Dumbing Him Down

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Dumbing Him Down

 

The networks condense John Kerry's foreign-policy

speech to 45 words (or less), and the public doesn't

know what he stands for.

 

Imagine that.

 

By Todd Gitlin

Web Exclusive: 07.28.04

 

Is it a huge surprise that American multitudes say

they don’t know what John Kerry and the Democrats

stand for? How would they know? And who bears

responsibility?

 

First point about the attention that’s being paid: An

ABC representative took to The New York Times (July

28) to brag that the network had made the right --

that is, the commercially correct -- call in deciding

to cut convention coverage to the bone. “The figures

released Tuesday by Nielsen Media Research,” wrote

Neil A. Lewis and Bill Carter, “suggest that the

number of total viewers for the Democratic

convention's first night fell to about 13.5 million

this year from about 17 million four years ago.”

 

But hold on. Two paragraphs later, Lewis and Carter

wrote, “[V]iewing on the cable news channels showed a

big increase, with about two million more viewers

watching this year's first-day coverage than did four

years ago.” And then, “PBS, the one broadcast network

that has continued to provide gavel-to-gavel coverage,

also experienced a sharp rise in viewers … an average

of 2.5 million viewers for the three hours of opening

night coverage, compared with 1.9 million four years

ago.”

 

Meanwhile, in some areas, ABC added a digital channel,

also sent out on the Web, for those who take their

convention coverage neat. No figures are forthcoming

for that.

 

Apparently no figures exist for C-SPAN’s wall-to-wall

coverage in 2000 or 2004, either.

 

Meanwhile, cable-news networks totaled 4.7 million on

Monday night, up from 2.7 million in 2000.

 

Let’s do some arithmetic. Leaving ABC digital and

C-SPAN aside, the first-night total TV audience added

up to 20.7 million, compared with 21.6 million in

2000. This represents a decline (again, not allowing

for the possibility of a compensatory uptick in

C-SPAN’s audience) of a grand 4 percent -- not exactly

what was implied in the Los Angeles Times headline “TV

Ratings Dip Sharply From 2000.”

 

There may well be, as Lewis and Carter wrote, “a sharp

decline in public interest in … scripted political

events.” But the networks may still be guilty of

self-fulfilling prophecies.

 

Second point regarding the coverage of what Dan Rather

is pleased to call the convention as “infomercial”:

Missing from every single newspaper account of network

thinking about public obligations is an accounting of

the profits made by the networks, their owned stations

and affiliates, from the broadcast licenses they hold

at the people’s pleasure, licenses worth hundreds of

millions of dollars (as determined in that ultimate

adjudicator of value, the market), and for which they

pay not the thinnest dime, either Roosevelt or Reagan.

 

Meanwhile -- third point about what the candidate and

his supporters say and when they say it -- it’s not as

though Kerry has been exactly quiet. The pundits may

roll their eyes at Kerry’s prolixity, but the networks

aren’t exactly giving Americans more than a nibble.

Take the gigantic question of foreign policy. George

W. Bush’s White House, Kerry said in Seattle on May

27, has “looked to force before exhausting diplomacy;

they bullied when they should have persuaded. They've

gone it alone when they should have assembled a whole

team. They have hoped for the best when they should

have prepared for the worst. They've made America less

safe than we should be in a dangerous world. In short,

they have undermined the legacy of generations of

American leadership, and that is what we must restore,

and that is what I will restore.

 

“Shredding alliances is not the way to win the war on

terror, or even to make America safer. As president,

my No. 1 security goal will be to prevent the

terrorists from gaining weapons of mass murder, and

our overriding mission will be to disrupt and destroy

their terrorist cells. Because al-Qaeda is a network

with many branches, we have to take the fight to the

enemy on every continent -- smartly. And we have to

enlist other countries in that cause.”

 

Kerry went on in this vein for 3,500 words. And the

night of this speech, how many did America’s still

dominant news channels convey? ABC: 28 words. NBC: 42

words. CBS: 43 words.

Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology

at Columbia University and the author, most recently,

of Letters to a Young Activist.

2004 by The American Prospect, Inc.

Preferred Citation: Todd Gitlin, " Dumbing Him Down " ,

The American Prospect Online, Jul 28, 2004. This

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