Big Three Networks Dim Their Lights on Kerryby
Timothy Karr
from USA Today
For election coverage, we project NBC News as the winner
With Election 2004 behind
us, experts have a wide range of views on how broadcast
and cable news outlets stacked up. But many agree that in
a campaign in which media missteps often got as much
attention as the candidates, being scandal-free held
special value.
In that sense, NBC News scored big. "Nobody blamed NBC for anything," including this year's favorite tag, political bias, says Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. For the top-rated news network, often accused of going the "infotainment" route, this election also proved those critics wrong. Outgoing anchor Tom Brokaw sprinted this last year, including a memorable Dateline with both President Bush and John Kerry; Sunday talk-show king Tim Russert contributed on-target political analysis; Today's Matt Lauer got a scoop after Bush said the U.S. "may not win" the war on terrorism. And lanky NBC White House correspondent David Gregory (nicknamed "Stretch" by the president) "has a way with Bush, and is not afraid to zing him," says network news analyst Andrew Tyndall. But doubts linger about Brokaw's heir, Brian Williams. Tyndall says that his being relegated on Election Night to reporting from a basement studio in NBC's Democracy Plaza not next to his mentor Brokaw signalled that Williams "failed to put his stamp on this election." How other outlets fared: At ABC News, political chief Mark Halperin earned his stripes with his political weblog, The Note, now required reading for political junkies but was flogged for his memo suggesting that sins by the Bush team deserved more scrutiny than sins by the Kerry camp. High marks go to correspondent Brian Ross for his revived "money trail" segments, and to Jake Tapper for his "fact check" pieces. Anchor Diane Sawyer was first with Howard Dean after his famous "scream" and Bill Clinton after heart surgery. But ABC continues to be dogged by charges from conservatives that it leans left. Halperin's memo "implied that journalists get to tell us the truth, as opposed to us deciding for ourselves," Lichter says. Meanwhile, Ted Koppel and Nightline have been trumped by Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and his Daily Show in terms of political late-night buzz, and political guru George Stephanopoulos has yet to gain traction on ratings-challenged This Week signs that both Nightline and Week need rehab. CBS was having one of its best political years following Dan Rather's 60 Minutes scoop on abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. But then he and his network were hit by "Memogate," in which Rather cited documents of dubious origin to question Bush's military service. Conservatives crowed that the scandal proved CBS News leans left, a charge the network denies. Viewers were rightly put off by CBS' denial, then subsequent admission, that the reporting was flawed, says Dale Harrison, an Auburn University journalism professor. "All we got was a vague apology, and we still don't know what the facts are." On Election Night, Rather's patented turns of phrases so-called "Danisms" such as "This race is hotter than the devil's anvil" "had become painful," says Joe Angotti, a Northwestern University journalism professor. Network fears of making a wrong call had Rather repeating perhaps to a fault that CBS "would 'rather be last than wrong,' and so they were," says Lichter at least according to network ratings. PBS and The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer had a strong year, with political operatives from all sides showing up regularly for in-depth interviews. PBS "lived up to its reputation for substance and balance," says Lichter, and solidified The NewsHour as "TV news for people who don't like TV news." Lehrer proved again to be a no-nonsense debate host; Gwen Ifill, moderating the vice presidential debate, became a household name, at least for a night. As cable moves more toward confrontational shoutfests, NewsHour remains a quiet oasis, says Tyndall. Fox News Channel drew more viewers than any of the Big Three at the Republican Convention an historic first in TV news but one likely to be repeated by Fox and other cable outlets, predicts Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. By limiting convention coverage to a handful of hours in prime time missing such key moments as the speech by rising Democratic star Barack Obama "the networks signalled to the public, 'Don't turn to us as public institutions anymore. We are worried first about making money,' " Rosenstiel says. Brit Hume, the former ABC News White House correspondent, clearly seems at home at Fox, as does another ABC defector, Chris Wallace. And right-leaning Fox may be in the catbird seat with the re-election of a conservative president. Not even a widely covered sex harassment scandal, since settled, involving star Bill O'Reilly could shake cable's No. 1-rated news channel, which drew 8 million viewers on Election Night. Fox's success may be in its feisty, news-with-attitude style, which rivals are copying while trying not to be too obvious about it. At Fox, "attitude is the star," says Tyndall, "and the rule is, 'We're not afraid to make fun of people if we don't like them.' That's a whole new ball of wax in TV news." As for CNN, some think the granddaddy of cable news did fine, but others say that after 24 years its look and format are stale, and that CNN's tepid ratings reflect it. Angotti says that CNN had "the best coverage on cable. Judy Woodruff and Jeff Greenfield are extremely qualified and clear-thinking reporters. Everything they say seems to make sense." But Harrison says that "when you've been around for a long time, that can be a liability or an asset. CNN's model seems to be limping along, trying to keep up." MSNBC, the also-ran in cable news, showed signs of rejuvenation, outgunning CNN during the GOP convention with 1.3 million viewers. Buzz about Matthews' Hardball "makes me think NBC may be able to make MSNBC succeed," says Tyndall. Matthews, famously parodied on Saturday Night Live, has "worked his way back into a respectable place at NBC News as a pundit not a shouter," says Lichter.
