28 October 2010

Nonstop Reporting and Analysis Affects U.S. Midterm Elections

Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, left, and Fox News’ Bill O'Reilly, shown at a September 22 interview, influence voters at both ends of the political spectrum, analysts say.

By Eric Green
Special Correspondent

Washington — “Ideological” Internet and cable television news shows running day and night with commentators expressing personal opinions about political candidates could affect the outcome of the November 2 midterm elections, political experts say.

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said that although critics may decry the latest trend toward ideological media, “which only reinforces people’s viewpoints instead of challenging them, the proliferation of new media outlets is positive too.”

In the early days of television in the 1950s, all Americans “got their news from the same few sources,” said Sabato. “Never again will we have that concentration of media power in the hands of so few. The democratization of the news media has not reduced the power of the media in elections, but it certainly has spread it out,” he said.

Sabato said that “not only do the media affect voters’ opinions, but voters’ opinions affect the media. People naturally gravitate towards views like their own and with media options from the left, right and center [of the political spectrum], voters are able to choose where they get their news.”

James Campbell, a political science professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, offered a different perspective on the new media’s influence. The U.S. public’s “greater access to alternative news outlets on the Internet, cable TV and radio,” he said, “may be undermining the influence” of traditional news media like network television and newspapers.

“My guess is that the traditional news media may be having less of an impact than they had in the past,” said Campbell.

NEW MEDIA AND VOTER POLARIZATION

Midterm elections in the United States are held every four years at the midpoint of the four-year presidential term. State gubernatorial and local offices, all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 37 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate are being contested in 2010. Those contests provide much fodder for political pundits on public airways.

Political science professor John Geer of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee said the reality of nonstop news gives the news media a “chance for heightened influence” in these elections.

The media environment — including election news and analysis — has changed dramatically since the heyday of trusted news anchors like Walter Cronkite in the 1950s and 1960s.

The public now has a bigger choice in the media it watches, “so liberals might watch the MSNBC television network [considered more liberal] and conservatives might like to listen to talk radio [generally favoring conservatives],” Geer said.

Geer said the “differential pattern suggests the news media are more about reinforcing existing attitudes than changing them. If so, the news media in the 21st century may be another source of polarization” among U.S. citizens.

“We don’t know the effect of the change to ideological media, but we do know that significant segments of the population are drawn to media that share their ideological preferences,” political analyst John Fortier said.

Fortier, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a policy research group in Washington, said, “Candidates and campaigns cannot completely avoid traditional media,” but “candidates have many more options for friendly coverage of their views than they did a decade ago.”

PAST IS PROLOGUE

Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said the media’s influence on American politics is nothing new.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Baker said, “newspapers were practically subsidiaries” of U.S. political parties. “That changed with broadcast television when candidates and parties ran paid advertisements for candidates but were forbidden to have programming that favored one candidate over another.”

Baker said that with cable news, “all restrictions have been removed and some U.S. cable networks feature commentators who are openly partisan, and some of them, like Fox News commentators Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck and MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann, have become enormously influential in shaping public opinion and influencing elections.”

Some Americans, especially those under 30, are said to be forming their political views from a different phenomenon — satirical television news programs such as the The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

Marvin Kalb, senior fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University in Massachusetts and former chief diplomatic correspondent for CBS News and NBC News, agreed that “to the extent that voters get their opinions from Fox and MSNBC, it could be argued that cable television talk shows are showing more political clout this year than before” and that “more clout is more influence.”

But Kalb said other factors may be more important in the 2010 election than the media’s 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week political spin cycle.

“Though we are all fascinated by TV punditry and watch and absorb it, it is not nearly as important this year” as the state of the American economy, Kalb said. High unemployment in the United States — reported at about 9.6 percent of the working population in October — is “infinitely more important” than political opinions offered on television, Kalb said.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)