THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605240695
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By TONY WHARTON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 115 lines
Political candidates speaking uninterrupted on television about the issues?
Sounds like C-SPAN.
But it's beginning to look as if small doses of unfiltered politics will splash over onto the commercial networks this fall in time for the presidential election.
At the urging of a historic coalition of print and television journalists, including highly respected Walter Cronkite, the networks have come up with a variety of proposals for putting the presidential candidates on the air.
Now it's up to Paul Taylor, former Washington Post reporter, to sort them out and put together a uniform plan all can accept.
``It's a very helpful first step,'' said Taylor, a veteran political reporter and author who quit his job this year to work full-time on this mission. ``It's an acknowledgment that there's a problem. It would make a lot more sense if we were to coordinate all the networks' proposals.''
To some, this may seem like just one more way of letting voters hear the candidates.
To Taylor and others in a burgeoning movement concerned about the state of democracy, it's more fundamental.
``Maybe if we can begin to promote a healthier discourse, other things will lead from it,'' he said. ``After all, the people we send to Washington have been elected in this system where all the rewards are to attack or to pander. These campaigns are where we make up the initial contract between the citizen and the leader.
``And if that is the result of a false dialogue, how can we be surprised when it leads to bad governing? So the idea was to reinvent that contract and try to let our better angels come to the fore.''
They are hoping it will start to arrest subtle forces that have been shaping politics and the public's view of politics for years.
John Thomas Sheehan, executive director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, said network news has gradually been taking the airwaves away from candidates for 30 years.
In 1968, television news viewers could hear candidates for an average of 42 seconds each during a typical broadcast. Doesn't sound like a whole lot. But today, he said, that figure is down to 7.1 seconds.
``The anchors get far more time to interpret what the candidates said than the candidates get to say it,'' he said.
Sheehan said the center's research also sheds light on the common public view that politics is negative: Television correspondents often depict the politicians as more negative than they really are. The public perceives the politicians as negative, polls reflect what the public thinks, the press reports the poll results, and the cycle goes on.
``So when you ask people about the campaign, people of course say, `Well, it's negative,' '' Sheehan said.
No surprise, perhaps, that successive presidents have earned increasingly low marks in the polls.
Free air time for candidates, at least as a first step toward addressing these concerns, is an idea that's been floating around for years. The presidential campaigns of 1988 and 1992, and congressional races in between, convinced many of the need for something new.
``There's been a building frustration that our campaigns, instead of bringing out the best of everybody, seemed to be locked in this vicious cycle that brought out the worst of everybody,'' Taylor said.
``I think the notion that the way politics happens on television is broken is widely shared in journalism, in the broadcast industry, in academia, and even in politics.''
The pressure mounted April 18 when 77 poeple and organizations, from Taylor and Cronkite to the Christian Coalition, signed a full-page ad in the New York Times urging the networks to act voluntarily.
``There had been calls from outside organizations,'' Sheehan said. ``But this particular impetus came from within the media, and it's hard to ignore your colleagues.''
Still, some network executives felt they had acted already. Richard Cotton, executive vice president and general counsel for NBC, said the networks gave time for the nominees to say what they wanted in 1992.
``There were hours of opportunities for candidates to respond in their own words to viewers,'' he said. ``Taylor is looking for opportunities for candidates to speak to voters without a filter. It seems to me that an hour-long program in which the candidate does nothing but respond to questions called in by voters is doing that.''
Not true, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the dean at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication, who has written extensively about the media and campaigns.
``The time isn't free now,'' she said. ``It's constrained by the questions of the interviewer or the reporter. And in a debate format, it's constrained by the short form that debates have taken. What's missing is time that the candidate can control and that focuses on issues that the public cares about.''
Taylor believes free air time could improve the political dialogue and reduce some of the pressure to raise money to buy television time.
Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has said that during his short-lived presidential campaign he was spending two to three hours on the phone every day trying to raise money.
In recent weeks, with Fox taking the lead, the networks have responded.
CBS and NBC want to put the candidates in news programs. Fox and ABC came up with various ways of dividing one hour among the candidates. PBS and CNN have their own proposals.
Now that he has them all agreed to the principle, Taylor wants the networks to agree to his plan: Give the candidates two to five minutes a night in prime time during the last month of the campaign.
Taylor's goal is to have viewers turning on ``Frasier'' or ``Home Improvement'' see a candidate for a few minutes.
If you leave the candidates on news programs, Taylor reasons, you reach the same viewers who already watch those programs and thus are more likely to be listening to candidates anyway.
With his plan, Taylor said, he wants to ``reach an audience who have disproportionately dropped out of politics, even nightly news or the news shows or stopped reading newspapers.
``Let's give them the candidate himself. It seems to me that makes all the difference.'' MEMO: Knight-Ridder Newspapers contributed to this report.
KEYWORDS: PUBLIC JOURNALISM COMMUNITY CONVERSATION
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