Edited For Television

Cnn, Abc, And The 1992 Presidential Campaign

Matthew Robert Kerbel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367007683
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429719899
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book discusses the words and pictures that constituted coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign on ABC and CNN. It addresses the implications of the news product for the viewing audience and the impact of the forces that create television news on the political system.

1
Introduction

We are heading for a presidential campaign that within the next twelve years will take place either within a TV studio or at least within television's special confines. I am not sure I know what to do about it.

—Roger Mudd¹

It was that kind of year.

A real vice president sends a real gift to the fictional child of a fictional television character. A billionaire becomes a media celebrity and a serious independent presidential contender, only to self-destruct—twice—under television's searing hot lights. Larry King emerges as an electoral force, perhaps the first-ever host of a presidential campaign.

The 1992 national election did not simply unfold on television; it was of and about television. Presidential candidates masquerading as pitchmen hawked toll-free phone numbers and feel-good imagery on forums ranging from the traditional ("Meet the Press" and "Today") to the unorthodox and downright bizarre ("The Arsenio Hall Show" and MTV),² as all the while television reporters dutifully legitimated these events by making them the focus of coverage. There were "electronic town meetings" and "infomercials," with candidates serving as ginsu knife substitutes. Ross Perot went so far as to reduce his reborn quest for the presidency to a series of commercial messages, which the major television networks felt worthy of news coverage in their own right. Roger Mudd erred only by allowing twelve years for his prediction to come true.

Television's domination of the electoral spotlight was far more insidious than these events suggest. Some of it may be understood in terms of what Mudd calls "television's special confines," in which the medium sets the conditions for what millions come to know as the presidential campaign. Television, secure in its cardinal role as the primary institution connecting Americans with their political candidates, is free to cover what it feels is important. And quite often, nothing is more important to television than television itself. Consequently, the campaign story on the evening news was often about little more than how the press covered the election.

During the 1992 campaign, reporters routinely inserted themselves and their experiences into election text, becoming co-stars in a drama of their own creation while sending a strong, cynical message to the audience about the evils of the political system. The problematic nature of candidate-reporter relationships, the backstage efforts by candidates at television image-making, the underlying motivations for candidate behavior toward the press—these constitute the reporter's experience as she fights boredom and campaign operatives in search of something new. Although such topics are of dubious utility to the news viewer, in 1992 they became the news.

Beyond this pervasive interest in the self, television coverage of the 1992 election may be most noteworthy for what it was not. It was not about institutions that were uninvolved in electoral competition, like interest groups. In fact, it wasn't really about institutions at all, favoring as it did individuals over groups or organizations in all facets of coverage. Even such political structures as the major parties and their representatives were rarely mentioned. And only certain individuals were favored: Most nonpolitical or apolitical individuals received little notice. Absent as well were ideological arguments and members of groups that might espouse them. Finally, for all the fanfare surrounding the advent of narrowcasting, election coverage was not much different on cable television than on the traditional broadcast networks.

This is surprising. In the aftermath of cable coverage of the Persian Gulf War, television news reporting appeared to have entered a new era. Live battlefield images were carried by satellite and cable into our homes, creating not just a living room war but an around-the-clock, real-time living room war. Only cable news, with its twenty-four-hour-a-day capability, could provide such unprecedented saturation coverage. When media watchers proclaimed a new dawn, they were only reiterating what was obvious to anyone with a cable box.

However, the war itself was an atypical news item. Constantly changing developments fueled an international obsession with knowing the latest information, as high-stakes conflict riveted attention on the Persian Gulf. The situation played to cable television's strengths: For the viewer with a hunger to know the latest, CNN was always there, going so far as to transmit live from ground zero in Baghdad.

Coverage of the Persian Gulf War capitalized on conflict, drama, uncertainty, and audience need-to-know. Routine news stories may offer some of these elements, but without the crisis moniker, they lack, by definition, the sort of intensity that brought high ratings to CNN's continuous war coverage. The presidential election is a good example of this contrast. Laden with conflict and uncertainty, election news attracted the concerned and the curious, especially as November neared. Lacking the nailbiting concerns raised by the Gulf War, however, it did not draw, nor did CNN pay, constant, cutting-edge attention.

