The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

(this is the 2nd of 3 posts)

These two gentlemen, & ABC News.

Yes, I work for an ABC affiliate. But I hope this post demonstrates to you that I’m not loathe to give criticism where it’s due.

Watching the debate last night, I felt most exasperated not at either of the candidates or their responses, but at Gibson & Stephanopolous’ insistence on spending the first 45 minutes going over the “tabloid fodder” that this campaign has generated.

No, I don’t think those issues should be ignored - it’s good for voters to see how candidates handle the mistakes they made.

But devoting 45 minutes - the first third of the debate - to this stuff , rather than focus on the issues that impact the voters directly, reinforces an image of a media that is only hungry for more gaffes, scandals, & above all - ratings.

The 2nd third of the debate was devoted to Iraq & foreign policy. The third third focused on domestic issues. It was telling, & helps me make my point, to hear Gibson say:

“We’re running short on time. Let me just give some quick questions here and let me give you a minute each to answer. What are going to do about gas prices? It’s getting to $4 a gallon. It is killing truckers. People are in trouble, yet the whole world pays a whole lot more for gas than we do. What are you going to do about it? “

Excellent question, Charlie. Perhaps it might have been a more important one to lead off the debate, rather than relegate it to the “running short on time” section.

I’m not the only one calling ABC on this flim-flammery - not by a long shot.

The Washington Post’s Tom Shales (appropriately) skewered ABC’s coverage this morning. He wrote it better than I could have:

“The fact is, cable networks CNN and MSNBC both did better jobs with earlier candidate debates. Also, neither of those cable networks, if memory serves, rushed to a commercial break just five minutes into the proceedings, after giving each candidate a tiny, token moment to make an opening statement. Cable news is indeed taking over from network news, and merely by being competent.

Gibson sat there peering down at the candidates over glasses perched on the end of his nose, looking prosecutorial and at times portraying himself as a spokesman for the working class. Blunderingly he addressed an early question, about whether each would be willing to serve as the other’s running mate, “to both of you,” which is simple ineptitude or bad manners. It was his job to indicate which candidate should answer first. When, understandably, both waited politely for the other to talk, Gibson said snidely, “Don’t all speak at once.”

For that matter, the running-mate question that Gibson made such a big deal over was decidedly not a big deal — especially since Wolf Blitzer asked it during a previous debate televised and produced by CNN.

The boyish Stephanopoulos, who has done wonders with the network’s Sunday morning hour, “This Week” (as, indeed, has Gibson with the nightly “World News”), looked like an overly ambitious intern helping out at a subcommittee hearing, digging through notes for something smart-alecky and slimy. He came up with such tired tripe as a charge that Obama once associated with a nutty bomb-throwing anarchist. That was “40 years ago, when I was 8 years old,” Obama said with exasperation.

Obama was right on the money when he complained about the campaign being bogged down in media-driven inanities and obsessiveness over any misstatement a candidate might make along the way, whether in a speech or while being eavesdropped upon by the opposition. The tactic has been to “take one statement and beat it to death,” he said.

No sooner was that said than Gibson brought up, yet again, the controversial ravings of the pastor at a church attended by Obama. “Charlie, I’ve discussed this,” he said, and indeed he has, ad infinitum. If he tried to avoid repeating himself when clarifying his position, the networks would accuse him of changing his story, or changing his tune, or some other baloney.

…

To this observer, ABC’s coverage seemed slanted against Obama. The director cut several times to reaction shots of such Clinton supporters as her daughter, Chelsea, who sat in the audience at the Kimmel Theater in Philly’s National Constitution Center. Obama supporters did not get equal screen time, giving the impression that there weren’t any in the hall. The director also clumsily chose to pan the audience at the very start of the debate, when the candidates made their opening statements, so Obama and Clinton were barely seen before the first commercial break. “

Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher called it “perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years.”

