals about the next administration. Gibson asked John McCain about his plans to be bipartisan in the face of overwhelming opposition. "I have worked across the aisle," was his reply. Williams asked Barack Obama about the dangers of partisan overreach: "I think Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid probably are getting a bad rap here in the assumption that somehow they will not show self-restraint." Obama criticized the majority Democratic Party during Bill Clinton's first term and the majority Republican Party during George Bush's: "I think there have been some pretty good lessons over the last 15, 20 years."
THIN END OF THE BESTIALITY WEDGE At Campaign 2008's Presidential level there has been precious little coverage of those culture wars wedge issues that were such favorites in previous cycles. Each network dug a little deeper and found them alive and well at the state level. NBC's Andrea Mitchell took us to North Carolina, "a state with a church on almost every corner," where the Constitutional prohibition against religious tests for office appears to be honored in the breach by both candidates for Senate. Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole ran an ad accusing her rival of raising funds from "Godless Americans." Democratic challenger Kay Hagan responded that she is a Presbyterian Church elder and Sunday school teacher and accused Dole of "bearing false witness against a fellow Christian."
CBS sent Kelly Cobiella off to South Dakota to weigh the pros and cons of Initiative 11, a ballot measure that would criminalize almost all abortions, save those to preserve the health of the pregnant woman or to terminate a pregnancy that was conceived after either rape or incest. Cobiella noted that the state already had one of the lowest rates of abortion nationwide--just 700 this year--and if passed and upheld by the Supreme Court, women who wanted one would likely cross state lines for a legal procedure.
As for ABC, its 50 States in 50 Days series turned to California, whose Constitution will be amended to prohibit same-sex marriages if Proposition 8 passes. Dan Harris ticked off funding from both sides--"religious groups like Focus on the Family, the Knights of Columbus and members of the Mormon Church against Hollywood celebrity donors like Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg and Ellen DeGeneres"--to call it "one of the most expensive campaigns in the country, second only to the Presidential race." Harris quoted the slippery slope arguments made by some evangelical Christians in support of imposing the ban: "If gay marriage is allowed to stand, it would force churches to marry gays; force schools to teach gay marriage; and open the door to pedophilia and bestiality."
YOU CAN VOTE HOWEVER YOU LIKE Enough of the politicking, what about the voting itself? NBC's Michelle Kosinksi stood in awe next to early voters in Georgia's DeKalb County: "There are 1200 people in line right now where we are and we have not heard a single complaint." She reported that the conventional early voter is white, male and Republican: "This year we are seeing far more women, African-Americans and younger voters." On CBS, Armen Keteyian previewed the prospect of 80% voter turnout on Election Day and found "widespread anxiety that the system, both men and machine, may simply overload" and "fears over poorly trained poll workers, machine malfunction--and even the number of machines." Pennsylvania, for example, has one machine for every 350 voters; in Virginia the ratio is 1:750.
In celebration of a musical, non-partisan, get-out-the-vote effort, anchor Charles Gibson selected the debating society of Atlanta's Ron Clark Academy as ABC's Persons of the Week. Having thrashed out the defining principles of the platforms of John McCain and Barack Obama, the debaters rendered them as a dance video You Can Vote However You Like. At last count it had in excess of 500,000 hits on YouTube.
LAST 81 DAYS Remember George Bush? He is the incumbent President. Bob Schieffer (no link), anchor of CBS' Face the Nation, observed that he "has not appeared at one rally for any Republican candidate in public this year." With 81 days remaining in his administration, CBS called on one of its loneliest outposts, the White House press room. Brushing off the cobwebs, Jim Axelrod told us that this is the deadline for fresh regulations to be submitted for legal vetting. He reported that the White House is "sensitive to charges of an eleventh-hour rush to ram home pro-business, anti-environment regulatory changes." Yet Axelrod's examples fit that definition precisely: easing the ban on dumping mine debris near water; weakening rules for the installation of emission controls; watering down clean water laws for factory farms.
MUQTADA AL-SADR, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL The closing days of a Presidential campaign will always find foreign coverage taking a back seat. The Congo story should have been an exception but CBS and NBC both fell down on that job. At least NBC mustered a Friday Hot Spots feature from Richard Engel in Baghdad. He updated us on the impact of the 2.5-mile-long, 12-foot-high concrete wall the divides the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City. On the side patrolled by the US military, $53m have been spent on playgrounds, schools, clinics and on a mural on the wall itself; on the other side, thousands of followers of Muqtada al-Sadr ritually burn the American flag. The construction of the wall involved the killing of 1,000-or-so militia fighters, mostly targeted by Apache helicopter gunships, and the deaths of six GIs.
