The ABC News Debate: The Questioners Take Center Stage

By Stephen J. Farnsworth

Normally, post-debate analysis focuses on the presidential candidates and what they said. But following last week’s ABC News Pennsylvania debate the most intense scrutiny was on the questioners – Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos – not on Hillary Clinton, not on Barack Obama.

The nation’s editorial pages and many bloggers attacked the two reporters for devoting roughly 40 minutes to a rehashing of personal matters about the candidates: including the much-discussed Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the alleged snipers facing down the former First Lady in the Balkans, who wears and doesn’t wear a flag pin, and the infamous “bitter-gate” remark. The two also tried to open up a new scandal area, observing that Bill Ayers, one of Obama’s supporters used to belong to the Weather Underground, a violent terrorist group from the 1960s.

For the hundreds of thousands of Americans struggling to pay the gasoline bill and worried about losing their homes, their jobs or their health insurance, ABC News delivered a breathtaking performance. The ABC debate debacle is a reminder of how often candidate events that have more audience participation – like the Democratic Party’s YouTube forum and the various “town-meeting” style debates – can be more informative than when journalists dominate the questioning. ABC News’s turn away from issues may also help explain why the network news audience continues to shrink.

Call it mass-media myopia. Too often, reporters are obsessed with the sports of politics, obsessing about who is ahead and what can be done strategically to change the dynamics of the campaign. Data collected over the past five presidential elections cycles by the Center for Media and Public Affairs demonstrate that network television routinely follows the “horse-race” aspects of the campaign and provides only limited coverage of more substantial matters, like issues. Surveys show that voters consistently say they want more serious, issue-based news than they get during presidential campaigns.

With their scandal quest, the reporters were previewing the general election, when Republican activists are likely to raise similar matters to try to derail the campaign of whichever senator becomes the Democratic presidential nominee. Attacks by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) four years ago remain fresh in media minds.

Even so, the amount of time the ABC reporters focused on scandal news was excessive. More time for policy matters in that debate would have been a great asset to voters, particularly since the home-mortgage crisis, trade concerns, and rising consumer prices for food and gasoline have all increased in severity during recent weeks. A March 19-22 Pew Research Center Poll, for example, found that 56 percent of those surveyed said the national economy was in poor shape, as compared to 28 percent in a January survey. Nearly half of those polled listed rising prices as their top economic concern.

Unfortunately, the ABC News questions revealed that some reporters remain more interested in talking than in listening.

Stephen J. Farnsworth is associate professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington and co-author, with S. Robert Lichter, of The Nightly News Nightmare: Television’s Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1988-2004, Second Edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and The Mediated Presidency: Television News and Presidential Governance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).