Walter Shapiro at Salon.com describes the debate as “devoid of a single policy question during its opening 50 minutes, the debate easily could have convinced the uninitiated that American politics has all the substance of a Beavis and Butt-Head marathon. If the debate was a dress rehearsal for the Oval Office, then the job of a 21st-century president primarily consists of ducking gotcha questions.”

& Will Bunch’s letter to Gibson & Stephanopoulos is so good & captures my feelings about it, here it is in full:

Dear Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos,

It’s hard to know where to begin with this, less than an hour after you signed off from your Democratic presidential debate here in my hometown of Philadelphia, a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, “a shameful night for the U.S. media.” It’s hard because — like many other Americans — I am still angry at what I just witnesses, so angry that it’s hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking. Look, I know that “media criticism” — especially when it’s one journalist speaking to another — tends to be a genteel, colleagial thing, but there’s no genteel way to say this.

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters — you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

You implied throughout the broadcast that you wanted to reflect the concerns of voters in Pennsylvania. Well, I’m a Pennsylvanian voter, and so are my neighbors and most of my friends and co-workers. You asked virtually nothing that reflected our everyday issues — trying to fill our gas tanks and save for college at the same time, our crumbling bridges and inadequate mass transit, or the root causes of crime here in Philadelphia. In fact, there almost isn’t enough space — and this is cyberspace, where room is unlimited — to list all the things you could have asked about but did not, from health care to climate change to alternative energy to our policy toward China to the deterioration of Afghanistan to veterans’ benefits to improving education. You ignored virtually everything that just happened in what most historians agree is one of the worst presidencies in American history, including the condoning of torture and the trashing of the Constitution, although to be fair you also ignored the policy concerns of people on the right, like immigration issues.

You asked about gun control — phrased to try for a “gotcha” in a state where that’s such a divisive issue — but not about what we really care about, which is how to reduce crime. You pressed and pressed on those capital gains taxes, but Senators Clinton and Obama were forced to bring up the housing crisis on their own initiative.

Instead, you wasted more than half of the debate — a full hour — on tabloid trivia that for the most part wasn’t even that interesting, because most of it was infertile ground that has already been covered again and again and again. I’m not saying that Rev. Wright and Bosnia sniper fire and “bitter” were never newsworthy — I myself wrote about all of these for the Philadelphia Daily News or my Attytood blog, back when they were more relevant — but the questions were stale yet clearly intended to gin up controversy (they didn’t, by the way, other than the controversy over you.) The final questions of that section, asking Obama whether he thought Rev. Wright “loved America” and then suggesting that Obama himself is somehow a hater of the American flag, or worse, were flat-out repulsive.

Are you even thinking when simply echo some of the vilest talking points from far-right talk radio? What are actually getting at — do you honestly believe that someone with a solid track record as a lawmaker in a Heartland state which elected him to the U.S. Senate, who is now seeking to make some positive American history as our first black president, is somehow un-American, or unpatriotic? Does that even make any sense? Question his policies, or question his leadership. because that is your job as a journalist. But don’t insult our intelligence by questioning his patriotism.

Here’s a question for you, George. Is it true that yesterday you appeared on the radio with conservative talk radio host Sean Hannity, and that you said you were “taking notes” when he urged you to ask a question about Obama’s supposed ties to a former member of the Weather Underground — which in fact you did. With all the fabulous resources of ABC News at your disposal, is that an appropriate way for a supposed journalist to come up with debate questions, by pandering to divisive radio shows?

And Charlie…could you be any more out of touch with your viewers? Most people aren’t millionaires like you, and if Pennsylvanians are losing sleep over economic matters, it is not over whether the capital gains tax will go back up again. I was a little shocked when you pressed and pressed on that back-burner issue and left almost no time for high gas prices, but then I learned tonight that you did the same thing in the last debate, that you fretted over that middle-class family that made $200,000 a year. Charlie, the nicest way that I can put this is that you need to get out more.

