Strange bedfellows

About this book

"As the presidential campaign of 1992 began, the television networks approached it with dread. The media honchos assumed the public had turned off to politics, George Bush was a shoo-in, and they would earn only blame for whatever they did. They became more intent on cutting their costs than in covering the campaign." "Thus, as preparations for the New Hampshire primary began, ABC, the leading news network, decided to assign only one off-air producer to each candidate; the other two broadcast networks were going to do even less. The result of this early decision was that the networks found themselves playing catch-up for much of the unpredictable campaign of 1992. And the candidates found themselves establishing new arenas in which to present themselves to an attentive public. Televised town-hall meetings, appearances on Donahue, Larry King, Arsenio Hall, Good Morning America, and almost every other nontraditional media format became the vehicle for supplying voters with the information the candidates wanted them to have." "No one could have foreseen the shaping of this campaign, but early in 1991, Tom Rosenstiel, award-winning media and politics reporter for the Los Angeles Times, had decided to write Strange Bedfellows, a book that would follow a network for an entire campaign. ABC granted Rosenstiel complete access to their news division, and with this unprecedented access, he shows us how the media shaped and misshaped the improbable campaign of 1992, how the mysterious world of network television news operates, and how the networks are seeing their influence over the news shrivel in the rapidly changing era of New Media." "From behind the camera and inside the editing bays of the nation's most influential network, we follow Peter Jennings, anchor of World News Tonight, and its executive producer, Paul Friedman, as they create and re-create their strategy for coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign. And we witness how after months of miscalculations, pursuit of false issues, and phony muckraking, the network attempted its most serious and substantive coverage ever - with mixed results." "In Strange Bedfellows, Tom Rosenstiel defines the high-tech sophistication that is democratizing the landscape - while also lowering the standards of American journalism. From Bush's facsimile Oval Office secret TV studio to Clinton's Little Rock War Room, we learn how the campaigns worked to control what went out on the airwaves and what that meant to the networks - and to the public. We see in close-up Candidate Perot's reactions to journalistic scrutiny and analyze his real contributions to the campaign of '92." "Rosenstiel challenges the media to take responsibility for their influence in shaping politics - while revealing the decision-making process of the media. Strange Bedfellows breaks important new ground in the literature of American politics."--Jacket.