January/February 2001

January/February 2001 | Contents

CABLE: FLYING HIGH

BY JANE HALL

A full month after the election, after many a hairpin turn, and just after the Florida Supreme Court had provided another one by ordering manual recounts of some 43,000 Florida ballots, Jeff Greenfield of CNN begged for mercy. If someone was trying "to create a thrill ride for political junkies," he said, "you'd have to shut it down due to cardiac arrest." Greenfield didn't look all that unhappy, however.

The next day the story reversed course again when the U.S. Supreme Court voted five to four to halt the counts, and once again the cable television networks were in the middle of the mix. Indecision 2000, as Comedy Central called it, was a made-for-cable, real-life historical drama, with changing characters and plot lines that conformed to the norms of entertainment, exciting an electorate -- and a TV-news audience -- that had not shown particular passion for Al Gore and George W. Bush before November 7.

While the major broadcast networks devoted considerable time to the long election story, the cable news networks -- CNN, the Fox News Channel, and MSNBC -- scored record audiences with wall-to-wall coverage, from election night through Al Gore's concession speech on December 13. More than that, unlike the all-Monica or all-OJ stories that had boosted ratings in the recent past, this one was not tabloidism tarted up with faux import. This was a story with true meaning and historical significance, and a lesson on how our democracy does and does not work. The cable networks can be faulted for relying too heavily on spin and counter-spin from Democratic and Republican strategists. And for leaving unanswered such questions as whether African-Americans in Florida were discriminated against in voting. But overall they provided solid, often exciting real-time coverage of the "Battle of the Ballot."

"This is a great story, and the cable networks did it about right in terms of the hours they gave to it," says Ed Turner, a veteran newsman and the former executive vice president in charge of newsgathering for CNN. "There are several stories that you didn't see and should have seen -- like who was in that crowd in Miami-Dade county and what impact they had on the canvassing board's decision not to finish their recount," Turner says, referring to the protests at the canvassing board there. "But in terms of telling a complicated story live and as it's happening in many places, this is what cable can do best."

The audiences for CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC spiked with election night and stayed high for more than a month as the constitutional drama continued. Viewership for those channels doesn't approach broadcast TV levels, of course. The weeknight audience for NBC's Nightly News was up to 12 million viewers during the final week of the drama. But in terms of all-day viewing, all four major cable networks vastly increased the number of people tuning in (see box). CNN's average prime-time audience was up 71 percent from October 2 through December 5, the day after the Supreme Court's first historic ruling, from 954,000 to 1.6 million viewers. Fox News Channel's viewership was up 55 percent, from 717,000 to 1.1 million. And MSNBC's was up 113 percent, from 391,000 to 832,000.

All three cable networks saw huge increases in the audience for their political- and legal-themed talk shows as well. CNN's Inside Politics and the legal program Burden of Proof both doubled the numbers of their viewers during November, as did Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC and Hannity and Colmes on Fox. On the night of the first Supreme Court ruling, Fox's O'Reilly Factor, with talk-show host Bill O'Reilly, scored the highest single rating ever for a Fox News program, 2.3 million viewers.

AVERAGE CABLE NETWORK VIEWERS BETWEEN 9 A.M. AND MIDNIGHT
Source: Nielsen Media Research

DAY CNN FOX News MSNBC

October 7
One month before the election

446,000 218,000 254,000

November 7
Election Day 2,661,000 1,171,000 1,414,000

November 14
Circuit Court upholds Katherine Harris's certification deadline 1,515,000 912,000 827,000

November 21
Florida Supreme Court extends certification deadline 1,294,000 857,000 781,000

December 4
U.S. Supreme Court asks the Florida Supreme Court to explain its reasoning.
Circuit Court rejects Gore's request for
hand recounts. 970,000 605,000 528,000

December 8
Florida Supreme Court orders a statewide manual recount of all undervotes 1,094,000 894,000 642,000