In this most typical of news situations, CNN's offering was far more familiar than it was revolutionary. Reporters followed campaigns, delivering assessments of the political situation. Pundits interpreted opinion polls, and staged candidate appearances were announced and discussed. With only a few excep tions, it would be difficult to distinguish this sort of coverage from that available on CNN's competitors. These reports were available on a twenty-four hour basis, of course, but that is a matter of quantity, not content. With its much-heralded ability seemingly to go anywhere at any time, CNN would appear to be positioned to cover an election in any number of ways. On the eve of an age in which we are promised (or threatened with) hundreds of cable channels, CNN could provide us with an alternate approach to the news—a different appreciation of what an election is about. But the network distinctly did not do this in 1992.

As if following a formula, newsworkers at CNN and ABC regularly and predictably showed us the same pictures of the presidential campaign again and again, and these images seemed to reflect a consensus in the news community. The camera's eye focused on the usual suspects: major candidates, generic members of the public, the press itself, rendering the televised election story highly personalized, politicized, and homogenized. It was about people rather than institutions, winners rather than losers, and power rather than ideas.

All the same, the coverage was not tilted by the partisanship of those who produced it. Despite arguments by conservatives that television favors liberal ideals and candidates,³ the televised election story was largely mum on matters of political preference. Yes, George Bush got bad press on both cable and broadcast television in 1992. So did Bill Clinton. This was not because of the partisan predispositions of the television news community but a result of how those in the news community determined what was germane to campaign coverage. An incumbent presiding over a protracted recession is going to hear stories he doesn't like simply because his name will be associated with unfavorable economic statistics and the unpleasant pictures that accompany them. This is how television newsgathering works; partisan affiliation matters not at all.

Where bias existed, it revealed a preference for the procedural self-interest of those reporting and producing the news: the process by which news-workers struggled to get the story on the air, the reporter's unseemly battle with candidates and campaign workers. This is the stuff of the reporter's experience. It is bias of a structural nature, derived from how newsworkers perceive their work and their world. It led television to present the election in terms best understood by those who were reporting it, which is to say as a nonideological power play in which they have a critical role. Daniel Hallin writes, "Serious journalism tends to treat politics as a contest rather than a discussion of social values: it asks 'Who is winning?,' not 'Who is right?' or 'What should we do?'"⁴ To this, we might add that television reporters ask, in the best tradition of Ross Perot's running mate, Admiral James Stockdale, "Who am I and why am I here?"

We will ask a different version of this question of television news: What is it, and why is it so? Taking these summary observations of television's version of the 1992 campaign as a starting point, I will examine the many similarities and few differences between cable and broadcast television's approaches to the campaign; the themes both networks emphasized; their portrayal of individuals, institutions, and relationships among principal actors; and their dogged determination to tell you about themselves.

Then, I will explore how this picture of the campaign came about. I will consider the interaction of several factors long considered to have an impact on news coverage: the structure and operation of news organizations; the routines used to gather the news; and the personal perspectives of the news gatherers toward their work, their goals, and the news itself. Working backwards from the picture of the campaign drawn by television, I shall connect product with producer in order to better understand the former by observing the latter.

Five Themes or "Miniseries"

In theory, television stories about the election may constitute a broad range of things. In practice, they tend to converge around several topics of interest to the subculture to which reporters (and, for that matter, candidates and campaign officials) belong.⁵ As this subculture envelopes both cable and broadcast news, these topics emerge in similar fashion on CNN and ABC.

Traditionally, election coverage is dichotomized by those who examine it into "horserace" stories, which detail arduous competition among candidates, and more substantive "issue" stories, which address candidate policy positions and performance.⁶ I have expanded the dichotomy to encompass five discrete thematic devices, each with distinct origins in the media-cam paign subculture: horserace, issue, process, image, and nonissue.

Horserace coverage references the various campaigns and derives from reporter assessments of electoral competition. Issue coverage alludes to stories about policy concerns that newsworkers generally consider to be of substantive importance to the public, even if they are uncertain how long their viewers are willing to listen to them.⁷

To these, I add what I call "process" coverage, which is about the media in general and the methods by which they cover a campaign. Self-referential by definition, this category encompasses all things related to the media's role in the presidential race. Often, process news is simply coverage of the coverage, the story of what television does to bring its audience the story of the campaign.