Once Bitten, Twice Tempted, but No Call in Wee Hours Published: November 4, 2004, New York Times It was 2:16 on Wednesday morning when Michael Barone, an analyst for Fox News Channel, wheeled around in his chair and faced the four people charged with calling the presidential race on behalf of the network. "I just got some spin from Rove on New Mexico,'' Mr. Barone said.
Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political strategist, was urging the network to call that state in the president's favor. New Mexico's five electoral votes would have pushed Mr. Bush over the top, and would have made Fox News the first network to name a winner. The response from John Moody, senior vice president news-editorial for Fox News and the ultimate arbiter, came swiftly. "Not yet,'' Mr. Moody said. And so no more crucial state calls would come on this election night at Fox, or at any other broadcast or cable news network. A night that began in near unanimity, born of changes made after the 2000 election night fiasco and of early data from surveys of voters leaving the polls that showed the president headed for defeat, would end in the equivalent of a hung jury, even though all the networks were using essentially the same raw materials of voter surveys and raw vote counts. By 1 a.m. Wednesday, Fox, NBC and MSNBC had all given Ohio to Mr. Bush, assuring him of at least a tie, but had still declined to call the election. Meanwhile, CBS, ABC and CNN kept Ohio out of the Bush column, giving Senator John Kerry's camp some ultimately misplaced hope that its candidate might yet pull out the victory. It was the starkest divide among the networks on a long election night that occasionally bucked the conventional wisdom. Here was Fox, for example, so often described - in liberal Web logs and elsewhere - as a broadcast annex of the White House, refusing an opportunity to be the first network to declare the president's re-election. Similarly, CBS News, which has been pounded by the right since it broadcast a flawed segment about President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service, was more aggressive than the other networks in calling some states for the president, at least in the early evening. The skittishness of some of the other networks to make early calls, particularly on states assumed to be in the president's column and that ended up there, was rooted in frustration with variations between the voter surveys and the vote tallies. Those concerns were only heightened as news executives worried that a bad call would surely invite comparisons to the 2000 election, when each network bungled its call on Florida. Still, it was on the question of how to analyze the results from Ohio that the differences among the network "decision desks'' became most apparent. Fox News, which was the first to call Ohio for President Bush, at 12:40 a.m., did so with relative speed. Huddled around folding tables in a makeshift studio, Mr. Moody and three consultants examined Mr. Bush's lead of approximately 130,000 votes in the state and concluded that it would be virtually impossible for his Democratic opponent to catch up. They based their analysis on the so-called provisional ballots that remained to be counted - to win Ohio, Mr. Kerry would have had to win an overwhelming majority - and on the precincts that had yet to report results, including Republican-leaning Cincinnati. "We agree,'' said John Gorman, the president of Opinion Dynamics, the network's outside polling unit. "Ohio, Bush.'' Less than 20 minutes later, NBC news officials would reach the same conclusion for roughly the same reasons. "Our models told us when it was safe to call a state,'' said Allison Gollust, an NBC spokeswoman. "It didn't matter what other people were saying,'' Ms. Gollust added. "And of course, as it turned out, we were right.'' That is not to say CBS was not tempted to make such a call. At virtually the same moment Fox's Mr. Moody gave the go-ahead, CBS informed its affiliates to stand by for a big announcement. But the network's analysts soon dashed the control room's optimism, arguing that the so-called provisional ballots that Fox had discounted in Ohio rendered Ohio a tossup. Dan Rather, the CBS anchor, minced no words in explaining the noncall to his audience at 1:30 a.m. "Having been embarrassed about the Florida calls in 2000, we said that we would rather be last than wrong.'' On Wednesday afternoon, Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS News, expressed no regret at the network's hesitation. "Nobody wanted to be in a position of declaring a winner before the candidates agreed to it,'' Mr. Heyward said. "You notice,'' he added, "that those other networks didn't project a single other state that night - they stayed stuck on 269 - because they knew what we knew: that the election was not going to be decided that night.'' For Fox News analysts, the temptation to call the election outright for Mr. Bush surfaced at 1:50 a.m., nearly a half-hour before Mr. Rove's call to Mr. Barone. A graduate student assisting Fox concluded that Mr. Bush had probably won New Mexico. But Mr. Moody, the senior vice president, and Mr. Gorman, the pollster, urged caution, pointing to the incongruously low voter turnout and questions over the number of absentee ballots. Mr. Gorman said on Wednesday afternoon that the pressure of potentially calling the race for the president had not influenced the decision. "We still can't make the case for New Mexico,'' Mr. Gorman said. "It's razor thin.'' Bill Carter and Randy Kennedy contributed reporting for this article. |
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from
the November 03, 2004 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1103/p09s02-cogn.html
