THEN AND NOW: COVERAGE OF ’68 AND ’08
The year was 1968. America was fighting a war in Vietnam and many Americans faced the reality that Richard Nixon was going to be the next president. With the assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the country was in a state of paralysis, shocked at how quickly social progress could be halted just four years after the signing of the Civil Rights Act.
In 1968, the media coverage was limited to only a few national radio stations and a daily average of four newspaper stories a day in nationally distributed newspapers from August to October. “There really wasn’t a variety of opinion, all the reporters just had to sort of add their own variations and occasional insight to the press releases,” said Henry Buano, a retired Daily News reporter who covered the election in 1968.
Screen Capture from Obama Fundraiting Image
The 2008 election had its fair share of history. A disastrous eight years of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had drained the country morally, an economic crisis threatened nearly every aspect of American life as we know it, yet the country still came together to elect the first African-American president of the United States.
Due to the overwhelming media coverage that surrounded the 2008 election from the start of the primaries, every American was given each candidate’s position on an entire laundry list of issues, from abortion to alternative energy.
Before looking at the 2008 election, it is essential to look back at another historic election to see just how far the election coverage has come from a technological standpoint.
With the advent of the Internet, the major newspapers were dealt a major blow in their very limited coverage that a print newspaper could provide in contrast to the hourly, sometimes even less than hourly, updates that web sites could provide. Not only had the Internet weakened the print media’s stranglehold on information, it created an entirely new set of Web-only publications which held significant political weight in the 2008 election, prime examples being The Huffington Post, Politico, Talking Points Memo, Real Clear Politics, Town Hall, and Drudge Report.
The Internet made the election coverage a truly democratic process. Instead of major news networks being able to hold to one side of a story, blogs and these newly created news sites became the primary means of consuming information for those who grew up with the rise of the Internet. Americans now had the ability to create their own blogs and give whatever opinion they wish to millions of people at once.
“The Internet has changed politics because even if you can’t work in a campaign office, you can still contribute,” Buano said.
In addition to changing the way voters made up their mind, the 2008 election changed the mindset of the candidate as well. “The 2008 election made it more important for candidates to be “on message,” as witnessed by the ability of minor slip-ups to be posted by bloggers and instantly available on the Internet,” said David Jones, a professor of political science at Baruch College.
One interesting aspect that had seen unprecedented changes from the 1968 election all the way to the 2008 election is the concept of the news cycle. In 1968, the news cycle was based on a 24-hour period which revolved around when newspapers went to print, usually once a day or twice at most. In 2008, the cycle of news was not one revolution per day, but one revolution per minute.
INTERACTIVE TIMELINE: ’08 CAMPAIGN AT A GLANCE
Journalists like Buano from the 1968 election believe that today’s news cycle is almost too much to handle. “For reporters nowadays, it seems like they don’t even have time to sleep. A breaking story can come when you least expect it,” he said.
In the 2008 election, the first place nearly all news broke was the Internet, which would then be followed by television, and probably hours, or even days later, it would finally hit print. The 2008 election had in essence become the death knell for the relevancy of print articles as breaking news in an election campaign. Even Buano, a veteran of print media, acknowledged the shift. “I think print is only good anymore for long stories or investigative stories, it would be impossible for print to keep up with the Internet at this point,” he said.
Even looking back to the 2004 campaign, it is hard to make any comparison from a technological point of view. Internet access has become cheaper, and in some areas free to residents via Wi-Fi networking. Cell phones now have newsreaders that update up to the minute, and even once relatively simple iPod’s have turned into mini computers via Wi-Fi, allowing people to get their news a variety of news sites. As Professor Jones notes, “technological advances have made it easier to mobilize supporters in increasingly sophisticated ways, which led to the larger democratic turnout this year.”
One of the most notable changes in accessible technology has been the number of households with access to the Internet. According to a recent survey by the US Census Bureau, there are approximately 17 million households who have acquired Internet access since the 2004 election.
An enormous shift has been made in recent years regarding the access of information via the Internet. A historical comparison would show that in 1968, there were between six and 10 newspapers printed in a major city. In 2008, at any local library, people could log on to Google News, and access over 25,000 articles from 4,500 different news sources.
Even something as non-political as the Iphone came into its own as a key political tool for the Obama campaign. With a free download, users of the iPhone and iPod Touch could call their friends, find local political events with links to the device’s maps application, browse photos and video from the campaign, and even have phone contacts prioritized by battleground states, allowing users to call them and encourage them to vote for Obama.
If there was one change that was apparent across that board on Election Day 2008, it was the scene of a typical American household sitting around the television waiting for results to come in. Besides the four major news networks having electoral maps, there were over 50 Web sites that were featuring their own electoral projections, and many families had different televisions on different channels while simultaneously looking at electoral maps on various Web sites. Add to this those who had a Blackberry or other Internet-capable devices, and you were looking at three different platforms of accessing information. The American household had in essence become a miniature war room.
Reporters like Buano can only guess where things are headed, “The newspapers are probably all going to be Internet based soon, and they won’t even use offices because everything will change so fast that they can’t afford to be sitting at a desk.”