Television loses the viewer vote
By Stephen Coleman
Published: October 30 2008 20:18 | Last updated: October 30 2008 20:18
How can 200m US voters make a mature, considered and perhaps even wise judgment about whom to elect as the next president of the most powerful state on earth? How can the media assist rather than hinder this four-yearly experiment in civic deliberation? Looking back over the past 12 months of an unprecedentedly costly and gripping presidential election campaign, two things are clear. The first is that television continues to be the dominant medium for agenda-setting, candidate-profiling and public exposure to information that does more than influence our prejudices. The second, however, is that to a greater extent than could have been imagined even a decade ago, the televised political spectacle has been humbled by a new communication ecology in which the box in the corner is looking strangely clunky in comparison with other flows of public information.
Since 1960, the televised presidential debates have been a high point in the battle for the candidates’ credibility. When Kennedy debated Nixon in 1960, 63m viewers tuned in. About 66m watched the third Obama-McCain debate and 70m watched the vice-presidential showdown between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. The difference was that, whereas in all debates from 1960 to 2004 it was the “debate about the debates”, conducted in the press and primetime news shows in the days after the actual event, that determined who won, this time something rather different happened.
After
the final debate on October 15 (pictured), CNN had a studio packed with
pundits ready to tell the viewers what they’d really seen. Their
overall verdict was that McCain was the winner on points. Then came the
result of the flash poll of Ohio swing voters, conducted online seconds
after the debate ended. They pronounced Obama the clear winner. This
left the pundits in a peculiar position: predicting an effect that had
already happened in their absence and contrary to their judgment. Flash
polls, made possible by the internet, have become a ubiquitous feature
of this campaign and represent an important challenge to the
time-honoured practice of media commentators telling an imagined public
what it is bound to think.
Another example of television’s decentered role is the prominence of YouTube videos as an alternative resource for Americans seeking a less professionally contrived take on the political choice facing them. The total number of views for the “Yes We Can” music video, featuring hip-hop star will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, is now charted at more than 18m. Within two weeks a video (“Dear Mr Obama”) made by a returning soldier from Iraq, supporting McCain, hit more than 9m views. The typical network evening newscast draws 7m-8m viewers at the most. But, unlike the news junkies, YouTube viewers tend not to have already made up their minds about how to vote and are circulating media content virally as a focus for discussion in blogs. Viralvideochart.com provides some impressive data showing just how many people are posting messages in response to YouTube content. It is online, not on the box, that the newly registered voters, whom it is believed will swing this election result, have been seeking a steer.
This leads on to a third way in which broadcasters have had to reconceive their relationship to their viewers. Like everywhere else, US politicians are dragged into the realm of popular culture, forced to endure questioning from people whose e-mails they would never actually read and enter into folksy chat with crowds they would prefer to see cleaning their cars. But during those democratising days and months of an election campaign, it is as if Joe the Plumber were Socrates reincarnated, a requisite guest at every feast of political words. By the end of the campaign it comes to seem as if the conversation with Joe was all that really mattered – and if you weren’t called Joe and you weren’t a plumber, your conspicuous eccentricity within the television audience was more than sufficient reason to ignore your presence. American television has gone on for 80 years assuming that its audience members had no names, only numbers in the forms of ratings. Now it has given them a name – one name; one identity; a caricature to fit all.
And here lies the problem for political communication. There now exists a remarkable range of tools enabling people to speak for themselves: in flash polls, on YouTube, in blogs and wikis and mash-ups and all manner of identity-enhancing technologies. But the aged and ossified medium of television is slow to adapt to this new world. Indeed, like many laggers, television strikes an attitude of condescension towards the newly vocal public. It assumes that by giving momentary attention to a pastiche plumber, it is getting to grips with an audience that is edging its way towards newer and better ways of apprehending social reality.
The late David Halberstam, in his The Powers That Be (1979), observed that John F. Kennedy broke the mould of candidature by smoke-filled room through mastering the art of television. For half a century, that has been a lesson all aspirants needed to learn. That time is over. The extent to which the new president manages to govern with, rather than around, the new political media may be one of the most far-reaching outcomes of this election.
This article is part of an FT series on television round the world. For earlier pieces, visit www.ft.com/arts/tv
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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