How the Television Networks Covered the 2000 Presidential Campaign

Transcript

Paul C. Light:

Well, welcome to Brookings. I'm Paul Light. I'm the vice president, director of Governmental Studies.

This is the second time in this project that I've had the opportunity to introduce Steve Hess. I like introducing Steve. He's a joy to work with, and this project has been a remarkable labor for him. I've watched as he's given an extraordinary amount of time to this project, to maintaining rigorous standards and meeting a really crushing deadline, week to week to week, along with his colleagues in the project.

Even as he's done this, he's appeared in hundreds of interviews over the last three or four months. We believe that he's now crossed the hundred-country threshold. I believe two weeks ago, in an interview with Turkish television, he actually made the hundred country mark. You go to Lexis-Nexis—I tried to run a Lexis-Nexis search on Steve before coming here, and my computer crashed at roughly a thousand entries over the last 60 days.

You all know Steve. He's a voice of reason and rightness in the conversation about how the media can cover elections more effectively. That was why the Pew Charitable Trust made this investment in this project. And he's used his energy and rigor, his commitment to excellence in this project to try to raise the bar on media coverage. And we'll see how well he did.

Steve cannot be held accountable for coverage in this campaign, but I'll bet you one thing. From a statistical analysis, had Steve Hess and this project not been up, the numbers would have been worse.

So, Steve, it's to you now. Thank you very much.

Stephen Hess: Actually, the creation of this project is not my—The inspiration for this project was Paul Light's and Sean Treglia's of the Pew Charitable Trust. I never expected nor did I ever plan to work this hard at this age and I bear a grudge.

This is a very unusual project for Brookings. The end product is not a book, it is not a report to come out after the election. It was designed to monitor the media in real time. And we were very fortunate that we were able to call upon the Center for Media and Public Affairs—Bob Lichter, its founder and president, will be one of our panelists—to contract with to give us the daily figures and analysis that we worked with. We're very grateful to them. They were wonderful partners in this venture.

We used, basically, for the material you'll see on the screen shortly, the flagship programs, evening news programs that are identified with Peter Jennings and Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw. We also, however, also used—we can talk about that as we go along—for contrast, if you will, the "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."

In addition to that work, we set up our own little operation. It was a four-ring circus that we had going here, run by our project manager, Jessica Gerrity, who will be pushing buttons and showing things up here. It simply could not have been done without her. And we have a marvelous website up, and it will stay up, which archives all of our material for those who are curious in the future, or scholars, as well, and that can be found on www.brookings.edu/hessreport. I hope you'll look at it. The website was designed by Gary Harding, and you'll see from these charts, for example, how elegant indeed it is.

We had three absolutely marvelous young men as our analysts, who were listening, taping and timing the three morning news shows, any specials or Prime Time news magazines, the four evening programs, Ted Koppel, Nightline, as well as the Sunday programs. I can apologize to them formally now. We violated their constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment, but imagine listening to all that, taking in all that and turning these tapes over to me daily. It was an amazing chore. Are they around? Dave—hold a hand up. Dave, Ron and Falan—next to Jessica. They're really the heroes of this project.

The program this morning, I'll talk very briefly about it, and then we're going to have a panel that seems quite appropriate for this subject. Bob Lichter will undoubtedly go beyond my bare-bones outline and show the meaning of some of these figures that he's put together. Ron—our own Ron Nessen, our vice president of public affairs, seems an ideal person to join us because he's had a unique background where he not only covered presidential campaigns, as an NBC correspondent, but also, as you'll recall, was the press secretary to a president of the United States, Gerald Ford. So he saw this from two sides. He'll join us.

And then our third speaker is Marvin Kalb, who, of course, was the diplomatic correspondent for both CBS and NBC, and the moderator, the host of "Meet the Press," left that career to start a second career as the Edward R. Murrow professor at Harvard, the founding director of the Shorenstein Center there. He is now in his third career, here in Washington, as the executive director of the Shorenstein office in Washington. He's my only dear friend of whom both a chair and a room at Harvard have been named. I consider it a privilege to have known someone who has both the Kalb Chair and the Kalb Room.

slide presentation (.ppt—323kb)

Let me start here with some basic facts. Jessica, let's go into the first table. And this would show the number of minutes. In some ways, this is your key table. This compares the last three elections.

When we started this project, we had two benchmarks: 1992, the election with Bush, Clinton and Gore, had the greatest coverage of any of the evening news programs in its history; in 1996, the election, a rather dull election, many think, with Clinton and Dole, had the least.

And through the eighth week, this election was actually below 1996; it was the lowest in history. This surprised us. Our hunch when we started it, as we wrote in the first column, was that this one would come between the two, but much closer to 1992. Why? Because it was going to be a close election; we knew that, and the networks knew that. They polled; the polls were accurate, and the stories were overwhelmingly framed as a close election, as we'll see in a minute.

In the last week they jumped to 17 minutes above the previous one. And the answer is why in the last week they did a marvelous job. They actually had 35 minutes of interviews with Gore and Bush on the networks. I can't claim, as Paul did, that all of our efforts—Paul Taylor's efforts, Marvin Kalb's efforts and others—shamed them into doing anything that they might not have done otherwise. But it is sad to think that they had the capacity to do the sort of job that they did in the ninth week of the election and hadn't done it previously.

I should say, by the way—haven't mentioned that the outlet for this work was two-fold, and I am most grateful for both the weekly column that was in USA Today, and Gwen Flanders, the political editor was a great help; and a little session each week on CNN's Inside Politics, to whom I'm most grateful, particularly to Tom Hannon.

Turn. Let's do the next slide. And this merely shows that when we talk about collectively the networks, that's a fair way of looking at it; they really do work in tandem throughout. You'll see their little differences between the three. NBC is the highest—what is it—oh, 15 points ahead of, say, of CBS; CBS is the lowest. I would say, actually, that NBC would have been even higher had it not been the official broadcaster of the Olympics in September. But the pattern is the same for all three networks and, of course, considerably below what they were capable of doing in 1992.

Let's go to the next slide.

Yeah, this is something that has been commented upon constantly, the shrinking sound bite; the amount of time that networks have the candidate actually speaking. Again, Bob Lichter's figures in the eighth week were seven seconds, and then, by the time we finished seven or eight days later, they had increased to 7.8. But you see that constant drop. And the sad part about that is that it means that we're hearing our candidates much more through the correspondents than we ever did, and that has the potential for distortion.

And we can see what it means, for instance, if you turn to the Newshour, where each week they had a segment called "On the Stump" where you heard the candidates in full, and you could see how much different it was than as it filtered through the reporters' on the road.

Next slide? Okay. Obviously, the amount of horse race coverage depends on how much of a horse race there is going for it, and there's no question that this was the greatest horse race and the greatest coverage. And there's nothing wrong with horse race coverage. It can be accurate and it certainly can be entertaining, but it also can squeeze out all other coverage, and in many ways that's what happened this year as the story was repeatedly framed or poll-driven in terms of how close the election is.

The problem with framing it that way is simply, What does the voter learn from that? Does it help them in any way in making their judgment on who they want to govern them, or what the person might do in the White House in January, and it doesn't.

We did something to show you how this gets squeezed out. We designed for the first time a governance scale. This was based on a series of questions that Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann put together, and they were the sorts of questions about, okay, a president is going to have to appoint an awful lot of people to run his government. What do we know about those people? What do we know about the way he's going to be appointing them? A president is going to have to make some very important decisions during the transition. How is he planning for doing this, and what do we know about that? A president is going to have to have priorities with the legislature. What do we know about that? The president, more and more, is going to run the government in terms of a permanent campaign. What have we known from the way that a Bush or a Gore have run the campaign that might tell us something about what they would do once they're in the White House? The president is going to be the chief operating officer of the executive branch. What are they telling us about how they would propose that?

Well, when we asked all those questions, we found that from October 2nd on, each network, ABC, NBC and CBS, actually had one story, one story each, that addressed that set of questions. These are the sorts of things that were getting squeezed out as the coverage became more and more horse race-driven.

Let's try another slide and see what we learn. Again, the same thing. We are not—we can talk about the networks because the network profiles are virtually the same in this regard; very little difference, one to the other.