In a non sequitur, NBC's Engel quoted Ambassador Ryan Cocker thus: "al-Qaeda has been degraded but it has not been defeated." Engel did not explain why Crocker was under the misapprehension that Sadr City had anything to do with al-Qaeda.
NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR GUINNESS Peanuts fan and CBS anchor Katie Couric sent Assignment America correspondent Steve Hartman in search of the Great Pumpkin for Halloween. He returned with a profile of Steve Connolly, a gardener with the ambition to grow the first one-ton pumpkin. As recently as 1976, no pumpkin grew larger than 400lbs, Hartman told us. Careful selection of seeds has now produced a squash that can expand by 45lbs in a single day. Connolly won this year's weigh-off with a 1568lb gourd: "Enough for this year's record but not good enough for Guinness."
THAT’S THE TICKET FOR MCCAIN At the end of the primary season, John McCain complained that the mainstream media were not giving him a fair shake compared with Barack Obama. How times have changed! This fall, the Republican Presidential ticket has attracted almost twice as much nightly news coverage as its Democratic rivals.
Chalk that up to the Palin Effect. McCain's running mate Sarah Palin has been every bit the media phenomenon this fall that Obama was this spring. Joe Biden, by contrast, has been all-but invisible.
This is a reversal of priorities of the primary season. During the spring, the broadcast networks' weekday nightly newscasts treated Republican John McCain as roughly half as newsworthy as Democrat Barack Obama. In the eight weeks of campaign coverage since the end of the Republican National Convention, that ratio has been reversed: McCain received slightly more airtime than Obama; but the McCain ticket was roughly twice as newsworthy as the Obama ticket.
At Tyndall Report, we have monitored how the nightly newscasts have covered each Presidential cycle since 1988. Overall Campaign '08 has been more newsworthy than any of its predecessors (3533 min since the New Year v 2292 in '04; 1984 in '00; 1783 in '96; 2912 in '92; 2872 in '88). Yet all of its preeminence derives from the explosion of coverage during the extended primary season this winter and spring. This fall's Wall Street woes helped break that winning streak.
In the eight weeks of the campaign season since the end of the Republican National Convention, Campaign '08 has been heavily covered, accounting for 39% of the entire newshole of the three broadcast networks' weekday nightly newscasts (872 min out of 2251). Yet the General Election period was not head-and-shoulders more newsworthy compared with the same eight week period in previous years (872 min v 752 in '04, 566 in '00, 445 in '96, 937 in '92, 744 in '88).
The crisis in the financial industry accounted for that relatively normal level of campaign coverage. It sucked some of the oxygen out of what was building up to be a record breaking campaign. During the same eight-week period, non-campaign-related economic coverage attracted a total of 626 minutes (28% of the newshole), meaning that fully two-thirds of the entire news agenda this fall has been taken up with either the campaign or the economy. The federal bailout of the financial industry received a total of 242 minutes; the action on Wall Street accounted for 127.
The networks disagreed about which of the two stories should dominate. Katie Couric's CBS Evening News treated the campaign as much more newsworthy than the economy (372 min v 172); ABC World News (237 v 230) and NBC Nightly News (263 v 224) treated the two stories as more or less equally newsworthy.
As for the candidates themselves, more than half of the coverage this fall (475 min or 54%) has been on their activities on the stump, including one-on-one interviews with the network anchors. Other types of campaign journalism on the nightly news include issues reporting (137 min), the debates (60 min for the Presidentials, 26 for the Veeps), the horse race (44 min on poll results) and the contests in the several states (40 min).
When it comes to candidate coverage, the Republicans have had no problem obtaining exposure. John McCain attracted a little more airtime than Barack Obama (191 min v 164; during the primary season their ratio was 203 min v 389) but the phenomenon of the fall has been the bottom half of the GOP ticket. Sarah Palin (112 min) attracted almost as much attention as a Presidential contender whereas Joe Biden (8 min) has been a virtual non-entity. Add the two halves of the ticket together, and the GOP has been treated as almost twice as newsworthy (303 min v 172) as the Dems.
