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http://books.google.com/books?id=IU7U7hDpr5cC&lpg=PR7... I highly recommend this excerpt as food for thought, bottom of page 4 - page 5: "Political candidates' campaign discourse provides more information about issues than print or electronic news media. There are several explanation for this finding. First, news reporting tends to concentrate on the 'horse race' aspects of the campaign: Who is ahead in the polls? Who is running the campaign? Which states are being contested by the campaigns? Will the candidates attack one another? Who will be included in the presidential debates? The answers to these questions may be news, but they simply do not help voters decide which candidate should be elected president... From January through October of 1980, CBS and UPI devoted 65 percent of their coverage to the horse race, 26 percent to issues, and 10 percent to candidates... A second reason why voters cannot rely on the news media for policy information is that campaign news is only one story among many. The network news, for example, is a half hour long, but subtracting commercials, stories on non-campaign topics, and horse-race coverage leaves little time to explain the candidates' opposing views on policy questions. Particularly in the latter phases of a campaign, political ads, presidential debates, and other message forms provide more issue information to viewers than the news media... To make matters worse, there may be a trend toward less and less coverage. The length of a typical political news story decreased by about 20 percent and the number of political news stories dropped by 20 percent from 1968 to 1988...average nightly news coverage of the campaign in 1996 was 12.3 minutes, down from 24.6 minutes in 1992...Furthermore, the news media have a tendency to offer short sound bites from candidates instead of thoughtful and extended consideration of issues...in 1968, the average quotation from candidates in the news was 43 seconds long. After 20 years, candidate quotations had shrunk to a mere 9 seconds...this figure had dropped to 8.2 seconds in 1996." |