By Arthur Solomon
As Republicans gather in Tampa, our long national nightmare is almost over as the GOP ratifies Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan for the top spots on their presidential ticket.
The question now should be: How much did we learn from the 20 debates and the plenteous pundit’s analysis?
Despite enduring a series of vitriolic debates, in my opinion, the nation didn’t learn much, except that the GOP establishment was fearful that a Newt Gingrich presidency would termite-like destroy the House where the GOP rules; Romney has trouble saying what he might mean; Ron Paul has the most “aw- shucks” personality, and Rick Santorum has the “who wants a religious fanatic as president” problem (except the extreme right wing religious fanatics).
But the short comings of the candidates are miniscule when compared to the debates and TV political reporting in general.
The debates were nothing more than made for television reality sitcoms. Like many TV shows, it left viewers who wanted specific answers with unfilled feelings, in this case a lack of details on how candidates would deal with problems they bloviate about.
That is because all of the candidates, except Paul, gave answers that are right out of the Big Red Book of Politics 101, whose most important message is “talk in generalities and never be specific.” (And Paul’s answers, while sounding reasonable, are scary when you think of the consequences of his positions.)
The reason that candidates can get away with nothing answers is because of the lack of preparation, keep it simple, no hard questions asked by the media.
What was missing from all debates are reporters who are well schooled in the fine print facets of policy that often are most relevant, even though they ask questions as if they were experts. Questions were asked in a fashion that allowed candidates the opportunity to generalize. That is why if a person really wants to know specifics about a candidate’s stance on economic and foreign policy matters they will not learn it from watching the debates of 2012 or the campaigning that followed.
The TV debate questioners, the pundit panels following, or on the daily political cable programs, remind me of instructors in an undergraduate college survey course, (but much better paid), where students get a smatter of information, but will not really learn the subject in depth until they advance to specialized classes.
What masquerades as political news on cable shows is mostly GOP and Democratic propaganda that even most PR people, I hope, would be ashamed to call authentic “news.”
If a major publication like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times or Business Week wanted to interview a candidate about tax policy, the national debt or entitlement programs, they would assign a reporter who is a specialist in those fields, so that when candidates speaks untruths or gives a wrong answer the reporter can challenge the candidates. That was missing during the debates and other political TV shows.
As a former journalist turned PR practitioner, what particularly annoys me about TV political reporters is their lack of follow up questions. It’s often as if the reporters have a prepared list of questions, based on a producer’s story line, and a pre set amount of time to ask them (which, of course, they do) and just go down the list, regardless of the answers they receive. This makes for bad journalism.
The superficiality of television news reporting is evident by this often heard interviewer- to- interviewee phrase: “This is a very important question and we’re running out of time. You have 15 seconds to answer it.”
It’s no secret that television has changed journalism and politics. And for the worse.
The best I can say about TV debates is that they exposed which candidates were slick talkers and which are not fast on their feet. (But glib talkers do not necessarily mean that a person would make a good president.)
What is amazing to me is how often candidates seem not to be able to give anything but general answers, even though it’s not a state secret about which questions will be asked, even when the questions are not controversial. A reasonable person might think that they are afraid to be specific because they want to keep their real agendas from being scrutinized and thus lose favor with some voters.
With apologies to the novel and film Love Story, watching the pundits who analyze debates shows why they never have to say they’re sorry. It’s easy to explain what happened if your job is safe no matter how often you are wrong.
If anyone of those “wise people” ever said anything prescient or out of the ordinary, please provide me with examples. (The only pundit during this never-ending, echo-sounding election season that I have heard who occasionally provides interesting “inside politics” analysis, soon parroted by others, is Ari Fleisher.)
Instead of spending hours watching debate analysis, similar assessments can be heard in only a few minutes on the hard news network programs after the debate’s perfunctory questions and answers.
My unscientific survey revealed that the most used phrases by TV pundits during the primary season, was, “his victory will give him the momentum going into next week’s primary.” Closely following was, “hasn’t captured the hearts and minds,” “stay on the message,” and “battle ground states.” Of course the candidate’s name would change each week depending on the primary outcome.
A USA Today story on February 8 showed that I am not the only individual who believes watching the preliminary debates and Groundhog Day analysis, where the script remains the same except for substituting one candidate’s name for another, are a waste of time. Citing a Pew Research Center poll, the story said “…independents who are the coveted voting bloc in every presidential campaign are tuning out.”
And the same paper reporting on another Pew poll on July 6 said that “a majority of Americans believe the campaign is a snooze.”
In her Wall Street Journal column of Feb. 11, Peggy Noonan wrote that both cable and broadcast political shows are not as relevant to viewers as in the past.
On the June 10, Reliable Sources CNN program, a panel of journalists agreed that the never-ending cable news coverage of the campaign was turning off viewers.
The Arizona debate highlighted an occurring problem: Accepting the candidate’s answers and quickly moving on. When the issue of illegal immigrations was discussed, moderator John King never followed up with a question about how to solve the situation confronting farmers in Alabama, Georgia and other states who are having difficulty hiring sufficient workers to harvest crops before they became spoiled. The answers given by the debaters remind me of what consumers and PR clients should be wary of when listening to the sales spiels before signing contracts.
Viewers should remember that the devil is in the small print, and on TV people don’t have the opportunity to read the agate size font. True, the debates did provide viewers with the broad strokes thinking of the candidate’s policy stances. But did we have to hear it ad infinitum during the debates, as well as on the incessant TV coverage of their stump speech rallies and also on interview programs?
The apparent lack of specificity of the waffle ball-type questions pitched to the candidates is not limited to the lack of preparation by the media. There are other reasons: it’s difficult to embarrass someone who you know personally by asking a question that will humiliate the person and, perhaps, socialize with, live near, and whose wives and children are friends.
So my advice to family members and friends is when the discussion turns to politics, watching TV debates can serve as a good survey course. But if you really want to know how the candidates feel about issues, TV is not the place to learn specifics.
But there is a danger. Reading the policy beat reporters on a daily basis might inform you how the candidate that you support really feels about specific issues. That might disappoint you. No big deal. Chances are that even if your candidate is elected president, you’ll be disappointed in how he governs. (Remember Etch A Sketch?)
Shortly, the baseball playoffs, football and basketball overage will be flooded with pundits’ “expert analysis,” but that’s harmless fun. But as certain as a huge daily intake of cheese cake, ice cream, fried food and alcoholic beverages will harm your health, the preliminary TV debates will be with us again in four years.
And the political addicted television viewers will tune them in and think they are learning how the candidates really feel about issues. And when the same questions are asked in debate after debate and the same answers are given in debate after debate, the viewers will still watch them.
After all, history shows that television viewers like sitcom re-runs.
Oops. A cynic said there’s no need to wait four years. The re-runs will begin on October 3, at 9:00pm under a new title: presidential debates
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Arthur Solomon was a senior VP/senior counselor at Burson-Marsteller, handling national and international sports and non-sports programs, including the Olympic and Asian Games organizing committees and sponsors. He can be reached at [email protected] |