December 12
U.S. Supreme Court bars further recounts 1,160,000 794,000 787,000

Matthews, a former aide to House Speaker "Tip" O'Neill, appeared to have found a story to match his energy level. He was all over the dial, at one point anchoring up to three hours a night of special editions of Hardball on MSNBC and CNBC (both owned by NBC) and appearing on NBC's Today. Interestingly, Matthews, whose Hardball program alone accounted for 17 percent of the negative characterizations of Al Gore in a Project for Excellence in Journalism study of bias in election coverage, was expressing admiration for the vice president in the post-election period. "Who do you want fighting for us in the world?" he said on PBS's Charlie Rose Show in November. "That guy hiding on the ranch down in Texas, or this guy with the best lawyers in the country duking it out?"

Fox News was strongly criticized for having John Ellis, a first cousin of George W. Bush, as head of the "decision desk" that called Florida for the Republican side. The incident was an embarrassment for the network. But Bill Shine, senior producer of the network's prime-time programs, challenges the charge of a Fox Republican bias. "On Hannity and Colmes, we've got Sean Hannity, a conservative who can sometimes be loud and obnoxious, paired with Alan Colmes, a liberal who can sometimes be loud and obnoxious," Shine says. "People try to peg Bill O'Reilly, but he supported Clinton on Kosovo and he's for more gun control and he's anti-death penalty. We've had David Boies and Barry Richard on our shows, and we've had reporters covering Bush and Gore at all times."

Like the gulf war, which made NBC reporter Arthur Kent "the Scud Stud," Campaign 2000 created a crop of attractive newcomers who were instantly famous because of their hours on the air. CNN's Bill Hemmer (dubbed "The Chad Lad" within CNN), Fox News Channel's David Lee Miller, and MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield were among those who gained a cult following, profiled in magazines and in The Washington Post.

One of the problems for reporters, however, was that they were on the air so much that it was hard for them to break away to do in-depth reporting. And the format and frequency of the whip-around newscasts, in which reporters assigned to Gore or to Bush were regularly asked for comment, sometimes left those correspondents sounding as much like official spokespersons as reporters, reporting endlessly that "the Gore camp feels" or "the Bush camp thinks" this or that. In addition, the 24/7 world of newscasts and punditry increased the political pressure on Al Gore to give up his fight. Practically from day one of the thirty-five-day drama, some commentators were asking when Gore would quit, while polls showed that Americans were far more patient.

What cable could excel at -- and why it gained so many viewers -- was the sense of play-by-play immediacy, taking viewers inside the court hearings and the canvassing board debates. One of the most interesting aspects of the story was how low-tech the coverage could be. Millions of viewers tuned to both cable and the broadcast networks to watch crawling text and still photographs of U.S. Supreme Court justices as they listened to the almost-instant audio replay of the deliberations.

Cable news executives would like to see a lasting effect from Campaign 2000. The talk-show hosts, at least, will still have plenty to discuss about Governing 2001, given the near-tie in Congress.

But what is promising for cable (and could be ominous for the broadcast news divisions) is that more people are turning to cable for political news. According to a new Pew Research Center study of how Americans got their campaign news, cable television outranked both network and local outlets as the primary source in both the pre-election and post-election phases. The study found that 83 percent of those who said they were at least "somewhat interested" in the election results got their news primarily from television. More to the point, 41 percent of those who were tracking the developments in late November said they were turning to cable news, compared to 30 percent who were watching local news and 23 percent who cited network news as their primary source.

Only 24 percent said they were getting their election news primarily from newspapers. But on the night when the Supreme Court effectively ended the drama, the instant TV analysis was almost too instant. Runners brought the sixty-five page decision to cable and broadcast TV reporters on the steps of the court, and viewers watched as everybody, including legal experts, tried to figure it out, reading it literally on the air. For all that excitement, it was good to see the decision analyzed and explained the next morning, in old-fashioned print.

Jane Hall is an assistant professor at American University and a former media reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She is a regular panelist on the media-analysis program Fox News Watch on the Fox News Channel.