Next. Yeah, this is interesting, too, in this regard. If you look at this year, the green line, you'll see the steadiness from

Labor Day on, which is what this measures in our nine-week campaign. They're up there above 60 percent, two-thirds of it is horse race—who's ahead, who's behind, this is a close election.

This differs very much from past profiles where, typically, in September and weeks one through four, even into five, the networks spend a great deal of time defining the candidates; what their qualifications are, what their records have been, and so forth. And then almost as if you turn on a switch, comes October, they start to talk about who is ahead and who is behind. That didn't happen this time. It was strictly horse race all the way through which, as I say, I at least consider that the most useless of all.

Next slide, Jessica? This gets into the question of the negative tone, the evaluations of it, and you'll see, again, a pretty negative profile of candidates, with the exception, strangely, of Clinton, who was a great favorite, apparently.

Bob Lichter may wish to talk a little more about this, but Gore and Bush received about the same amount over time, at least, although if you looked at the week-by-week profile, they jump up and down when we have things like rats commercials or Adam Clymer comments, comments on Adam Clymer and so forth.

I should say, by the way, that we have seen the future and it looks worse. That is another group, Pew-sponsored group, under Tom Rosenstiel, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, has just done a report which included Internet news and found that the Internet news was a great deal harsher than the traditional print or broadcast coverage. So as we move more and more into the Internet era, expect our coverage to be more and more negative.

What does one generally conclude? And we conclude that three networks—part of large companies owned by Disney, owned by Viacom, owned by General Electric, grudgingly—grudgingly decided to cover the process and the election of the president of the United States. This goes back to the period in which the candidates for the nomination were debating, and in which out of probably a dozen debates, only two were on the over-the-air networks; one on Meet the Press and one on Nightline.

I'd be perfectly happy to pass it all off to cable. The problem with that of course is that a quarter of Americans aren't on the cable. A problem with that is when you look at who's watching the cable, if you're generous and you add up all of the programs of CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox and so forth, you can find 2 million viewers; add up the evening news and you're up to 20 million. So, cable is still niche broadcasting for us political junkies and isn't going to catch people who just wander through and find out their news each evening.

In a strange way—and then of course as we go through the network history this year, we find the conventions where they grudgingly gave us an hour a night if we were good, and then on to the October debates where it was controversial if it conflicted with baseball or on Fox with the premier of a science fiction show.

It was not a happy picture. But strangely and interestingly enough I find, and this surprised me, that the networks seem to be moving their serious, or the bulk of their public affairs broadcasting from 7:00 p.m. at night, the flagship when they have the large audiences, to 7:00 a.m. in the morning. And you could get twice as much public affairs broadcasting if you were watching the Today Show,

Good Morning America, and the early morning than if you were watching their counterparts at night.

And while, of course, you can say those are two or three hour shows, that's almost exclusively in the first hour, and even in the first half hour of those programs, as well as huge numbers of interviews, some of which being even 15 minutes in length with the candidates, their handlers, their family and so forth.

It still confuses me. I would propose and prefer a nation that got its serious news while it had time to sit and think about it, as opposed to when we're rushing off to get to work or getting the children to school.

There was another part of this program, the monitoring program, which I thought was very important, because while it's clear that, as I say, we were getting grudging attention from the networks, we still are—or Marvin's profession is a profession full of very talented, energetic and dedicated people. And so we felt at the same time as we were telling the story of their employers, we should tell something of their story and give some awards. So that each week we did have four awards, and they were announced in USA Today; described in more detail on our website. They're part of a little brochure that if you don't have, you can pick up out there. These were awards because we wanted to recognize these people, we wanted to encourage good journalism, and they deserved it.

So to conclude my little part of the program, before we bring up our panelists, we've put together a little five minutes to remind ourselves of the good journalism that we actually did have this year, and some of the people who gave it to us.

Hess Report Award Winners! ISDN || modem

[Video is shown]

S. Hess: Okay, I think we'll do it in the order I mentioned before, Bob, Ron, Marvin. Chat for as long as you're comfortable chatting, and we'll have some comments and questions from the audience.

Robert Lichter: Okay. Well first, let me thank Steve and Brookings for not only helping to support our work in doing this study this year, but also in helping to publicize it. So I'm very grateful for the opportunity to come and talk about this to you.

Steve, of course, has given you the basic outline of what we found. I guess I'd like to frame this by saying that whatever we found about the media coverage of the election this year, of course, what everybody is going to remember is not the campaign coverage but the election night coverage. So even if we could give them a brilliant grade, I think it would be a little like saying that the Titanic was doing just fine except for the iceberg.

But nonetheless, I think in the future, as we try to take lessons not only from the election night coverage, but from what we've learned in the past and haven't learned in the past about how to cover elections, we need this kind of systematic data.

Let me just add a few observations to Steve's overview.

He mentioned the coverage is way down from eight years ago. That means, if you work out the numbers, two elections ago, the three networks together gave you about 25 minutes a night of election news, or about eight minutes a piece. This election they gave you about 12 minutes, or four minutes a piece per night. It's not a lot of election news for what is universally regarded as the most exciting race in memory.

Second, the focus of the news—Steve mentioned the focus on horse race, which we're all used to now. There's another aspect of focus that Steve raised indirectly in terms of the number on sound bites. The time that presidential candidates get to address the American people is measured now in eight-second bursts.

And if you wonder why Bush and Gore were going on Leno and Letterman, we discovered that when Bush went on Letterman, he got more airtime in a single block than he got the entire month of October on all three network newscasts combined. That is, cumulatively. Cumulatively.

If you ask, "Is the focus of the news on the candidates or on the journalists, how mediated is it?—if you actually add up the airtime, journalists talking about the election accounted for 74 percent of the airtime. Candidates actually shown speaking accounted for 11 percent of the airtime. So the news is highly mediated, and I think that's what's driving candidates into talk shows, to give them time to just present themselves more as full human beings to the public.

And finally, on the question of tone, if we say "How thorough was the coverage, what was the focus of the coverage, and finally, what was the tone of the coverage," Steve emphasized that the candidates got pretty even-handed coverage in one sense. That is to say, they both got clobbered about equally. Bush—when you look at sound bite by sound bite, favorable and unfavorable, supportive and opposing comments, excluding comments about the horse race—not, "Bush is surging, Gore is sinking," but "Gore is lying, Bush is drinking"—you know, the latter would be what we call good press, bad press. You had over 60 percent negative for both of them. That's in line with previous elections. So what we have is less news that is more focused on journalists and pretty negative toward both candidates.

And just one final comment. And that is, of course, as we're all aware, we're talking about just the TV network evening news shows, which once upon a time functioned as a pretty good proxy for major media. That's becoming less so. It's not clear how much less. We do have some fragmentary results coming in. Tom Rosenstiel's study deals with the Internet and so forth. In the past, where we have looked at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and various other major news outlets, we have found that the general tone of TV news and the focus of TV news was a pretty good proxy for that.

Let me just say, one finding that we didn't mention, and that is, we also looked at the Lehrer NewsHour on PBS. And it will surprise no one that the coverage was much more substantive, less horse-race focused. What surprised us was that it was far more positive toward the candidates.

Three out of five comments about both candidates combined on the commercial networks were negative. Two out of three comments about both candidates combined on PBS were positive.

On PBS, the candidates and their surrogates got a chance to make a case for them, tell you why you should vote for them. On the commercial networks, increasingly you hear why you shouldn't vote for either candidate. And balance means that the other guy gets as bad news as you do.

Thanks.

S. Hess: Well done. Ron.

Ronald Nessen: Well, when Steve first asked me to appear on this panel, I started to make a list of all the shortcomings of press coverage in this campaign that I wanted to talk about. And I wrote down: too much emphasis on the horse race and strategy—and you see how that turned out in the survey that Steve took; the ever-increasing attention to poll results and the even less reliable focus groups—and you saw how that turned out; the endless convening of panels of undecideds and persuadables; the usual short-term media frenzies about what turned out, at least in my mind, to be minor issues, mistakes, gaffes, and so forth—the Adam Clymer remark, the "rats" commercial, the Bush mispronunciations, and so forth.

I also wrote down a development which really troubled me, and that was a media attempt to determine whether George Bush was smart enough to be president.

