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Show Hinckley Journal of Politics 2005 of discussion, they have almost no control about how those topics are discussed, and whether the stories are presented with an issue or strategy frame. Placing the blame on the politicians themselves also puts us in a chicken-or-the-egg type dilemma: is political news coverage shallow and insubstantial because that is the nature of politics and politicians, or has politics become shallow and insubstantial because that is the nature of television news? The news director may feel that the politician's speech is nothing but clever empty phrases and thus show it only in sound bites; the politician, seeing that his speeches are always reduced to nine second clips, begins speaking solely in sound bites in order to be assured it will play well on the news. A spiral of mutual cynicism begins, each feeding off the other (Capella & Jamieson 1997). Another factor that may contribute to strategy and horse-race focused news broadcasts is the predominance of Washington insiders on the news. The news about Washington politicians is most often reported by career Washington correspondents and commented on by political analysts and former government officials. It is easy to see how this closed loop of Beltway insiders could begin to lose sight of the fact that the daily ups and downs and maneuvering of politics, of such riveting interest and vital import to them, evokes little interest and has even less real effect on ordinary Americans. It has even been found that insider Washington analysts' presence on newscasts increases the use of strategy frames (Jamieson 1996). But the press corps have always been Washington insiders, and the pundits similarly entrenched Beltway-ites. Thus their presence cannot adequately explain the precipitous decline seen in broadcast political news coverage in the last 15 years. One factor that perhaps can, however, is the drastic alterations the media environment has undergone in the last two decades. Increased media conglomeration could be a contributing factor. In 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which deregulated much of the television industry and loosened the caps on media ownership by large corporations, allowing one company to own up to 39 percent of the media in one market. Changes in ownership patterns of individual stations certainly cannot account for changes in the quality of the national network news, but, as the Project for Excellence in Journalism showed in a five year study, where local news is concerned smaller station groups produce higher quality newscasts than stations owned by large conglomerates by a significant margin (2002). The rise of cable has had serious consequences for broadcast television in general, and the rise of cable news has had even more serious repercussions in the broadcast news departments. Less then 7 percent of homes with at least one television had cable in 1970. By 2003, 69.8 percent of television households had cable television subscriptions (Media InfoCenter 2004). Despite this, the major broadcast networks have continued to dominate the ratings, but recent years have seen cable garnering more and more of a mainstream audience, eating into broadcast's traditional territory. The bevy of options presented to the viewer through cable has broken the networks' monopoly on the public's attraction. The concept of a political event broadcast on all three major networks guaranteeing an essentially captive audience is no longer valid. This has been documented in a marked decline of the ratings for presidential addresses since the rise of cable, perhaps explaining the networks' reticence to cover events such as debates and conventions (Baum and Kernell 1999). Cable news has seriously altered the playing field for the network news broadcasts. Minor upstarts when they began in the 1980s, all-news cable channels such as CNN and Fox News have risen to a place of prominence, receiving increasingly higher ratings and, albeit less than local and national news broadcasts, being cited by more and more of the public as a source for campaign news. Their 24-hour, instantly accessible nature makes them even bigger players than ratings numbers would indicate, for while the number of people watching cable news at any one time may be low, the number who tune in during any 24-hour period is substantially higher. This upturn has been led by Fox News, which pioneered a style of flashiness, confrontation, and 24-hour up to the minute immediacy which has since been copied by the other cable news networks. It is this style and immediacy which the networks now see themselves as contending against, thus possibly acting as a force towards increased superficiality and strategizing in lieu of in-depth and substantial reporting. Also, the fact that political events receive treatment on these channels, regardless of whether they are treated in any depth or with anything but a horse-race approach-in addition to the supposed accessibility to politics offered by C-SPAN and the Internet-has led to a decreased sense of duty on the part of broadcasters. They feel the public's political needs are being met by those outlets, and thus assume that their traditional special public obligations are no longer as important. This is a claim, however, that rests on unproven ground. Despite its perpetual potential to revolutionize politics, the Internet remains a marginal source of campaign information for most people, and is neither as substantial (PEJ 2000a) or as widely used as is commonly thought (Consumers Union 2004). C-SPAN, though a wonderful public service, has a fairly small audience (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2004b), and is still hampered by its subscription-basis, making it unavailable to members of the public without cable, a problem it shares with cable news networks such as Fox News or CNN. Although most of the population does have access to cable television, almost a third of the population, over 80 million people, do not (Media InfoCenter 2004). Those without cable fall disproportionately in the lower income brackets, and thus are the same people more likely to not have access to other means of political information such as the Internet (Fetto 2003). Thus neither cable nor the Internet provide enough public education to significantly 77 |