Strange Bedfellows: How Television and the Presidential Candidates Changed American Politics, 1992 by Tom Rosenstiel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"But more dangerous than ideological bias in the media is hysteria. The press has become so large, conducts so many polls, examines so many trivial details, that to audiences on the other end context and nuances are lost. And television compounds the problem by compressing everything into the grammar of two minutes."

Continuing my reading project that could be entitled Politics and the media in the US, having read and reviewed here H.R. Haldeman's The Ends of Power, which deals with the early 1970s, and Lesley Stahl's Reporting Live, which spans the period from the early 1970s to very early 1990s, I have now read Tom Rosenstiel's Strange Bedfellows (1993), which focuses on the 1992 presidential campaign.

Tom Rosenstiel, now a well-known author and journalist, worked for the Los Angeles Times as a reporter and media critic. The book offers an inside, extremely detailed account of the campaign, mainly from the point of view of the ABC news network. The author writes:

"For twelve months, I had access to the editing bays, the assignment editors, the story meetings, and the thoughts of the principal people deciding how the network would cover the campaign. I traveled with ABC's correspondents and producers as they followed the candidates. I watched how ABC's nightly newscast was assembled by the senior producers and editors [...] I had access to budget meetings and internal memos. I saw the struggles over personnel and money."

Chapter 1 describes the events and atmosphere of the Election Day, November 3, 1992, when Bill Clinton, the candidate, defeated George H.W. Bush, the incumbent, and Ross Perot, the independent candidate. Next, the author rewinds to the fall of 1991 and, from then, the book can be read as a chronological collection of well-captured vignettes of hundreds of campaign events being covered by the network. The amount of detail the reader can learn from this book is incredible. The book also delivers many interesting syntheses, summaries, and conclusions. Let's mention several of them:

"Ted Koppel, the anchor of ABC's Nightline, even had a theory he called the 'Vanna-tizing' of American culture, in honor of Vanna White of TV's Wheel of Fortune. Vanna remained enormously popular, the theory went, precisely because she was seen but not heard."

Note how well it matches Ms. Stahl's observations from Reporting Live about the primacy of images over words. Or consider the "expectation game":

"[...] the fragile game in which the media set expectations and then interpreted the vote by watching who succeeds or fails to meet them."

The author also notes that while at the beginning the network was determined to provide a serious, issue-based reportage of the campaign, at the end it devolved into quite a chaotic, event-based coverage.

The reader may enjoy the discussion of how the new technologies and the competition from other news sources, including the emergence of CNN, affect the coverage of the campaign. Finally, the angle, which I find the most fascinating. How much does the coverage of the campaign change the campaign itself and, possibly, its outcome? I would love to see a more detailed study of this issue. The author mentions it a few times, for instance:

"Policing what candidates said changed the relationship between reporter and politician. By labeling a candidate's statement as distorted or false, the press went from being a color commentator up in the booth to being a referee down on the field. Implicitly, this role acknowledged that the press not only reflected political events, it shaped them."

Overall, a very good read, perhaps lacking a slightly higher degree of cohesion. Highly recommended, though!

Three-and-a-half stars.

View all my reviews