And the other thing I wrote down was the ever-diminishing sound bite. And you saw that that's now down below eight seconds.

I thought back to the time when I covered campaigns for NBC in the '60s and '70s, and the average sound bite then was about 45 seconds. And this means that one of the candidates for president would get up and make a 20- or 25-minute campaign speech, of which 45 seconds was used on the nightly news, which seemed to me then to be rather short. Eight seconds—less than eight seconds—I think this is a terrible way to pick a president—is by hearing him say something for less than eight seconds, usually part of sentence, not even a whole sentence, and usually something that makes him look stupid.

Anyhow, that was my list I was going to talk about. And then came Election Night, and first Florida was called for Gore, and then it was called for Bush, and then the election was called for Bush, and now we see that we don't yet have a winner. So I knew that this was the media issue I really wanted to talk about.

I think what happened on Election Night is the culmination of some trends that have troubled me for a long time about coverage on television. One is that the multiplicity of all-news cable networks—Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN—as well as the Internet as a news source, has increased the competition to be first and that this has lowered the standards of what you put on the air, what is verified enough to put on the air.

Secondly, with hour after hour of time to fill up on the all-news networks, there's not enough new news to fill 60 minutes every hour.

There's a trend in which the anchors ask the correspondents and the pundits, "So what's going to happen next? How do you think this is going to come out?" And this has been going on for a long time.

One of the most vivid memories of the campaign, to me, was the night of the South Carolina primary. I was watching CNN. The polls closed at 7:00. At 7:00, Judy Woodruff asked the CNN correspondent on the scene in South Carolina, "So how's it going to come out?" The polls had just closed. The only answer is, "Beats the hell out of me!" But of course you can't say that on television.

So this trend to predict or guess what's going to happen, I think, was one of the factors that went into what did happen on Election Night.

And finally, I think the 24-hour news networks, the people who work there, do something different than Marvin and I did at the network. We worked all day to produce a story for one program, Walter Cronkite or the Huntley-Brinkley show. We had plenty of time to get the background, to make sure the facts were right, to put in some kind of historic perspective, to make sure a variety of views were represented. And that's what we did.

What you're seeing now, what you're watching on the cable news networks, I think, is not news; it's the news-gathering process. You're watching reporters gathering items. Some turn out to be right, some turn out to be wrong, some are propaganda spinning from the campaigns.

And the idea is that over time, over 24 hours, this will all get sorted out and it will end up you'll get pretty much the factual stories. But that takes awhile, and in the meantime, what you're watching—you know that old expression in Washington about you should never watch legislation or sausage being made, and I think I would have to add news to that.

As some of my friends know, I have for a long time propounded the theory that television ruins everything it touches. And this was based, first of all, on baseball, then on the Olympics, then on the conventions, and now I think I have to add elections to that list.

S. Hess: Thank you.

Marvin?

Marvin Kalb: Just one note of dissent on what you just heard from Ron about the "glory days" of Cronkite and Huntley, Brinkley. I remember on August 20th of 1968, when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, Walter Cronkite called me and he said, "Marvin, I want you to come in and do an analysis of why the Russians moved in, because we don't know whether we're on the edge of World War III." And I said, "Fine, Walter. I'll be right there. How much time do I have?" "Oh," he said, "take as much time as you like because this the story of the day." I got 45 seconds. So, you know.

A somewhat wider perspective, perhaps, is what I would like to offer. Steve's research, which is just marvelous, and his group here, which I have had the privilege of meeting, just a wonderful group. And our collective thanks go to Pew for making it possible, too, and Brookings. But Steve's research focuses on ABC, NBC and CBS. We are now living in a communications revolution. Most people in this country may continue to get most of what they know about the world from those three evening newscasts, but I would venture to guess in terms of presidential politics, what has already been suggested is more true, and that is that while on those three newscasts the presidential candidates may get only 7.8 seconds of exposure on an evening newscast, they then go to cable television, and for those of us who are junkies on politics, that's where we spend a lot of our time.

So while it may be true, and I think Steve's underlying point is absolutely essential, and that's where most people get their news and their first impressions, but for the junkie, it is cable television where they get their news. And even if you carry it now into the area of where do most people get their impressions about the candidates, they got, I would suspect, more of their impressions from appearances on Leno and all of those kind of late-night comedy shows than they did on the CBS Evening News.

So when the question is raised—Why was there so little?—the networks made their decision that there would little; the candidates saw that and simply skirted the networks and went to those areas of television today where they could get a better shot at getting their positions across.

Now, one result of television news coverage this year has been particularly the way in which the election was covered last Tuesday: a huge, huge, unmistakable setback for the credibility of television news. And I carry that one step further: for the credibility of journalism as practiced in America today. Because if it is true, as many studies seem to indicate, that most Americans get what they know about the nation and the world from television, whether CBS or CNN kind of television, nevertheless, that indicates that they are getting slim pickings and they are finding out things about the world that may or may not be true, may or may not have perspective.

Where was, for example, foreign affairs coverage throughout all of the year 2000? Nonexistent. Where was the coverage of that 20 to 25 percent of the American people who live in what is certainly justifiably called "poverty" in this country of plenty? One would imagine, through all of the coverage, that everybody in this country was a millionaire. Not true, but we got very little of that.

Now, one of the things that upsets me deeply, I must say, about this setback to network credibility is what really happened on Election Night, and Ron has already talked about this. And I just want to pick up a couple of points. The institution of something called Voter News Service, the establishment by the networks and the Associated Press in 1990, first seeing big time in the 1992 election, was simply this: As a result of the disheartening 1988 election, a lot of the people who ran the networks now—not just the Bill Paley types in the old days at CBS—but large corporations who look toward the bottom line, these large corporations, when they were taking control of the networks by the mid-'80s, certainly into the mid-'90s, in this time frame, began to ask questions about, How much does this kind of coverage cost?

The coverage, according to which each one of the networks had its own polling, data collection, interview projects, that costs, if my figure is right, about $17 million a year for each one of the networks. So the big boys, like General Electric, come in and ask at NBC, "How much are you guys paying for this?" They said, "Seventeen million." "Can't you do it any more cheaply?" "Oh, yes, we can." They came up with this idea of taking a lot less money, creating Voter News Service with the help of the Associated Press, and then there was one source of basic information that came in; so that on Election Night all of the networks and the Associated Press, feeding out to all of the newspapers and radio stations, one source of information. If there is a blunder, it is a blunder that is limited not just to one network, but it affects, like a virus, all of the networks.

We saw the chickens coming homing home to roost last Tuesday night. The effort to save money produced bad calls and, essentially, lousy journalism, and it affected our judgment of what was happening. On the basis of the first Gore call just before 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday evening, there then followed two hours of commentary on the networks, plus two hours of calculation in both of the two camps, directly ascribable to what was on television news, but what was wrong.

Then it was pulled back, then there was a call made at 2:16 in the morning by Fox, not—not that VNS, Voter News Service, had said that Florida now goes to Bush, but rather that the large numbers that were coming into VNS indicated that Bush might be the winner. The first network to call that was Fox at 2:16 in the morning on Wednesday morning. The person in charge of the entire operation at Fox to call decisions of this sort was John Ellis, who used to work at NBC.

I know him well. He was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center. He is a pro. But he also lives with the fact that he is George W. Bush's first cousin.

So a question gets raised. And it's nothing more than a question. It's not an accusation, but it's a question. All of this came out of the fulcrum of television news. As Sam Donaldson said over the weekend, "garbage in, garbage out." Sam Donaldson said that; I didn't. And it was garbage in the sense of bad information from VNS that went into the networks, and out of the networks came this bad information; too, no longer checked to the degree that it used to be checked. There used to be first-rate small armies of statisticians and experts at each of the networks, so that if one blew it, the others had an opportunity to correct it for the American people watching. That was not the case. So, television news had had, I think, a bad, bad setback and it can take a while to come back from it.

S. Hess: Let me ask the panel, and, of course, the audience, too, a question. The networks, who were surprisingly uninterested in covering the campaign, even though they knew it was going to be a close election—in part because they thought, and they had some evidence, that people weren't terribly interested in it—now that the campaign is over and we need a president, they will turn this, and are in the process of turning this, into a political O.J. Simpson case. I mean, it is increasingly going to be a three-ring circus unless it ends soon.

