Sound Bite Democracy: Network Evening News Presidential Campaign Coverage, 1968 and 1988

Abstract

To be sure, image-conscious coverage was not the only kind of political reporting to appear on network newscasts in 1988. Some notable "fact correction" pieces, especially following the presidential debates, offered admirable exceptions. But the turn of television news to "theater criticism" set the tone of the 1988 coverage, and defined a new and complex relation between politics and the press. This new relation, between image-conscious coverage and media-driven campaigns, raises with special urgency the deepest danger for politics in a television age. This is the danger of the loss of objectivity-not in the sense of bias, but in the literal sense of losing contact with the truth. It is the danger that the politicians and the press become caught up in a cycle that leaves the substance of politics behind, that takes appearance for reality, perception for fact, the artificial for the actual, the image for the event.