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July/August 2000 | Contents
SIX SUREFIRE WAYS TO MAKE CAMPAIGN COVERAGE A HIT
BY CHRISTOPHER HANSON
MEMO
To: Macon Bucks, Vice President
for Raking It In, CBS-Viacom
From: Edward R. Notmurrow, Director,
News Appetite Enhancement Project
Macon, we've got a big problem. The top domestic story of the year, the presidential campaign, is an eye-glazing bore. Good times at home, no Big Bad Wolf abroad, and the demise of John McCain's candidacy have completely turned the audience off to political news. Some three-fifths of the public think the race is dullsville, according to a poll commissioned by this network and The New York Times, in May. The collective public yawn can only be contributing to those disappointing Evening News ratings and ad revenues. I'm writing to suggest some options for making the campaign and the Evening News less of a bottom-line burden. Here goes:
Nailing the Niches. The mass audience for political coverage is dwindling in part because the cable revolution has created so many alluring alternatives to broadcast news. We need to go after these niche cable markets, offering partnerships in which campaign news is targeted to select audiences. Precedents include MSNBC and CNBC, which are aimed at financial news junkies and talk show addicts. I envision even more precise audience targeting to hit the news-averse market with short segments. CBS News on the SciFi Channel, for instance, might cover candidate attitudes toward the paranormal. CBS News on The Cartoon Network would address views on the "V chip" and parental warning. (An animated version of the reporters and candidates would be well worth the expense.) CBS on E!, the fashion and glamour channel, might give us a feature like "Inside Tipper Gore's Closet."
News you can't choose. Another untapped market for our political news is the captive audience, people stuck for the moment in one place with little to do. These people are desperate for any diversion and can be induced to watch what they otherwise would avoid like broccoli. CNN seems to have pioneered captive market exploitation with its special airport channel, while NBC has sold a special in-flight video news service to United Airlines. Enterprising firms like Captivate Network have already brought video and headline services to elevators, supermarket check-out lines, gas pumps, and even Magnetic Resonance Imaging chambers. But we could explore other captive audiences -- for instance, patients undergoing laser vision correction (the eye remains open during the procedure).
Perhaps the biggest market of this sort consists of commuters gridlocked in their cars. For them, we could institute the CBS News Transpo-cast. Political coverage would be viewed on huge screens that would be installed along such congested highways as the Santa Monica Freeway and the Capital Beltway. But could daily detail about the Bush-Gore race increase incidents of road rage? We should definitely consult Legal before moving ahead on this.
Asking the tough questions. Given the revived popularity of quiz shows, we could use that format -- wildly exuberant contestants and mounting cash prizes of up to a million dollars for right answers to political questions -- to hook the public on the campaign, drive up ratings, and draw in advertisers. As with 21, each contestant would have an expert helper with whom to consult on the toughest questions -- in this case a journalist like David Broder, to add gravitas.
Stand-up "reporting." You have no doubt seen the survey data indicating that many people now get virtually all of their news -- political and other -- from topical jokes on late night television monologues, including those of our own David Letterman. His snarky attitude still seems to strike a chord after all these years. What about teaming up Letterman with Rather? The David Letterman Show/CBS Evening News would combine music by top and emerging performers, weird animal acts, and stand-up comedy with insights into the candidates' policies. Dan Rather, whose contract still has some time to run, might be used in the Ed McMahon role, setting up punch lines. I asked one of Letterman's gag writers to come up with an example, and the focus groups ate it up.
RATHER (deadpan): Democratic candidate Al Gore charged today that Republican George W. Bush's ambitious, fifty-state anti-ballistic missile defense plan was dangerous. (Cut to Letterman, rolling his eyes in an exaggerated, here-we-go-again manner. Titters from audience.)
RATHER (continuing, clearly irritated): Gore suggested the plan could lead the Chinese to build up their nuclear arsenal in order to overwhelm American defenses -- a result that, in a crisis, might lead Beijing to deliver a full scale barrage against American cities.
LETTERMAN: Hey, hold the MSG! (laughter) That's one case where I hope they DO get the wrong address or the wrong order! (more laughter) Speaking of home deliveries, Dan, those Chinese can be pretty -- shall we say -- unreconstructed. The fortune in my cookie the other night said, "Woman's mouth like twenty-four-hour restaurant: always open." (intense laughter)
RATHER (unsmiling): Which leads us to the gender gap in the presidential electorate. It seems, for the moment at least, to be shrinking. A Gallup poll released today . . . (Letterman rolls eyes) . . .
And so on.
Starcasts. An alternative to Letterman would be to replace Rather with a rotating ensemble of stars, coating the news pill with celebrity sweeteners like Sharon Stone. (Watch out, Leonardo!) We could push the celebrity journalist gambit a few moves further by reenacting the day's election events on our newscast, using actors as stand-ins for campaign figures. How about George Clooney as Bush and Woody Harrelson as Gore? Who knows, we might even sell the FCC on the idea that reenactment is a form of civic journalism that could reconnect millions of disaffected voters with the vital issues of the day -- thus fulfilling the public service requirements that stuck us with the dull, old news format in the first place.
Mindbending. What about using cutting-edge technology to help solve our problem? We could pioneer "Subliminal Broadcasting" with a sub rosa news program that would run simultaneously with a popular show superimposed "on top" of it. The genius of this approach is that it allows us to transmit uninteresting but important public affairs material without driving the public to jazzier competitors. The subliminal report would educate the voter on an unconscious level with split-second bursts of political information that could not be detected by the naked eye.
As we work out the bugs, we should consider some less ambitious head-hunting. Could you feature a start-up CBS cable channel for insomniacs? With them we could turn the weakness of this year's political news into a strength. Campaign coverage, including detailed analysis of the candidates' tax and trade policies and extensive excerpts from their speeches, would be played all night on our new channel. Our promo campaign would encourage insomnia sufferers to put a TV in their bedroom and keep it tuned to the channel as they climb between the sheets. The sufferers would be all but guaranteed to nod off quickly for a good night's slumber, without the harmful side effects of barbiturates. They would awake not only more refreshed but better informed. We could call the new channel CBS Snooze. There is, of course, a precedent for this sleep-channel idea -- C-SPAN. But unlike it, ours will consult experts on sleep and sleep learning, and will thus be more deliberately, scientifically, and effectively soporific. That's our selling point. Still, we don't have Brian Lamb. Let's ink that baby!
Christopher Hanson, a contributng editor to cjr, teaches journalism at the University of Maryland. He worked for twenty years as a reporter in Washington, D.C.