The other is sad. Somehow, we are a nation that is dripping in information. If you don't get it from the networks, you will find it someplace else. And if you have the time and the interest and the money, you can find it. So it saddens me that the networks didn't do a better job. It scares the hell out of me about what can happen in the next few weeks if this runs its course, where the only thing the networks—or television can give us are rumor and speculation.

How can we advise them or deal with it ourselves? I've personally made a promise to myself, which I've kept up till now, and hope to continue to keep, that I will not go on any American television program while this is hanging loose. The questions will be of speculation. The historical questions, as I've watched used, are taken out of context. I heard someone I like very much on public television talk to me about the election of 1876 this morning, which was totally irrelevant in every way. There was not one lesson that could have been drawn that time, except it was a close election and one of the states happened to be Florida, that didn't even look much like today.

So the only television I am doing is foreign television. And I'm doing it because people overseas will be confused and need someone to explain our constitutional system or the laws to them. You know, I'd love to take a full-page ad in the New York Times and ask all of my other sound-bite friends to take this pledge as well, take the air out of this system that is going to produce—could produce combustion.

Now, what else can be done? Tell us, you know, what's the future in store for us in the next few weeks and so forth?

M. Kalb: I was struck by an interesting irony though, Steve. During the conventions, you remember that there were a number of people, and I put myself in that category, who criticized the networks for giving, as you were saying before, inadequate coverage to the convention. Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS news said at the time, in Philadelphia, to a panel I ran, "The American people are not interested in a civics lesson. They are not going to watch it." I said, "You're wrong." He said, "No, no no, we know we're right." Over the weekend, one of the things that Rather and other people from other networks said was that what they are going to do right now is give the best civics lesson possible to the American people. How wonderful it is that we can use this occasion to educate the American people to the wonders and the complexities of American democracy.

So, I think that the networks are now going to use this, and I think they should; there is no bigger story in the country right now. I am all with them to do extensive, solid, exhaustive, substantive reporting. Whether we'll get that I don't know, but that is what I would encourage them to do.

R. Nessen: I wish that were true, Marvin—but the amount of time spent on the story does not necessarily equate with a lot of useful information.

I had the experience over the weekend, which I guess a lot of people did, of watching a couple of hours of the kind of continuous, all-news cable network coverage. And then I spent—that was a couple of hours—and then I spent about five minutes listening to one of the NPR news on the hour broadcasts from which I found out how many votes had been counted, who they had gone for, what some of the time deadlines were. I learned more in five minutes, factually, than I learned from a couple of hours of watching what I have come to start calling the blather. There's an awful lot of blather.

R. Lichter: Steve, I want to say I have taken your personal view of this to heart, and I hereby pledge not to go on television to talk about this, except for the express purpose of criticizing how television is doing this.

But what's striking is we've become used to the degree to which elections take place within an environment of ideas, of tone; set by the media. And the one silver lining was that after we got all the coverage and the shortened sound bites and the horse race and the candidates complaining about bias, people went into the privacy of the polling booth and decided who would be the next president. Now it's clear: who will be the next president is going to be influenced for better or worse, without anyone being able to change this, by the framework of media coverage. From the moment that Bush was declared the winner, and his role became, therefore, "the king is dead, long live the king," and Gore's role became, "we was robbed," that established a framework that is now playing out.

And Sunday, the New York Times effectively sent a signal in a front page article saying, Democrats and Republicans alike are saying don't let this go on too long; don't litigate too far.

The news serves the function of informing, but also the function of elites signaling other elites. What's going to happen cannot help but be influenced by the way the media treat this. So, I think, in this sense, the media will be more responsible for determining the next president of the United States than ever before.

R. Nessen: Could I make one other comment —

S. Hess: Sure, and then we'll get to questions.

R. Nessen:—just to follow on what Bob said, that the impact of media coverage itself? You know, there is a great debate going on about whether calling—the early call of Florida for Gore had an impact, even in the panhandle of Florida where the polls were still open, and elsewhere in the country.

I was struck on Election Night about the lack of explanation of what did the call mean? You know, it was, "Florida has gone for Gore," "We call Florida for Gore," "Gore is going to win Florida," and so forth. There was nothing about "This is based on the Voter News Service," "This is based on exit polls," which depend on people being willing to stop coming out of the polling place and talk to you and tell you the truth, and what's the margin of error, and what has been the success rate in the past of calling races by exit polls? There wasn't a really clear explanation of that on Election Night, I think.

M. Kalb: One of the reasons that that may be the case, Ron, is that they feel they've done it before. In other words, they have done that explanation so many times in the past that they assume that the viewer already knows that, and they don't feel a burning necessity to repeat all of that stuff again. But it ends up as conveying an impression of a burning hypocrisy, because each network comes forth and tells you a result.

The presumption on the part of a normally intelligent viewer is that that network did its work in coming up with that result. Rather, at a certain point said in introducing Tuesday night's coverage, that "If you hear a call here on CBS, you can take it to the bank"—[mild laughter]—quote/unquote, more or less, that. What he was trying to say with great pride is that CBS used to do this very effectively and, for the most part, still does it very effectively.

But there is now, for the reasons I tried to explain before, which ends up being saving money, there are large temptations to self- glorification on the basis of less substance, and the hypocrisy is that they don't tell you up front, "This call is based on Voter News Service, and we're making this call based on two people who are sitting here with me. Here they are." It's tricky.

S. Hess: Well, Marvin, let me ask—because, Marvin's "they've already told us this," reminded me of something about—because he's done the surveys that—not only the general election, but also have gone back to January and the primary—is the sense that this long process that we have now has also had effect on the news that we were measuring from Labor Day forward; the sense that they've already done this. News has to be news. You talk to them, and they said, "Well, we did a story about education back in May." And they do. I mean, they will say this to you. "We did a marvelous profile, Barbara Walters, back in June, of the candidates. We don't have to do it again."

And the irony of the thing is that the political correspondents are tired of the story, have already done that, just at the time that the rest of us—the man and the woman in the street—is tuning in. And so the wires cross in a very strange way. And part of that they could do something about, and my analysts noted this because they have been watching it every day.

The three networks each assign a reporter to the campaign trail. Good reporters. This isn't a criticism of the reporters. They hear the same thing day after day. They also get tired. "That's not a story. We heard that yesterday and the day before." And yet, as you watch these networks, you see that they really have quite deep benches.

There are some very good reporters that are lucky to get on the air once a week. And why aren't they rotating these reporters, seeing the campaign each week with fresh eyes?

And I just simply—maybe the two former network correspondents could tell me why, and I assume it has something to do with establishing a persona, to having "stars" out front, whether it's John Roberts or Gail Shipman or Dean Reynolds, or whatever, you want to establish a person, your identity with each candidate, and you think perhaps you're getting more and better information because they know all of the people in the trenches, which in fact they don't; anybody representing ABC, CBS or NBC would be given the same information. But I think it's something's that easy to do; they don't do it, and I do think it has the potential of improving future coverage.

R. Nessen: Well, you're right. Essentially the campaign stump speech doesn't change much from day to day. And having trekked around on press buses and press planes for a couple of campaigns, after you've heard the speech two or three times and you've reported on the two or three major points, then you feel that you can't report the same thing again because you've already done that story.

When I was at NBC, we did—at some point in the campaign, the guy who was—one year I covered the Johnson campaign, Lyndon Johnson campaign, and Robin MacNeil covered the Goldwater campaign, and then we switched off at some point during the campaign.

But I had an idea one time, which I never carried out either when I was a correspondent or running the news department in Mutual, which was to assign somebody to cover the campaign the way the voters see it; to put them in a motel room and make them watch television all day long, say this is the way voters see the campaign. They don't go—not very many people really come out to see the candidates in person. And I think in some ways, that might have worked. For instance, I think when the 30-second attack ads on television first started, it was a whole election cycle before anybody got onto that. And if you had somebody covering the campaign as it appears on television, they would have perceived that.

I suspect that a lot of this campaign we've just been through went on on the Internet, below the radar scope, and nobody really knew or reported on what was going on on the Internet, for instance.