Campaign's lasting effect for mediaBy Tim RuttenLOS ANGELES - Whatever the election results are, there's a growing sense that this race may involve tectonic shifts in the landscape of political journalism. It's still much too early to recognize clearly, let alone chart, what the new lay of the land may be. It's important, moreover, to keep in mind that much that seems new may have as much to do with changes among the consumers of media as with the media itself. For more than a generation, American political journalism - like most public opinion research - has organized itself around the assumption that public participation in the electoral process has been low and is generally drifting downward. The problem, as editors and producers saw it, was to get people interested. Call it the minimal interest/low turnout model. That was then; this is now. One consequence of the nation's deep, bitter, essentially even division is that its people have rediscovered their politics. The most recent survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 96 percent of registered voters believed this campaign is "important" and that fully 66 percent found it "interesting." As recently as June, just a third of the survey's respondents thought the campaign was worth following. More than 8 out of 10 voters said they found the race easy to follow, and 73 percent called the campaign "informative." However, their interest in the message doesn't translate into approval of the messenger. Andrew Kohut, who directs the Pew survey, said 58 percent of voters "think that members of the news media often let their own political preferences influence their reporting." And yet, a 54 percent majority rates the media's coverage of this election as "good" or "excellent." Television is one place where you already can see this paradoxical perception - that the media are biased, but their coverage is good - at work. Here, the changes wrought by campaign 2004 are readily discerned: This election year marked the end of the mainstream broadcast networks' serious participation in American political journalism and the decisive rise to influence of the cable news operations. When CBS, NBC, and ABC declined to offer serious coverage of the national political conventions, it was a clear signal that their news divisions' corporate overseers had lost the will - that is, the financial incentive - to fulfill their obligation, as federal license holders, to operate in the public interest. In fact, the networks' only notable campaign moment was another sign of decline and fall: the humiliation suffered by "60 Minutes" and CBS News anchor Dan Rather, when they rushed onto the air with an anti-Bush exposι based on patently fraudulent documents. This year, television's electoral coverage has been dominated by cable news, in ways both distinctive and disturbing. For all intents and purposes, we now have a Republican TV news network - Fox News - and a Democratic one, CNN. According to that Pew survey, 70 percent of voters who say they get most of their election news from Fox plan to vote for President Bush, while just 21 percent intend to support Sen. John Kerry. Among voters who rely on CNN for their news, 67 percent support Senator Kerry and 26 percent say they'll back Mr. Bush. The partisan cast of Fox's audience is a consequence of the network's business model and its on-air structure as a kind of right-wing electronic op-ed page - a 24-hour cycle on which studio chat shows are strung like beads linked by snippets of news. Fair and balanced it may not be, but cheap and opinionated it surely is. CNN, by contrast, has pursued a brand of journalism that attempts to observe the traditional mainstream ethical attachment to balance and dispassion. Whether it can maintain that stance as its audience drifts more solidly Democratic is an open question. The logic of broadcast management in which programming decisions are so intimately directed by viewer preferences would seem to argue against it. Clearly, perceived political bias doesn't bother many people; increasingly larger shares of the audience are tuning to cable stations for news. The specter of TV journalism divided along partisan, ideological lines is disturbing enough, but it pales alongside the implications of the most serious media controversy to erupt in the campaign's closing weeks: the abortive attempt by Sinclair Broadcasting to order all its stations to air an anti-Kerry documentary in prime time. However influential old media - as in newspapers - may remain, and however significant new media - as in the blogosphere - may become, the majority of Americans get most of their news from local television. That's been true for more than a generation, and it's one of the reasons the Sinclair flap ignited such passions. All of the Baltimore-based broadcast company's stations are in small- and medium-size cities, places where the importance of local TV news is amplified. As Elizabeth Jensen and other Los Angeles Times reporters have documented, the chain has grown in the face of what amounts to Federal Communications Commission indifference to its own regulatory strictures on media concentration. In several instances, Sinclair has been allowed to control two stations in the same market. It has been allowed, moreover, to compel all its stations - and remember, each is individually licensed to operate in the public interest - to air news and conservative commentary produced by the corporate headquarters. The ability of an operation like that to focus all its resources on tipping a tight election is obvious, which is why all hell broke lose when Sinclair announced plans to air the anti-Kerry documentary. Threats of lawsuits, boycotts, and congressionally directed regulatory action followed. Sinclair backed down. The problem is this: While what Sinclair proposed to do was, by every defensible journalistic standard, wrong and unethical, it was entitled to behave so as an assertion of its rights under the First Amendment. The First Amendment protects all speech, not just true speech or good speech or fair speech. It affords its highest protection, moreover, to political speech, which the documentary - whatever its moral or factual defects - most assuredly is. This threat to the most fundamental of our liberties was created by the FCC's failure to defend the public's interest. Media concentration raises the stakes in any given legal controversy to a point where it virtually invites legal and governmental intrusion into the media's editorial decisions, putting the First Amendment at unconscionable risk. There's an unlooked-for lesson from this campaign. Tim Rutten writes about the media for the Los Angeles Times. © Los Angeles Times. |
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TV journalists stick to what they know
By Hal Boedeker | Orlando Sentinel Television Critic
Posted November 3, 2004
"We're going to err on the side of caution," CNN's Wolf Blitzer said at 6:26 p.m. "There's no rush to judgment."