But I’m not ready to make nice. What I just watched was an outrage. As a journalist, you appeared to confirm all of the worst qualities that cause people to hold our profession in such low esteem, especially your obsession with cornering the candidates with lame “trick” questions and your complete lack of interest or concern about substance — or about the American people, or the state of our nation. You embarassed some good people who work at ABC News — for example, the journalists who worked hard to break this story just last week — and you embarassed yourselves. The millions of people who watched the debate were embarassed, too — at the state of our political discourse, and what it has finally become, at long last.

Quickly, a word to any and all of my fellow journalists who happen to read this open letter. This. Must . Stop. Tonight, if possible. I thought that we had hit rock bottom in March 2003, when we failed to ask the tough questions in the run-up to the Iraq war. But this feels even lower. We need to pick ourselves up, right now, and start doing our job — to take a deep breath and remind ourselves of what voters really need to know, and how we get there, that’s it’s not all horserace and “gotcha.” Although, to be blunt, I would also urge the major candidates in 2012 to agree only to debates that are organized by the League of Women Voters, with citizen moderators and questioners. Because we have proven without a doubt in 2008 that working journalists don’t deserve to be the debate “deciders.”

Charlie, I’m going to sign off this letter the way that you always sign off the news, that “I hope you had a great day.”

Because America just had a horrible night.

Amen.

Not everyone feels this way. Praise for ABC’s coverage can be found here & here.

SIDEBAR: Did ABC have a horrible night? No. In fact ABC did fairly decently in the ratings, especially in big cities who face an upcoming primaries. A buddy from college who now works at Fox Sports wrote me an e-mail about the overnight ratings:

“The overnights include 56 major markets. The rating is a % of homes in hose markets that watched. This is what each network averaged from -10pm:

Fox - 9.1
ABC - 8.8
CBS - 6.1
NBC - 4.8

Philly did an 18.0 and Pittsburgh a 10.2. Philly’s ABC station is one of the strongest in the country and Pittsburgh’s is just ok. Other big cities with primaries ahead: 11.4 in Charlotte, 12.7 in Raleigh, 9.4 in Indy. ABC won from 8-10pm in each of those markets. ABC also won NY, Chicago, Boston, and DC.

The half-hours went like this: 8.2, 9.4, 9.1 ,8.4. That 8.4 includes about 10 minutes after the conclusion of the actual debate when a lot of people would have bailed. The number for the closing question was probably more like a nine and a half.

This is a great showing. I’m sure some idiot will write that it’s somehow meaningful that the debate got beat badly by Idol (which only faced the back half of the debate), but it isn’t. We’re talking about a primary debate here, and it won the night in numerous huge cities that have already voted.

Many of Shales’s criticisms are valid, but he’s flat wrong when he says cable news is replacing broadcast news. When the final figures come in, last night’s audience is going to be multiples bigger than any previous debate this year. An 8.8 overnight, which is a preliminary number, suggests a true audience of over ten million.

It’s good fodder for Dan’s point about people being so much more engaged this year. On one hand, ten million-plus is an incredible audience for a primary debate (maybe the biggest ever?). On the other hand, about 110 million people are going to vote in the general, so well over 90% of November voters didn’t tune in last night.

In any area - sports, politics, music - I think the internet greatly amplifies the most interested people. For example, I think the smartest 10% of baseball fans are far, far more knowledgeable than the smartest 10% of fans 30 years ago, but the average fan is probably about the same. And I think the same is true of politics. The political junkie of
30 years ago would seem totally ignorant by today’s standards. That top 10% - or whatever it truly is - creates the impression that people in general are more engaged, but I’m not certain that they are.”

Well said, & we’ll see.

What do you think? Do you agree that ABC’s (& Gibson’s & Stephanopoulos’s) approach to the debate was shameful? Post a comment & let us know!

****”The views and opinions represented here are mine and mine alone. They do not represent the views or opinions of any other employee or the management of WTVC-TV or Freedom Broadcasting Corp.”****

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