S. Hess: Bob, I cut you off. Forgive me.

R. Lichter: I was just going to say with regard to the point that you made, a criticism that has been made for some time of election news is that there is a disjunction between news values and civic values, what voters need to know to make an informed decision, and what interests journalists—the very latest thing, which is inevitably something relatively ephemeral and often more trivial. Tom Patterson has written eloquently about this.

But similarly, I'd like to go back to Marvin's point about CBS. I distinctly remember Dan Rather saying early on—I was very impressed, and I still am genuinely impressed; I'm not trying to say this facetiously—that he basically said you may not hear it first on CBS, but you'll hear it right; we'll wait to make the call to get it right. And the fact that the three network anchors ended up looking like Larry, Moe and Curly Joe, is the result of the fact that personal intention cannot override institutional decisions; that with the best will in the world, he was still stuck with one source of information and the competitive atmosphere and could not change that.

I will commit a cardinal sin of punditry and tell you —

M. Kalb: Here in America?

R. Lichter: Yes, here even with a television camera in the room—which is to admit ignorance —

[TAPE CHANGE]

— until all the wrangling started about Florida, that the networks had made that call while part of the panhandle was still open because it was in the Central Time Zone. I just—you know. And I had just taken for granted, even though I'm supposed to keep up on this stuff, that they don't call a state until all the polls in the state is closed. That seems to be such a commonsensical thing to do, and yet they didn't.

So we shouldn't have to be worrying about whether that affected voters or not. That's the sort of thing the networks should get together and say, some things, for the good of the country we just have to subordinate our competitive instincts.

M. Kalb: Well, they did get together. I mean, there was an agreement among the networks, I think when VNS was set up, or shortly thereafter—I'm sure there are people in the room who knows this better than I—but that they were not going to make calls on any state unless all of the polls in that state had been closed.

R. Lichter: What happened?

M. Kalb: I don't know what happened here, except they went back on their word, or they broke the agreement.

S. Hess: We'll have questions. Now, the transcript of this whole session will be quickly put on the Brookings website, so I'll ask you, when you ask a question or make a comment, to please state your name so it shows up there.

Curtis Gans has been waving furiously in the back. And I'd love to turn to him first.

Question: Thank you. Does this work? Can you hear?

The first thing I want to say is I want to express my gratitude to Steve for this study and to Bob for the continuing work because it informs all of us, and I think we all should be grateful.

I will quickly answer Marvin's factual question. What the networks agreed to is not to project in an individual state before a majority of polls are closed in the individual states. So essentially, they projected Indiana while Gary was still voting; they projected Kentucky while the western part of the state was still voting, they projected Michigan while the Upper Peninsula was still voting; they projected New Hampshire while Manchester was still voting. And there are about 13 of those states.

I think this election raised two public policy questions. The first was best illustrated by Steve Luxenberg's article yesterday in the Washington Post Outlook section, which is whether the networks should project at all based on exit polls and sample precincts. The news of the night on Election Night is the tabulated results. And if they just reported that, they'd never get it wrong and they'd never influence the turnout in one-sided elections in the West Coast. I think if they won't voluntarily go back to the tabulated results, those projections ought to be banned.

The second serious policy question was, I think—I don't know which one of you raised—I think it was Steve who raised it—which is essentially the continuing abdication of network television from the coverage of politics. And you raised the question of the pre- primary, pre-Super-Tuesday debates, in which there were 20 Prime Time debates, not one of which was covered by network television. The average viewing audience of one of those Prime Time debates was 1.5 million. The average viewing audience for a television network program is 9 million; and total for the three, 43 million. Two networks have abdicated from the broadcast of the general election presidential debates. All the networks have cut their convention coverage. No network now covers presidential press conferences and responses live. No network affiliate covers debates for federal or statewide offices in Prime Time. Even the Clinton-Lazio debate was at 7:00.

The question that needs to be raised is, do we not want to re- regulate broadcast television for public service application based on market share, which is, those who have the greatest market share have the greatest obligation for covering certain events on a must-carry basis?

The networks say, if you want that sort of stuff, you can get it on cable and satellite.

But I believe an informed electorate is not an option, and therefore we have to explore our public policy remedies.

One last thing: I am not taking your pledge, because there are things that ought to be said that aren't predictions about what's going on right now. But I do agree with Ron that some of the cable coverage in bringing people together in what amounts to rallies and inflaming opinion is not a very useful thing for our democracy.

S. Hess: Thank you. Then we've got a question over here. Yeah.

Question: Al Millikan, Washington Independent Writers. My strong perception is that history is going to make it clear that Ralph Nader was a much bigger news story than he got network or media coverage from. And I'm wondering, particularly—he really seemed shorted in the substance of the ideas that he was putting forth, which were very much in contrast to both George W. Bush and Al Gore. I'm wondering what would you all say about that.

And also what was going behind the scenes—threats and intimidations from the Democrats, secret support from Republicans—that also seemed to be a very significant story. I'm not sure it got the proper coverage.

S. Hess: Does anybody wish to—you want to —

R. Lichter: Well —

S. Hess: Did you measure Nader?

R. Lichter: Yeah. Actually, the Nader people asked us, but then we hand these data out, you know, equally to all candidates who are interested, and the Nader people asked us just—the eighth week, when he was making his final push for more coverage, how much coverage he had gotten in the network evening news. We found four stories that had discussed Nader for 20 seconds or more, and less than one minute of speaking time for him. Even though he was running, you know, very far behind in the polls, that would be proportionately a lower percentage of airtime than one would expect from his poll standings—about 2 percent of the airtime versus 4 or 5 percent.

And of course, he did get a burst of coverage right at the end that was coverage of how he would play the role of spoiler. This is something that the networks always have to deal with—the problem of minor party candidates and what do you do with them. And every four years, we have this discussion that the—with the exception of Perot, who became a really major force and was leading in the polls at one point in '92.

Minor party candidates really just always get shafted in network news. Whatever reason, that's—every study we've ever done, they are just about completely ignored, and that, for better or worse, makes it harder for them to get any traction.

S. Hess: Do you want to add to that, Marvin?

M. Kalb: Well, I was just thinking that if—just looking at the numbers, he—what did he get nationally? Something—2 or 3 percent of the overall national vote. And if Bob is saying that he got even less than in coverage —

R. Lichter: Well, he—I think he got about 2 percent in coverage, but he was running at about 4 to 5 percent in the polls.

M. Kalb: At that time.

R. Lichter: And he could argue, "And if I'd gotten more coverage, I wouldn't have fallen off in the polls." You know, that's just an undecidable argument.

M. Kalb: Absolutely. It's undecidable, and it's really impossible to know. And we do have this problem every four years. I think that is also accurate.

But my sense is—and here I have no studies to back it up—but just my sense is that he got more coverage right toward the end, possibly than he deserved, on the basis of the numbers that he got.

But then, from another point of view, given the role of spoiler, if in fact that's what he got—but when you begin to look around at the numbers in the key states that everybody's talking about now, Nader did pick up a significant number of votes that would have affected the outcome one way or the other. So it is a very important kind of story. And I think it is covered with sufficient depth.

S. Hess: A question over here.

Question: Hi. My name is Alicia Shepard. I write for American Journalism Review. I have—I've wanted to jump in five times.

First of all, Stephen, if you don't go on the air, and you obviously are very intelligent, then the networks still—or the cable stations still have the pressure to fill up the airtime, so someone else will go on.

And then, Marvin, you made the point that the networks assume that the people watching are well informed about Voter News Service, which I had never even heard of before. And I should have, I guess. And you know, the number-one rule in journalism is, you know, don't ASSUME; it makes an ASS out of U and ME.

M. Kalb: If I said, by the way, that I thought that most Americans knew about Voter News Service, I misspoke. I didn't mean that at all.

Question: No, no, you just said the networks assumed that we watching understood how the returns were coming in —

M. Kalb: Uh-huh.

Question:—and that they made the assumption —

M. Kalb: I'm sorry to have left that impression. I certainly didn't mean to.

Question: No, no. You said—you—I think we agree. You said that they make the assumption that we all know, so they don't bother to explain it.

