The Public Eye Chat With...Bill Plante
You've covered every presidential campaign since 1968. When it comes to 2008 coverage, why do you think that it is so focused on the top-tier candidates? Do you think that in some way viewers are shortchanged by this?
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The reason that the focus is on the top-tier candidates is because everybody who's covering politics expects this to be over by February 2008 -- less than a year from now. And they don't believe that anybody who is lower down in the polls right now is going to have any chance to get traction.But beyond the fact that candidates like Clinton or Obama simply have more money and already have the attention, isn't it sort of circular logic for the media to say, 'These are the people we're going to cover because other people aren't going to get traction?' Isn't it sort of in the hands of the media to provide the traction?Now, it can easily be that several people who are leading now fall by the wayside. And maybe somebody from lower in the pack will pop up, but it seems unlikely. Because the top-tier candidates are all well known, all well funded and it's very likely that one of them is going to have the nomination. I mean in the Democratic party it's Hillary or Obama -- so it seems today. Is there a chance for a Richardson? Who knows? But it seems less likely so therefore, there's less interest in the second-tier candidates.
There is a certain circular logic here because if nobody knows who the second-tier candidates are, then they certainly aren't going to rise. So, they will get some coverage. They simply won't get as much as the top-tier candidates. And they'll do everything they can to drive the coverage themselves, but for the most part, the interest is going to be in what the people who are likely to get the nomination are doing and saying about one another. If candidate X from the bottom of the pack says that a top- tier candidate is a jerk, it'll be a blip in the news cycle. But if two top-tier candidates start calling each other names -- as we've sort of seen already -- it becomes news.What about the scene now and then in terms of the way races are covered. There's a lot of focus on the "horse race" element rather than a discussion about issues like health care and the economy. Is that a drastic change from a long time ago?Part of what drives this is the constant reinforcement of the never-ending news cycle, which is the cable networks and to some extent, the wires. That didn't exist when I started covering campaigns.
It's a problem which has only gotten worse over time. It's very much analogous to covering the top-tier candidates instead of the bottom-tier candidates.But is it just simply easier to cover who's winning, who's losing in polls and whatnot rather than to do a story on what issues are most important to people in New Hampshire?I'm sure that everybody -- the networks, the major newspapers -- will make an attempt to say "Here they all are." Just as in every election cycle in my memory you go on once or twice during the general election campaign and say "Here are the big issues, listen up ladies and gentleman -- foreign policy, domestic policy health care, arms control." And you say that probably once, twice.
There is less emphasis on the issues than there was maybe 20 or 30 years ago but it has always been more about who appears to be winning – who's up, who's down, who's in, who's out -- than about the issues themselves because it's hard to know during a campaign, in most cases, what the effect the issues are going to have on the voting public.
In the case of 2008, clearly the war will be still of major interest. So you can say -- and polls will probably point out -- that the war will have some major effect on how people vote… . And both candidates in the general election will raise issues like health care or taxes -- or you remember Ross Perot and the giant sucking sound of jobs leaving America -- hoping that those issues they raise will catch on with the public.
In 2008 it'll be the war, unless there's an economic collapse, the war will be it.
That'll get done, but on a daily basis it won't get done. It'll get touched on, nodded to. A genuflection will be made in the direction of the issues. I don't mean to sound cynical but if you talk about issues all the time, it's harder to get people to pay attention. And broadcasting and newspapers and magazines are all about holding people's interest.We did a post recently about whether the "Evening News" had gotten better or worse since 1964. You were on that program. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like to work on the show as it existed then?
Sure. When I came to work at CBS News in 1964, the people who were running it and were producing the broadcasts were all ex-newspaper people. And they were almost all men…So, the atmosphere of the show today is a lot less formal?And in those days it was not unusual to have a 20-second sound bite. My friend the late Johnny Apple once complained bitterly when he worked at NBC in 1960 because they wouldn't let him run a 52-second sound bite. They thought it was a little long.
Some of the sound bites in that 1964 "Evening News" that you used as a comparison run 15-20 seconds. That requires the viewer to pay attention. I guess you could assume in those days that when the networks were the only source of news and it happened once a day at 6:30 as a source of national and international news that people would pay attention.
Now there's less expectation that people will pay attention and the sound bite has gradually shrunk to a point where even three seconds is not uncommon and 10 seconds is usual…
There was a very serious atmosphere when I started here about what the "Evening News" was. It was a very sort of traditional newspaper format. When Don Hewitt made the argument for a half-hour news program – the "Evening News" was for many years 15 minutes – he took the 15-minute script and had the graphics department lay it out as a mock-up of the front page of The New York Times. And the 15-minute script filled about half a page. So the idea was the half-hour newscast would fill almost a whole page mock up of The New York Times.
And there was that approach where the serious news, whether it was domestic or foreign, would come at the top of the broadcast. There were very few "News You Can Use" kind of features. There was the occasional interesting science feature but there wasn't much of that. There was occasionally a kicker story. But it looked very different than it does today.
Much less formal, yes. There are a lot of things that play into that. When I started covering the White House in 1981, there was no cable. Satellite news channels and CNN were just getting started, so they weren't really a factor for two or three years and you didn't have all the competition from Fox and MSNBC for many years after the 80s.What advantages or disadvantages are there for the viewer considering those types of changes? Or is it just a different reality?The "Evening News" in 1981 was what we said it was at the three networks at 6:30, and that was it. Now, of course, you can get all the news you want anytime. The advent of cable forced the networks to open up their news operations, not hold back the best footage until the "Evening News," but give it to the news syndication services so the affiliates can run it in order to stay competitive with the cable nets.
Cable networks would do news summaries very frequently. If a big story is breaking they are on all the time, although we may be too. But it's changed the whole approach. Far less time is spent on individual stories. The assumption is if a story is really big, you already know about it by 6:30.
I think it's just a different reality. It has evolved. I would never say that it would be better to go back to where it was, because it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work today. It doesn't do anybody any good to sit around and say, "Gee things were better in the old days." Whether they were or not is largely in the eye of the beholder anyway. What you have to do and what the networks have tried to do – you can argue about how successfully or unsuccessfully – is adapt.So, if you ask the question is the "Evening News" better or worse than it used to be, it has evolved it has changed. You may not like the way it has evolved, but it's a fact and I don't think you can undo it. And then the question arises: where do you go to get as much substance as you could get maybe 30 or 40 years ago from television?
There are places. You can watch the unadulterated workings of the Hill and other parts of Washington on C-SPAN. You can watch things treated in longer form on the NewsHour. Or imagine this: you can read. You can read periodicals. You can read whole newspaper articles. The information is out there. And it seems to be that it's the responsibility of the consumer to get the information he or she needs. It's our responsibility to do the best job we can of giving them what we consider to be the most important information of the day. But we're obviously not going to do that in depth.