The McCain campaign's celebrity taunts against Obama this summer grew out of protests against the mainstream news media for treating Obama as their darling, refusing to grant McCain equal attention. Whether or not his decision to nominate the Governor Of Alaska as his running mate helped his prospects of winning the election, it certainly helped his ticket win the race for minutes of airtime.
Crossposted at Huffington Post.
ABC's Jake Tapper (no link) and CBS' Dean Reynolds and NBC's Lee Cowan all ended the day in Chicago for Halloween as candidate Obama took time off the campaign trail to admire his daughters' costumes. He started the day in Iowa, site of the caucus triumph in Iowa that was his first win of the primary season--and one of several states that George Bush won in 2004 that he hopes to turn from red to blue. Cowan was quite certain that Iowa would switch: "Today's return is a sentimental journey not one of necessity. Polls show him with a solid lead here."
Besides Iowa, CBS' Reynolds ticked off eight states that may be ripe for "flipping"--Ohio, NC, Fla, Va, Colo, Nev, Mo, Ind. All three correspondents gave publicity to the Obama campaign's announcement of three late TV ad buy additions to that list--Georgia, North Dakota and "shockingly" Arizona, as ABC's Tapper saw it, given that it is John McCain's home base.
In a mangle of mathematical confusion, NBC anchor Brian Williams listed just six of those states, on which he claimed the election is "hinging"--Ohio, NC, Fla, Nev, Mo, Ind--with "a combined 89 electoral votes that will get you a long way to 270." The reason why this was confusing was that Williams' map had already assigned Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado to Obama's likely column, thereby giving him 286 votes, enough to win without any of those undecided 89.
Williams should have left the map in political director Chuck Todd's safer hands. In Todd We Trust. All Others Must Bring Data as the saying goes.
OHIO STATE & PENN STATE Republican John McCain rested his hopes for victory on doing the unexpected. "I think we are going to fool the pundits one more time," he predicted in his interview with ABC anchor Charles Gibson. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell repeated the claim by McCain's advisors that he has "enough resources, the money and manpower to get out the vote." She promoted his upcoming appearance on her network's Saturday Night Live, "hoping satire and a final push can give an underdog the last laugh." As for his state-by-state strategy, CBS' Chip Reid found McCain playing little defense in five of those vulnerable red states from 2004: NC, Fla, Nev, Mo, Ind. Instead all of McCain's eggs are in the baskets of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Reid contrasted the stump visits in those two states by each ticket over the last five days: Obama-Biden 7 vs McCain-Palin 25.
PLEADING FOR A FOLLOW-UP The technique of airing longer-than-usual one-on-one interview segments with the network anchors during the nightly newscasts has always been a hallmark of the waning days of a Presidential election campaign: so ABC gave six minutes to Charles Gibson and John McCain and NBC gave four minutes (in addition to Thursday's five minutes) to Brian Williams and Barack Obama.
It is a problem to let these interviews stand alone without accompanying reportage when the candidates say things that just do not make sense. McCain showed us a couple of cases in point. To illustrate his accusation that the motive for Obama's tax proposals is not to raise revenue but to redistribute wealth, McCain said this: "The fact is that 50% of small business income in America--you can check it--would be under his tax plan and would be taxed." This means that the other 50% of small business income would be tax-free. Does that make sense?
Then Gibson asked McCain what he would be glad to stop doing after Election Day: "Frankly, probably, ask for money. You know that is what I am not very good at. I am good at asking for votes, support, volunteers. I have just never been really good at asking for money." But is it not true that a key differences between McCain and Obama this fall has been that McCain is funded from the federal finance system. Does that not prohibit him from soliciting? Surely Obama is the one asking for money; McCain is the one free of it? Does this make sense?
NO CONGRESSIONAL CONTEST The anchors telegraphed a complete lack of suspense or curiosity about Tuesday's elections for House and Senate. Both ABC's Charles Gibson and NBC's Brian Williams assumed massive Democratic majorities in both houses in their hypotheticals about the next administration. Gibson asked John McCain about his plans to be bipartisan in the face of overwhelming opposition. "I have worked across the aisle," was his reply. Williams asked Barack Obama about the dangers of partisan overreach: "I think Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid probably are getting a bad rap here in the assumption that somehow they will not show self-restraint." Obama criticized the majority Democratic Party during Bill Clinton's first term and the majority Republican Party during George Bush's: "I think there have been some pretty good lessons over the last 15, 20 years."