M. Kalb: Right.

Question: And the other thing that really bothers me is the lack of context, and I wonder if that's something that you can look at when you do your research? For instance, when this first 19,000 votes came out that would have been thrown out, I didn't know. Nineteen thousands out of how many? Was that statistically significant? There just seems to be so much stuff that's being thrown out, and I think Ron said it right, that it's newsgathering as we watch it. But it isn't put in context, and that is really important.

And the last thing is my question, which is, Dan Rather suggests that the solution to this is uniform poll closing times. What do you gentlemen think of that?

M. Kalb: I think that Dan has a point there. I think that there ought to be steps, perhaps that is one of them, that could improve the overall situation.

But with respect to the networks, that's not going to make the difference. That'll help, but it won't make the difference. The networks will still live in the same competitive environment. They're going to have the same people running the industry. I don't see where that kind of change will really dramatically change things. I can see it helping. I hope it happens. I don't know how it will happen, but I hope it happens. And there may very well be hearings on the Hill, I would imagine, that would start reasonably quickly. I don't know what deep effect it will have, but even if there are hearings, psychologically, it has an effect on the people who run the networks, because they don't like to be called before congressional committees.

And there will be calls, "Heavens, there is a danger to the First Amendment." All of that will come into play. But this is a phenomenally good opportunity for sensible people to come up with sensible alternatives to a system that clearly doesn't work well. And for a country like this, which is the model—or should be the model—for countries around the world seeking to perfect their democracy, we should do better.

S. Hess: On that poll, uniform poll closing, it strikes me that that's another true example of network chutzpah: let's all conform.

You can vote at 10:00 in the morning, and I've got to vote at 7:00 at night. We'll keep the polls open and charge our taxpayers to keep it open till 10:00, because we're in three time zones, just so the networks don't have to make a mistake, which is basically what we're talking about. Let's all change all of our laws so that the networks don't have to make this mistake again.

Thank you.

R. Nessen: Well, if I could say one thing about that, Steve. No, I agree with Steve, and there's an example. You know, I've said earlier that I have this theory that television ruins everything it touches. When I first started covering conventions, they were covered by the networks gavel to gavel. Then the networks said, "We'll give you three hours. We'll give you prime time during your convention week," so things had to be packed into —

M. Kalb: Four days a week.

R. Nessen: Organized, and so forth. Then the networks said, "No, that's not enough. We'll give you—we can't afford to give you three hours a night. We'll give you one hour a night." So then things really got packaged. Everything was scripted and timed so you could take maximum advantage of the hour.

Then television said, "Nah, this is too scripted and pre-packaged for us. We're not going to cover it at all." So, you know, if you change the poll closing times to conform to the networks' needs, they're going to find some reason why that, you know, further ruins the process.

M. Kalb: Yeah, but we're letting the politicians off too easily here.

S. Hess: Well, I —

M. Kalb: The politicians, Steve, took a look at what was on television and then fashioned the convention to take advantage of what it was that television was providing. They would always know that television began with 90 seconds of an opening.

So at the beginning of each hour, they'd have 90 seconds of something quite spectacular that you could not avoid—you had to watch. Then they would change.

S. Hess: Well, you know, I don't think that Don Hewitt has such a bad idea on the conventions, and that is that the two parties should pay to put them on the air. They are largely commercials for the two parties. They can raise all the money they want, it's soft money, these days. That doesn't seem to be an effort. So television time is cheap there in the middle of the summer, and so forth, and so on.

But I would do a little more. Anybody like CNN, or anybody else, who wants to cover those paid commercial broadcasts can do it for free. Anybody like NBC or CBS or ABC, that is charging for them, the networks—the parties will then charge them to come in and cover the conventions.

So, you know, I don't think it's such a bad idea. The conventions really have become generally not very newsworthy. And you could argue that they're squeezing the networks. But we should see them; we should have an opportunity to see them. And if the networks—and the parties can afford to put them on, and the networks can afford to pay to cover them, if they're Republican and Democratic productions.

Question: Katherine Reynolds with Bloomberg News. Can you talk about what you see as the responsibility of Voter News Service to be public about how their operations are conducted, and also, in this specific instance, what happened on election night in Florida?

R. Nessen: You know, I said earlier that I thought that—I mean, I probably watch this as closely and follow it as closely as anybody. I, today, after all this whole week of how did this bad call come about, I mean I heard Marvin say things today about the Voter News Service that I never knew until this minute. Who are they? How are they funded? Where are they? Who's in charge of it? How many people work there? What's their method? I mean, how do they get these results? How do they transmit these results?

I know zero about the Voter News Service today, after all this controversy, except what I've heard here today. So if I know this little, and I really follow this closely, imagine how little most people know about it. I mean, in an age when television and reporters want to know everything about everything, why is there so little about the Voter News Service?

Question: Well, they won't return phone calls. They won't explain. They're not giving interviews. And so I think you've raised a great point. Why aren't they telling us who they are? I asked them to send me a press release they put out. It was "We are looking into the problem." You know, they sent me a fax sheet. That's all that I've been —

M. Kalb: I used the word hypocrisy before. May I use it again?

M. Kalb: Network news, as all of journalism, in this country particularly, lives on a tenet of mass transparency, obvious transparency. They're the ones who bring you the truth; they are the truth tellers. If they be the truth tellers, let them tell us the truth fully about what happened with Voter News Service.

The idea which I read in today's Washington Post, that the man who runs the Voter News Service will not answer reporters' questions, I find thoroughly objectionable. Why not? His argument is that the networks won't let us. Who at the networks won't let you, and why? I mean, if there is not a front-page story in the New York Times tomorrow about just this kind of an issue, I think the Times is then faulty.

There is a lot of self-protection going on here because there was a gigantic series of blunders last Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, with consequences—I think Bob was talking about before—with consequences that end up shaping the political environment.

When I first went up to the Shorenstein Center, it took me about three years to persuade my colleagues, the senior faculty at the Kennedy School, that the media does play a major role in American politics. "Sir, please believe me." They didn't. [Laughs]

Question: Trevor Butterworth, Newswatch.org. During the conventions, there were many news stories about coverage and about the number of viewers watching. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer had dramatically increased numbers of viewers, yet they were never mentioned in any of the coverage.

In the light of all the criticism of the networks today, could you speak a little bit more evaluatively about the role of public broadcast in conveying political news about this election, in the sense that would you recommend the average person on the street watch this program over watching the network news?

S. Hess: Yes. Let me say I think the reason, and I'll be corrected here, that you don't get figures is that Nielsen does not do the figures on public broadcasting.

Question: [Inaudible]

S. Hess: They're making some estimates or some judgments. The numbers are really, and very sadly, fairly low. Put it this way: They have often bored me but never insulted my intelligence. [Laughter] And that's about how—the figures that we came up with with Bob when we raised some more money to add PBS to our study, was almost like the mirror image. It was really like the mirror image. If there was two-thirds horse race on the networks, there was one- third on the News Hour. If there were two-thirds negative on the networks, there was one-third—it was fascinating. It was almost like the mirror image.

They did some truly lovely pieces. And by far—by the way, it was PBS, but it wasn't the News Hour—by far the classic piece of journalism of this whole year has been Jim Lehrer's piece on the history of the debates, if you haven't seen it, where he got every person, presidential and vice presidential who had ever debated, with three exceptions: Ross Perot, Al Gore, and Lloyd Bentsen, to talk about that experience and what it meant to them was brilliant, brilliant television.

The program that we ended our little five minutes today was a Frontline piece, Choice 2000, by a Boston outfit of Michael Kirk. We had some very useful things that we saw on Washington Week in Review. It's a treasure; it's an absolute treasure. But we can't force people to watch; it's a option, but it's out there.

And that's why I really say that we are awash in information in our world, but we really have to think about the person who doesn't have the time; doesn't have the money to search around for news, and frankly, doesn't have the interest. And that's why the networks are so important, because in a sense, people stumble upon this thing while they're trying to find out what the weather is tonight, or what their sports scores are. And those are the people that have to be reached out to—the rest of us can find the news.

R. Lichter: Steve, the social scientists, of course, always have a jargonized term for the commonsensical point that other people make, and then the jargonized term is, "the inadvertent viewer," that's who has gotten lost. The political junkie will always have plenty of places to go to learn more about what they already know a lot. The person who doesn't know much and just is flipping through, and would get exposed to something that they wouldn't otherwise see; that's the viewer and the voter that's getting left out of the new information transmitting system.

