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Show Airing Democracy: Politics and Broadcast Television Travis Currit inator of our culture, the shared currency of an increasingly-fragmented society. Thus broadcast television is uniquely situated to be a disseminator of democracy, a tool to bring the political information to the masses that is necessary to empower them to act on their own behalf. Another factor that makes the question of political information on broadcast television so important is the public's reliance on it as a source of political information. Use of television in general to follow presidential campaigns has traditionally been very high (Jamieson 1996) and a recent survey found that, despite some slippage in recent years, people turn to local, non-cable TV news for campaign information more than any other source (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2004a). The third factor that should concern us about the amount of political information being broadcast is that, in a very real and legally binding sense, the airwaves used by broadcasters are public property. Citing the inherent scarcity of broadcast spectrum and the necessity of government regulation for the orderly use of the airwaves, therefore providing them with their economic value, the Federal Communications Act of 1934 declared the airwaves to be public property. This decision has since been upheld in numerous court cases'. The Act recognizes that broadcasters, to whom the government grants the right to use the public spectrum for free, have a responsibility to serve the public interest. This responsibility has, to varying degrees throughout the years, been interpreted to include a responsibility to disseminate political information (New America Foundation 2004). Thus we see that broadcast television is the single most important medium in terms of potential for creating a more equal democracy. It is then of greatest concern how well it is fulfilling this potential, specifically how much political information is being disseminated through this most democratic of media. Amount and Quality of Political Information on Broadcast Television Unfortunately, the answer is disheartening. The amount of useful political information on broadcast television is alarmingly low, and it looks to be in a state of continual decline. Before we document that decline, however, it is important to define the phrase "political information on broadcast television." For in a very real sense all television is political, in that it both reflects and shapes the public psyche, echoing and creating the sentiments of a nation, the country's Zeitgeist for which an election is a concrete expression. However, for political information to truly count for our purposes, that is, for it to be considered as a useful tool in the expansion and 1 The landmark cases for establishing the public interest standard are FCC v. Pottsville Broadcasting (1940), National Broadcasting Co. v. VS. (1943), and Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969). proper functioning of democracy, the information must function far more explicitly than as mere shaper of unconscious public opinion. It must be framed in such a way that it will be consciously digested as political information, so that it will be viewed as an argument to be evaluated and weighed on the scales of political opinion and voting choice. Furthermore, it must contain some substantial discussion of an issue or topic of actual interest to the voter when weighing his decision. As we will see, not all of what is sometimes called political information meets the narrow definition implied by these requirements. First, while political information may crop up in shows from a variety of formats, the focus is primarily on programs that the public actually views with the intent or at least expectation of receiving political information. This is the case primarily with programs of an overtly political nature, such as debates and presidential speeches, and shows with a primary purpose of disseminating information, such as the news, talk shows, and the like. The main area of focus in this arena will be the local and national nightly news broadcasts, which have the highest overall audience of the informational programs and also are overwhelmingly cited by the public as their number one source of political information (National Association of Broadcasters 2002). Secondly, not all political information is created equal. As any candidate will tell you, the information presented in the weeks closest to an election outweighs that of the previous months, for that is when the majority of the public starts weighing their decision. Thus we will particularly look at broadcasting in time periods surrounding major elections. Unfortunately, much of the election year broadcasting becomes caught up in the drama of the horse race as shown in the latest polls, which, though exciting to the political junkie, do not tell a voter anything about a candidate or an issue that would actually help him or her to decide for whom to vote. Thus consideration will be given not only the quantity of political broadcasting, but also the quality. Unfortunately, both quantity and quality have declined to alarmingly low levels at the present. Quantitatively, the decline is striking. According to the Tyndall Report, a publication of ADT research which has tracked the amount of campaign coverage on network news for the last 16 years, in 1988 the weekday nightly newscasts of the three major networks-ABC, CBS, and NBC-had aired 1476 minutes of campaign coverage by May 28 (2004). At that same point in the 2004 campaign, the number was only 911 minutes, a decrease of almost 40 percent. A similar report by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) found that in 2003 the networks spent 32 percent less time covering the campaign than they did during the same period of the 2000 election cycle, and 62 percent less time than they did in 1996 (2004b). This fits with the data from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), which found that only 4 percent of network news stories in 2003 were about campaigns or elections. The 74 |