THIN END OF THE BESTIALITY WEDGE At Campaign 2008's Presidential level there has been precious little coverage of those culture wars wedge issues that were such favorites in previous cycles. Each network dug a little deeper and found them alive and well at the state level. NBC's Andrea Mitchell took us to North Carolina, "a state with a church on almost every corner," where the Constitutional prohibition against religious tests for office appears to be honored in the breach by both candidates for Senate. Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole ran an ad accusing her rival of raising funds from "Godless Americans." Democratic challenger Kay Hagan responded that she is a Presbyterian Church elder and Sunday school teacher and accused Dole of "bearing false witness against a fellow Christian."
CBS sent Kelly Cobiella off to South Dakota to weigh the pros and cons of Initiative 11, a ballot measure that would criminalize almost all abortions, save those to preserve the health of the pregnant woman or to terminate a pregnancy that was conceived after either rape or incest. Cobiella noted that the state already had one of the lowest rates of abortion nationwide--just 700 this year--and if passed and upheld by the Supreme Court, women who wanted one would likely cross state lines for a legal procedure.
As for ABC, its 50 States in 50 Days series turned to California, whose Constitution will be amended to prohibit same-sex marriages if Proposition 8 passes. Dan Harris ticked off funding from both sides--"religious groups like Focus on the Family, the Knights of Columbus and members of the Mormon Church against Hollywood celebrity donors like Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg and Ellen DeGeneres"--to call it "one of the most expensive campaigns in the country, second only to the Presidential race." Harris quoted the slippery slope arguments made by some evangelical Christians in support of imposing the ban: "If gay marriage is allowed to stand, it would force churches to marry gays; force schools to teach gay marriage; and open the door to pedophilia and bestiality."
YOU CAN VOTE HOWEVER YOU LIKE Enough of the politicking, what about the voting itself? NBC's Michelle Kosinksi stood in awe next to early voters in Georgia's DeKalb County: "There are 1200 people in line right now where we are and we have not heard a single complaint." She reported that the conventional early voter is white, male and Republican: "This year we are seeing far more women, African-Americans and younger voters." On CBS, Armen Keteyian previewed the prospect of 80% voter turnout on Election Day and found "widespread anxiety that the system, both men and machine, may simply overload" and "fears over poorly trained poll workers, machine malfunction--and even the number of machines." Pennsylvania, for example, has one machine for every 350 voters; in Virginia the ratio is 1:750.
In celebration of a musical, non-partisan, get-out-the-vote effort, anchor Charles Gibson selected the debating society of Atlanta's Ron Clark Academy as ABC's Persons of the Week. Having thrashed out the defining principles of the platforms of John McCain and Barack Obama, the debaters rendered them as a dance video You Can Vote However You Like. At last count it had in excess of 500,000 hits on YouTube.
LAST 81 DAYS Remember George Bush? He is the incumbent President. Bob Schieffer (no link), anchor of CBS' Face the Nation, observed that he "has not appeared at one rally for any Republican candidate in public this year." With 81 days remaining in his administration, CBS called on one of its loneliest outposts, the White House press room. Brushing off the cobwebs, Jim Axelrod told us that this is the deadline for fresh regulations to be submitted for legal vetting. He reported that the White House is "sensitive to charges of an eleventh-hour rush to ram home pro-business, anti-environment regulatory changes." Yet Axelrod's examples fit that definition precisely: easing the ban on dumping mine debris near water; weakening rules for the installation of emission controls; watering down clean water laws for factory farms.
MUQTADA AL-SADR, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL The closing days of a Presidential campaign will always find foreign coverage taking a back seat. The Congo story should have been an exception but CBS and NBC both fell down on that job. At least NBC mustered a Friday Hot Spots feature from Richard Engel in Baghdad. He updated us on the impact of the 2.5-mile-long, 12-foot-high concrete wall the divides the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City. On the side patrolled by the US military, $53m have been spent on playgrounds, schools, clinics and on a mural on the wall itself; on the other side, thousands of followers of Muqtada al-Sadr ritually burn the American flag. The construction of the wall involved the killing of 1,000-or-so militia fighters, mostly targeted by Apache helicopter gunships, and the deaths of six GIs.