S. Hess: The woman there.

Question:—New Media News Organization.

I was wondering. It's been common knowledge for a time now that the number of households that are depending on their news is going down—I mean, depending on their news and then going to the networks has been going down while the number of households going to the Internet to depend on their news is going exponentially up, and that the digital divide, so-called, is shrinking so that millions of households that hadn't been online and checking online for their news now are, and it's more affordable in that way.

It seems that you're not willing to talk too much about the Internet media's role in the political elections this year, in the primaries, as well. And I was wondering if, because the websites, the political websites, the networks each have their own websites, like ABC, Fox, that seemed to go and get record hits during the election this year, and are able to provide more in-depth coverage and webcasts from the conventions and other rallies, why not focus more on improving the journalistic coverage through the Internet rather than kind of holding on to this network connection that we have, the traditional news television network?

R. Nessen: You know, I'd like to know what the Internet coverage was like. I mean, obviously, washpost.com and, you know, USAToday and CNN, I mean, I know about those traditional websites, but I'd like to know what else was on the Web that may have affected, or informed, at least, voters. And as I said earlier, I think that's one of those stories that was beneath the radar this year and that something was going on there that I'd like to know about. For one thing, I think—I mean, network television is one of the most mediated forms of news, in the sense that it goes through an awful lot of hands before it gets on the air. The Internet is probably the least mediated source of news, other than somebody stopping you on the street and saying, "Did you hear this?" But I mean, everybody can be his own publisher on the Web.

The other thing that I wonder about—and Marvin touched on it briefly, and I had read about it somewhere—that particularly among younger people, people under 30, if you ask, "Where did you get information this year about which to make up your mind about which candidate you want to vote for, Leno, Letterman, MTV, "Politically Incorrect" all were cited by about 25 or 30 percent of people under 30. And I guess some of us more traditional types wonder what that—you know, what they are getting out of those shows that could be useful in making a decision about who to vote for for president.

R. Lichter: Actually, Ron, believe me, it pains me to say this, but —

R. Nessen: The entire?

R. Lichter: Yes. That's the number for the entire population. Eight years ago that was the number for 20-somethings. Now the number for 20-somethings, I believe, is 47 percent. It's almost 50 percent say they get some information. And this reminds us. You talk about the Internet, and unfortunately, asking, "How did the Internet do?" is like saying, "What did the Library of Congress have to say?" It's extraordinarily difficult to find out. Even if we could find out for right now, talking about the Internet now is like talking about the role of television in 1950. That's something I'm going to have to find out about. You've got the Internet, you've got the popular culture—the talk shows, the late-night humor and so forth, and something we haven't even mentioned is local TV news, which if you ask people where is their first source of information, local TV is also very important.

S. Hess: I think really we—it's the old scholar's joke about the lost key in the parking lot. And you say, "You lost it here?" They say, "No." "Then why are you looking here?" "Because the light's better." That sort of thing. We really haven't yet figured out an appropriate way to measure. There are obviously plenty of people working on it. I think we do a lot of measuring of the network news in part because we know how to measure it and it's easy to measure. I don't think, by the way, that it's by any means unimportant. I think it's still infinitely more important. But you're absolutely right—I think you're absolutely right—that the growth is very substantial, and we're going to have to figure out how to deal with that, as scholars.

M. Kalb: Steve, let me just add one point.

S. Hess: Oh, I'm sorry.

M. Kalb: We did a couple of studies on the role of the Internet, how many people access it and all of that, just before the Republican Convention. And what we found in this one study was that very, very few people were dependent upon the Internet for their information about the convention and then, secondarily, their information about the campaign up to that point.

Now, even the very, very few people who were dependent upon it, who inadvertently stumbled upon it, was larger than what we had found in 1998 during the off-year campaign, and larger still from what we had found in 1996. So clearly, it's going up and it's going up at a geometric, rather than an arithmetic rate. It is still not, from the evidence I've seen, anyway, a determining factor. It is not where most people get their information. It may turn out to be the case in 2004 or 2008, but it isn't there as yet.

But I have a feeling that the blunders of the networks last Tuesday will, in some way that is not yet apparent, add to the transformation of the industry; add to the way in which people—add to the different ways in which people get their information about politics. They may not be as trusting of a network call in 2004 as they were last week.

Question: I'm Wes Pippert, Missouri Journalism. A comment was made earlier about the lack of coverage of international issues during the campaign, and I had done a little survey for the State Department online journal on how the candidates—media coverage of what the candidates had to say about international issues. I chose the breakdown of the Camp David talks in July. And Labor Day—that's a quiet period when one would think that that would be a perfect opportunity to go into this sort of thing—and I did the three networks and CNN, and the three newsmagazines, the Post and the New York Times. Nobody—nobody—had anything to say. CNN had more international stories; AP did a little bit, but nobody had anything to say.

And, I thought, even worse—that's a value judgment that I stand by—when there was a breaking story, like the breakdown of the Camp David talks or the visit of the Mexican president here, nobody told us what the candidates themselves—how they would respond to that, to the breakdown of the Camp David talks or the visit of the Mexican president.

And so the media, across the board—not only the networks, but the print press as well—were really deficient on coverage of candidates' opinions about international issues.

M. Kalb: Steve?

S. Hess: We measured, from Labor Day to Election Day, all foreign policy, internationally oriented issues, as they related to the campaign. On the three network daily newcasts, there were a total of 10 stories for the rest of the world, by —

M. Kalb: On all three networks?

S. Hess: Yes. By comparison, there were 12 stories on George Bush's DWI arrest.

Question: My name is Jeff Phillips. I work for the BBC World Service Radio. The general tone of the discussion so far is that the changes in the coverage of the election are a bad thing. And I'm just wondering whether in your report, or whether as a background for the report, you went to the networks and asked them what the sort of decision-making process was by which they reached the decision to reduce the coverage, and to define the nature of their coverage?

I suppose they would say they're reflecting the tastes and requirements of their audience. And yet the electorate, which is the audience, would say—well, we know that the electorate gets most of their news from television. So we seem to be in a mutually reinforcing spiral of uninterest. And I wonder why we impose on the networks a public service remit which they don't perhaps feel they have? And even if you think they should have it, should they, so to speak, operate in the face of this apparent knowledge about their audiences?

And just a final point, it occurs to me, I wonder whether the networks don't feel that the very existence of C-SPAN lets them off the hook?

S. Hess: There's no question that you're probably talking to four people who feel strongly that the networks have this responsibility, certainly to the degree that they own stations and they're given these stations by the —

Question: Probably —

S. Hess: Pardon?

Question: Everybody in the room probably has.

S. Hess: Yes, yes. Well, I mean that, I think, was the nature of your question; if, in fact, the public isn't interested in it, why should the networks be interested? Because they have certain obligations in accepting what they get in order to inform us on these things.

Now, the question I would—I would say that they were correct, that the American people weren't terribly interested in this. They had the opportunity to watch the debates and they chose not to. There's an awful lot of evidence along the line. Even with the closeness of the election, and so forth—Curtis has probably left—but there is virtually no increase in the turnout.

Now, was it mutually supported? Was that because the networks didn't do anything? I don't think so. I'm not going to give the networks that sort of power, although I think Marvin would. But I wouldn't pull back from the view that the networks had a greater responsibility in covering, just as you could say, well, the BBC is owned by the government, maybe a little different—but in —

Question:—owned by the government.

S. Hess: Yeah, right. Right. That in the course of once every fourth year, in the choosing of our president, that they do have certain responsibilities to us that do extend beyond the casual interests of the Americans at one time.

I'm sorry that my fellow citizens are not much more interested than they are. But I would hope to see that they had the opportunity to be more interested.

M. Kalb: Don't be too unhappy about the citizens.

S. Hess: No.

M. Kalb: I mean, about a hundred million voted. Not bad.

S. Hess: And a hundred million don't.

M. Kalb: A hundred million don't, sure, for all kinds of different reasons. But that doesn't mean the hundred million who don't vote are not in some other way involved in community service and public matters. It's entirely possible.

