Four out of five Americans cite television as their primary news source. If coverage of the run-up to the November presidential election is anything to go by, these Americans won’t have much to inform them when it comes time to cast their ballots.
Take the recent Democratic National Convention held in Boston. If you watched network television news to find out what the convention could tell you about the Democrats, you would know that the Democratic nominee’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, told a reporter to “shove it”. You’d also know that New York black politician, Al Sharpton, went over the allotted time for his remarks (twenty minutes instead of seven), and that the nominee himself, John Kerry, once rescued his daughters’ drowning hamster.
Things you would know less about include the policy proposals or internal party politics of the Democrats. There was no serious coverage of what happened behind the scenes – who funded the whole thing, what they got for their cash, the interests weighing on the candidates, or struggles for power within the party. “Behind the scenes” meant movie star Ben Affleck (a Kerry fan). Viewers saw him throwing out a baseball on NBC’s morning show and were treated to speculation about what chances the Kerry daughters had of hooking up with Jennifer Lopez’s former fiancé.
That said, there wasn’t much “in-front-of-the-scenes” coverage, either. The three main broadcast networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, each aired only three hours of the four-day event, and even the 24-hour cable news channels like CNN, CNBC, and Fox News, which did allow paid subscribers access to a bigger slice of the convention, gave much of their airtime over to talking heads who babbled on about Teresa Heinz Kerry’s etiquette or counted how many times John Kerry’s Vietnam service was mentioned by speakers.
An American presidential election always carries enormous geopolitical weight because of the size of the U.S. economy and the country’s role as sole superpower. But this election is of course even more closely watched, because of the imperial ambitions of the current regime and hopes, founded or not, that some homegrown “regime change” might blunt America’s renewed pursuit of its “Manifest Destiny.”
Since this election promises to be a tight one, it is therefore understandable to some extent that the coverage has been dominated by “horse race” analysis – who is ahead, who is behind. This is compounded by the archaic complexity of the American electoral system, in which the most popular candidate does not automatically win the election. (Rather, states “vote” as unequally weighted blocks, as anyone who followed the fiasco of the vote counting in Florida last time around will remember.) So polls and opinion surveys of “undecided voters” in “swing states” become an obsession of the press.
And because it is presumed that these undecided voters don’t care about policy (if they did, how could they be undecided at this late date?), reporters turn to trivia that supposedly reveals something about the candidates or their partners’ “character”. Teresa Heinz Kerry’s “shove it” remark was recycled by CNN and the other networks for up to four days in a row to explain to voters what kind of first lady Mrs. Heinz Kerry would turn out to be. This is not the sole province of the evening news, however. The New York Times recently opined (and I’m serious) on its news analysis pages: “One of the many differences separating John Kerry and George W. Bush is their choice of bicycle.” The article spent another 1000-odd words comparing their riding habits.
Paul Krugman, a left-liberal columnist in the New York Times and a regular critic of the mainstream media (one wonders how he keeps his column), feels strongly about this: “The triumph of the trivial is not a trivial matter. The failure of TV news to inform the public about the policy proposals of this year’s presidential candidates is, in its own way, as serious a journalistic betrayal as the failure to raise questions about the rush to invade Iraq.”
There is of course another, simpler reason for all of this: the chase for ratings. That means editors and producers want drama. During the Democratic convention, reporters and journalists complained at the choreographed spectacle, stage-managed speeches, and high-tech gadgetry, and would seize on any unscripted movement. One anchor spent much of his pre-Kerry speech coverage speculating whether Kerry would go over his allotted time and discomfort viewers waiting to see reruns of their daily comedy and drama fix.
Even more serious criticism has been raised about commentators’ complicity in reproducing the spin and counter-spin of the two main parties. The use of “talking points” is an especially pernicious practice. “Talking points” are briefs put out by both parties, the storylines they want to see reproduced by journalists. While these storylines shape evening news broadcasts, their impact is more visible on the 24-hour cable channels, which are more hungry for easy content.
The effects of this are most visible in repeated themes, such as whether John Kerry is a “flip-flopper” (a term that the Republican Party has flogged and which has become almost a ritual incantation on the Fox News channel). Fox is the worst offender, having essentially taken up the role of propaganda arm of the right wing of the Republican Party – think the SABC under apartheid but with flashier graphics. (Polls repeatedly show that people who get their news from Fox still believe that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had direct links, weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and that most of the world supports the Iraq war. But CNN and the other, more respectable channels, are far from immune on beating the patriotic drum and misleading viewers.)
Some Americans have resorted to out-of-the way sources for their election coverage. C-Span, a public service channel, provided comprehensive, commentary-free coverage of the Democratic National Convention and other campaign events of both parties. Others resort to bloggers, read international newspapers on the web (the UK Guardian a particular favourite), or wait for the nightly bulletins of BBC World News (relayed on local public television channels). And still others look to political documentaries, which are enjoying something of a renaissance in America this election year (more about that in my next column). But these sources are not accessible to everyone. C-Span is available to cable subscribers only, those searching for bloggers must both have internet access and be sophisticated enough to find their way through the glut of information on the web, and the BBC news broadcasts on public television are not available in all markets.
So for most, the broadcast and cable networks are the best access to “news” about the campaigns that they’ll get till November. On present evidence, that means Americans are apt to make their choice based on trivia rather than on the facts about the parties, the candidates, and their platforms. But then again, most Americans – to quote “ratings”, that most reliable of American measures – choose to tune out political news.