In a non sequitur, NBC's Engel quoted Ambassador Ryan Cocker thus: "al-Qaeda has been degraded but it has not been defeated." Engel did not explain why Crocker was under the misapprehension that Sadr City had anything to do with al-Qaeda.
NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR GUINNESS Peanuts fan and CBS anchor Katie Couric sent Assignment America correspondent Steve Hartman in search of the Great Pumpkin for Halloween. He returned with a profile of Steve Connolly, a gardener with the ambition to grow the first one-ton pumpkin. As recently as 1976, no pumpkin grew larger than 400lbs, Hartman told us. Careful selection of seeds has now produced a squash that can expand by 45lbs in a single day. Connolly won this year's weigh-off with a 1568lb gourd: "Enough for this year's record but not good enough for Guinness."
THAT’S THE TICKET FOR MCCAIN At the end of the primary season, John McCain complained that the mainstream media were not giving him a fair shake compared with Barack Obama. How times have changed! This fall, the Republican Presidential ticket has attracted almost twice as much nightly news coverage as its Democratic rivals.
Chalk that up to the Palin Effect. McCain's running mate Sarah Palin has been every bit the media phenomenon this fall that Obama was this spring. Joe Biden, by contrast, has been all-but invisible.
This is a reversal of priorities of the primary season. During the spring, the broadcast networks' weekday nightly newscasts treated Republican John McCain as roughly half as newsworthy as Democrat Barack Obama. In the eight weeks of campaign coverage since the end of the Republican National Convention, that ratio has been reversed: McCain received slightly more airtime than Obama; but the McCain ticket was roughly twice as newsworthy as the Obama ticket.
At Tyndall Report, we have monitored how the nightly newscasts have covered each Presidential cycle since 1988. Overall Campaign '08 has been more newsworthy than any of its predecessors (3533 min since the New Year v 2292 in '04; 1984 in '00; 1783 in '96; 2912 in '92; 2872 in '88). Yet all of its preeminence derives from the explosion of coverage during the extended primary season this winter and spring. This fall's Wall Street woes helped break that winning streak.
In the eight weeks of the campaign season since the end of the Republican National Convention, Campaign '08 has been heavily covered, accounting for 39% of the entire newshole of the three broadcast networks' weekday nightly newscasts (872 min out of 2251). Yet the General Election period was not head-and-shoulders more newsworthy compared with the same eight week period in previous years (872 min v 752 in '04, 566 in '00, 445 in '96, 937 in '92, 744 in '88).
The crisis in the financial industry accounted for that relatively normal level of campaign coverage. It sucked some of the oxygen out of what was building up to be a record breaking campaign. During the same eight-week period, non-campaign-related economic coverage attracted a total of 626 minutes (28% of the newshole), meaning that fully two-thirds of the entire news agenda this fall has been taken up with either the campaign or the economy. The federal bailout of the financial industry received a total of 242 minutes; the action on Wall Street accounted for 127.
The networks disagreed about which of the two stories should dominate. Katie Couric's CBS Evening News treated the campaign as much more newsworthy than the economy (372 min v 172); ABC World News (237 v 230) and NBC Nightly News (263 v 224) treated the two stories as more or less equally newsworthy.
As for the candidates themselves, more than half of the coverage this fall (475 min or 54%) has been on their activities on the stump, including one-on-one interviews with the network anchors. Other types of campaign journalism on the nightly news include issues reporting (137 min), the debates (60 min for the Presidentials, 26 for the Veeps), the horse race (44 min on poll results) and the contests in the several states (40 min).
When it comes to candidate coverage, the Republicans have had no problem obtaining exposure. John McCain attracted a little more airtime than Barack Obama (191 min v 164; during the primary season their ratio was 203 min v 389) but the phenomenon of the fall has been the bottom half of the GOP ticket. Sarah Palin (112 min) attracted almost as much attention as a Presidential contender whereas Joe Biden (8 min) has been a virtual non-entity. Add the two halves of the ticket together, and the GOP has been treated as almost twice as newsworthy (303 min v 172) as the Dems.
The McCain campaign's celebrity taunts against Obama this summer grew out of protests against the mainstream news media for treating Obama as their darling, refusing to grant McCain equal attention. Whether or not his decision to nominate the Governor Of Alaska as his running mate helped his prospects of winning the election, it certainly helped his ticket win the race for minutes of airtime.
Crossposted at Huffington Post.