Young people today—we found out from the Vanishing Voter Project, young people today felt to a very significant extent disconnected from the political process, but very much connected to local charity work, for example, local community work, local church activity. So they are involved, but in different ways.

And the overall sense of the vitality of American democracy is still that it's very strong. We've just come upon a big bump in the road with the election coverage of last week and that, in turn, has an impact upon the way we see ourselves.

But it is also—and I'll end up here as, you know, the plus side—but it does end up as an extraordinarily good opportunity to take a look at the entire process, including network coverage of the process and find some better way of doing it. It certainly is not beyond our wit.

R. Lichter: And if I may respond to one part of the gentleman's question; this is not just a matter of preference, there is a legal structure, a regulatory structure, since the Communications Act of 1934, that the networks and local television stations are given the right to broadcast over the public airways in return for operating in the public interest, as that's defined by regulators. And that's come into play again recently; they're selling off new parts of the spectrum, and the argument is there should be free airtime for candidates, and so forth.

But it is a matter of law and regulation, which does give a little more teeth to congressional saber rattling over hearings on the process.

R. Nessen: Well, let me just say one additional thing to the BBC man. In some ways, this is sort of the chicken-and-egg question, and in my own mind, I haven't—I don't know which comes first. The networks say, "Well, we only use seven-second sound bites because people have such short attention spans these days." And I don't know; maybe they have short attention spans because all they get to see are seven-second sound bites. I don't know.

The more important question, I think, is, are people turned off of the process? And, I mean, I guess the glass is half full when half the people voted, and I see it as half empty, because only half the people voted!

To what extent are the half who didn't vote turned off by this negative portrayal of the candidates that Steve found in his survey, or the put-down of candidates by Leno and Letterman and "Politically Incorrect" and so forth? I mean, that people—have they grown cynical and turned off of the system because of that kind of coverage? And those are the questions that come to my mind. I don't know what the answer is.

M. Kalb: Yeah, but Ron, we've never in this country had a 100 percent vote on those who were eligible to vote. We simply don't —

R. Nessen: But we've had way higher than 51 [percent].

M. Kalb: We've have not—we've had—yes, it's been higher than 51 [percent], and it's occasionally gotten into the 60s. Maybe it was in the 70s at some point in the 19th century. But that is not where it has been in the 20th century. We're in another time frame, where different perspectives have to come into play.

The only country in the world that I have ever covered where the vote was very high was the Soviet Union in its worst days. You got a 99 percent of the vote, and then the state wanted to know what happened to the other 1 percent.

We've never had that in this country, so that when we set up hypothetical standards of where are the other hundred million, we've never had the other hundred million. It's a matter of getting a good, solid majority of people, eligible voters, who vote, and then the rest of people do their thing. But they have always done their thing.

So to suggest that we're at 50.7 [percent] now and that that is an indication of a crisis in American democracy, I think, is faulty.

R. Nessen: Well, I would only argue this, Marvin: that using your numbers, which are THE numbers, if half the people vote and half the people vote for the winner, and half the people vote for the loser, so you've got a president elected by 25 percent of the eligible voters, I think that's harmful to democracy.

M. Kalb: Yeah, that's a good point.

S. Hess: Well, here we have another question. Down here.

Question: John Hanchette, Gannett News Service.

Marvin touched on this, and Bob, you did too, but I'm wondering, on—you both mentioned these congressional hearings, which are inevitable, and that they have teeth, both psychological and with the Communications Act of '34. Is there anything Congress can do to solve this or help solve it without trampling on First Amendment rights?

S. Hess: Anybody —

R. Lichter: Well, I think what you do without trampling on First Amendment rights is to rattle the saber but not to thrust it home.

M. Kalb: Exactly. Exactly.

R. Lichter: That is to say, you create more public pressure to make the networks do the right thing.

S. Hess: That's fair.

Is there a last question? A last question? Okay. The gentleman here has the last.

Question: Thank you. I'm with a German newspaper. I covered this election as a foreigner. And I was thrilled—well, especially by the outcome, of course.

Mr. Kalb mentioned the word "hypocrisy" twice.

And I was grateful for that because I'm wondering if the panel could address the question, if you as citizens have any second thoughts about this election. The fact that—you know, the sloppy recounts, new numbers every time, reminds us of some Third World practices you certainly don't want. And I wonder, do you have any second thoughts about the election, rather than the coverage of the election?

S. Hess: Actually, we don't have to answer that. It really is outside. But anybody who chooses to can defend a democracy where, of course, you get a fair approximation in that regard, and it usually works very well. The truth of the matter is that most elections are not close. In the 20th century, there were only four close elections. So you don't have to go through this process, which is run mostly by amateurs, people who are poll watchers and count ballots, and they're tired and so forth, and old machinery and whatnot. And you get a pretty darn close approximation of where we are.

And by the way, I should say, unlike other periods, there really hasn't been any proof of fraud in this election. I mean, we have had periods in our history where vote fraud has been a good community sport, the political machines in the cities and so forth and so on. That's not the case here. It's the case of a very complicated system run largely by amateurs, and underfinanced, underfinanced because, you know, it's not raining, so you don't fix the roof most of the time.

But it's not Third World. You know better than that. Let's face it. There's been nothing that's happened that's approached Third World or authoritarian world or anything like that. It's just the sloppy way that democracies tend to operate, especially if they're very large democracies and there are just an awful lot of people trying to line up in line and get their vote counted, and again, sometimes with old equipment.

R. Lichter: Steve, much of the foreign press has taken this opportunity, I think, to indulge in a spasm of what the Germans have the perfect word for, Schadenfreude, which is taking pleasure in the misery of others. This has been known to happen, in looking at American political events. And I think you have to look at this as we're seeing an extraordinarily unusual, almost worst-case scenario, and yet no one is charging fraud. There is tremendous public resilience. No one seriously thinks that there will be a crisis of confidence in the system. And I think it speaks to the underlying strength of the system that you can't cover every last contingency, and when everything goes wrong, the system doesn't go under. People look for ways to make it better.

M. Kalb: I've spent a lot of my life—I'll be very brief —

S. Hess: Go ahead.

M. Kalb:—covering foreign countries where elections were being held. And quite often when there was doubt about the result, I would find that I would be taking my cameras the following morning to take pictures of tanks in the central square, or troops that had been brought up for the television stations and the radio stations and all of that. When I came to work on Wednesday morning of last week, I noted one thing which was quite remarkable, and then commented upon it, in fact, when the first reporter called that morning.

I got down to work in 18 minutes; it normally takes me 25, and the streets were relatively clear and I saw no sign of a problem. I was incredibly proud of the absence of traffic; of the normalcy.

I think I get the drift—the undercurrent drift of your question, and I think Steve has addressed that very, very well. But to suggest that there is any fundamental crisis in the system, I think, is to carry our blathering a bit further than it was intended.

R. Nessen: Let me add a little last blather. We've all gotten the Internet—we've all gotten the e-mail message, I guess, in the last week saying that Bosnia was going to send election observers to Florida. And you know in a way this might have the effect of improving, before the next election, some of the amateurishness and old-fashioned approach to counting the votes.

I have a slightly darker view of my colleagues than my colleagues do here today. I think we've had an unwritten rule in America that there are flaws in the system, votes are stolen here and votes are stolen there and lost and missed, and so forth, but that somehow it averages out, and that we accept the results of the election. And you've heard a lot of talk over this weekend about Richard Nixon, rather than cast out on the system, accepted his loss in 1960, despite allegations of ballot irregularities in Illinois and Texas and elsewhere.

We've had the rule that we accept this as a rough count. And I think that unwritten agreement has been broken this time. Whoever—eventually we're going to have a winner. I think the process, however, is going to cast—is going to be used to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the winner. There's a terrible, cynical expression in politics these last few years, let's mess 'em up a little bit, let's mess 'em up a little bit. And both Bush and Gore are going to get messed up, no matter how this turns out. And I worry about the next four years and the perception of legitimacy.

The 2004 election will start on Friday, or whatever day the winner is declared.

S. Hess: Well, I'm sorry to end on that sad note. I don't happen to agree with it —

R. Lichter: You should have ended on mine.

S. Hess: Thank you. This was a lot of fun for us; I hope it was a lot of fun for you as well.

[END OF EVENT]