"Image" coverage is about the persona of the office-seeker. It looks at the character and capability of the candidates and their posturing and preening on the stump. Originating as it does with the words and actions of the candidates, image coverage is less substantive than issue coverage. Likewise, while related to the horserace, it may be distinguished by its emphasis on matters of personality rather than competition.

"Nonissue" coverage involves discussion of specific occurrences that have no bearing on policy issues but that are more distinctive than simple image references. At minimum, they are fleeting references to such things as a candidate's judgment, personal history, or health; at maximum, they endure and become campaign crises. Nonissue items are always about a candidate, but unlike stories involving policy issues, rarely draw a connection between the candidate and the public. Instead, the nonissues are portrayed as matters of concern to the candidate, with no mention of how the viewer may be involved.

Obviously, portrayal of all of these topics derives from the decisions of newsworkers, regardless of whether the public, the candidate, or the media serve as the point of reference. Each theme becomes part of the television story of the campaign only with the blessing of the gatekeepers. Thus, television's rendition of an election may be understood as the concurrent depiction of five thematic "miniseries" that collectively constitute the televised picture of the campaign. These miniseries document the campaign as television news personnel saw it and related it. Slice through television coverage at any given time, and you will find a series of subtexts, often overlapping one another in the same story, relating to some or all of these five topics. Over time, these thematic devices evolve, disappear, reemerge. Collectively, they constitute the picture of the election we see on cable and broadcast television.⁸

In past years, television has paid more attention to the horserace than to the issues, leading observers who equate issues with essence to question the substantive value of election coverage. In 1992, the horserace remained the most prominent topic of campaign coverage, but it was far from the only story. Horserace coverage shared the spotlight with process references, a never-ending but ever-changing stream of nonissues, and a healthy dose of image coverage.

And in a departure from past elections, television also paid greater attention to a select set of issues. Although foreign policy and most domestic policy issues were all but ignored, economic matters marshaled a large share of attention, especially at times when horserace conflict was low. Two distinct elements contributed to this coverage. First,-given a primary field composed of unknowns (or "supporting players"), television news could not find a convincing way to portray electoral competition. Second, economic figures, public opinion polls, and reporter judgments indicated that an enduring recession had planted itself in the American pocketbook and psyche. For those reporters and producers who anticipate audience interest, pictures of domestic suffering rivaled metaphors of athletic competition; the circumstances were right for issue coverage, at least of the bread-and-butter variety.

Cable Versus Broadcast: New Ways of Watching Television

Until very recently, discussions of television election coverage have focused on the three major broadcast networks. The reason for this is clear: CBS, ABC, and NBC together boasted the largest electronic news audience. CNN, once derided as the "Chicken Noodle Network," came of age in the 1980s as the audience for cable television grew. Today, CNN boasts a regular viewership in the half-million range and is still growing. In the wake of the Persian Gulf War, CNN began to receive acclaim for its ability to report undigested news—live pictures of the bombing as it was happening. In 1992, CNN had a well-developed election news unit and aired an ambitious series of election-oriented programs. Claims to being a "fourth" news network no longer sounded far-fetched.

The coming of age of cable news provides an interesting basis for comparison and a forum for better understanding how election news appears on television and why it looks as it does. The numerous similarities in how cable and broadcast television conceptualized and portrayed the 1992 presidential campaign occurred despite sharp distinctions in how broadcast and narrowcast media operate. In fact, looking simply at the organizations behind cable and broadcast news might lead one to expect differences in what they produce. But this is not the case.

Although both outlets depend on advertising revenue, individuals use cable television and broadcast television differendy and so the commercial imperatives of the two are somewhat dissimilar. Network news operations are components of large entertainment vehicles broadcasting to a mass audience. Executives count on evening news programs to capture and hold sizable audiences for subsequent entertainment programming. Until recent years, news divisions were regarded by the networks as investments. The evening news drew people into the hours of prime time programming. Before the advent of the remote control, cable alternatives, and the VCR, viewers could be expected to seek out their favorite evening news broadcast and park themselves on that channel all night. So, although expensive to operate, news divisions were all...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PART I The 1992 Campaign: Pictures on Television
• PART II The 1992 Campaign; Pictures of Television
• PART III Conclusions
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index