He warned that reporting a winner of the presidency could take awhile. Competitors echoed the caution through the evening. They didn't want to repeat the blunders of election night in 2000, when they were famously off in projecting Florida's razor-thin finish.
"We have no intention of sugarcoating it," ABC's Peter Jennings said. "All the networks blew it four years ago."
Tom Brokaw was equally humble as he made his final election night appearance as NBC's anchor. "We're going to take our time and get it right," he said. "We've been encouraged by the forbearance of the American people."
In saying there was insufficient data to call South Carolina, CBS' Dan Rather said the network was "being very conservative as the evening goes along." But Rather was showing little restraint in delivering his down-home witticisms.
"This presidential race is hotter than the devil's anvil," he said. About the Florida contest, Rather quoted an old saying, "Politics has got so expensive, it takes a lot of money just to get beat with."
Shortly after 8 p.m., CBS' Bob Schieffer relayed a White House source's comment that Gov. Jeb Bush had called to say his brother had probably won several counties, including Orange. "They have no idea how Florida is going to come out, but they're feeling a little better at this hour," Schieffer said.
Rather found that an example of spin. He later noted that the campaigns for President Bush and Sen. John Kerry were spinning because so many polls were still open.
"Right now, only votes talk. Everything else walks, including all that spin," Rather said.
Florida commanded heavy attention because of 2000. At 8:45 p.m., NBC's Lisa Myers reported that the Bush campaign felt it had done better in the I-4 corridor. At 8:50 p.m., NBC's Brian Williams said that exit polling showed Kerry doing well among first-time voters.
The long voting lines and uncertain outcome in Ohio drew television's attention, but Florida was never far from center screen. On CNN, Bob Woodward of The Washington Post found a lot of contradictory information coming out of the Sunshine State and applauded the channel for holding off on projections.
"You all have taken a Valium cooler or something, and everyone is being careful," Woodward said. "There is good reason to be careful."
But problems still cropped up. At 9:17 p.m. on Fox News Channel, Brit Hume found "tantalizing indications" that exit polling might be off in indicating the presidential victor.
CNN's Tucker Carlson said exit polling needed to be reassessed. "It does stink," he said. "It's useless."
The ghost of 2000 was hanging over the night. ABC and CNN explained how they had improved their systems after the debacle four years ago in projecting outcomes.
"When these calls are made, everyone feels more comfortable about them," CNN's Judy Woodruff said. "This time, everybody is trying to do everything we can here at CNN to make sure that [2000] doesn't happen again."
The news organizations went at their own speeds in calling the states. There was no sense of competition on that front. They worked to be transparent in their methods. Michael Barone explained that Fox News Channel was being careful in calling a close U.S. Senate race in Kentucky.
A few networks put more showmanship into the visuals. CNN had the busiest look when it threw up many returns simultaneously on the NASDAQ wall in New York. NBC offered the most scenic backdrop with its views of flag-decorated Rockefeller Center. NBC also relied on a familiar prop when Tim Russert pulled out his pad to track the Electoral College.
ABC used its map to explain the close race and possible outcomes. In projecting Florida for Bush at about 11:40 p.m., ABC's Mark Helperin said it was important for the people of Florida to be spared a repeat of 2000.
"This is a scrambled night, and it could be a long one," NBC's Brokaw warned.
His last election night as anchor was a memorable one because of the close presidential race. It was also probably Rather's last election night in the central role at CBS. When he's gone, the election rite will lose a lot of its color.
Rather took pains with the Florida projection. "Having been burned once in Florida, you better believe that of all places, if we're going to get singed anywhere, we don't want it to be Florida this time," he said. "And I wouldn't kid anybody about that."
Hal Boedeker can be reached at 407-420-5756
