TV revs up campaign for political coverage

The 2004 political season is off and running, and it’s not just with the nine Democrats slugging it out for the nomination. Some of the most intense early action is among the TV networks trolling for voters who use remote controls.

Never mind that TV viewers customarily first tune into political coverage once the Democrats and Republicans hold their summer conventions, which still are a full year away. On the air and now in the new frontier of the Internet, the battle for supremacy in TV news is being waged in a largely civil competition, but one with real ramifications.

“Presidential politics is always a high-stakes battle, the arena where national news organizations distinguish themselves and establish a pecking order,” said Tom Hannon, CNN’s political director.

Later this week, 17 months before the 2004 presidential election, NBC will announce some of its campaign coverage plans for both the network and its MSNBC cable channel.

One of NBC’s key strategic weapons? The July 1 public launch of what has been an internal daily e-mail on the topic of the political race, dubbed First Read.

NBC is trying to grab territory ABC has largely staked out for itself in the insider political world with its original and influential the Note (https://abc news.go.com). It’s an opinionated, detailed, sometimes snarky handicapping of the daily developments in the presidential race, with links to the important stories in other news outlets, original reporting and some pithy commentary on what it all means. Until recently, the Note was co-written by ABC’s deputy political director, Elizabeth Wilner, known for her “original, light, easy” touch, said one rival network executive. She jumped to NBC on March 31 to head its new political unit. (Tuesday, ABC News named WashingtonPost.com’s Lisa Todorovich to replace Wilner.)

All of this action underscores that competition is fiercer than ever for viewers who increasingly have tuned out politics.

NBC, which had success during the Iraq war by spreading its correspondents among the NBC network, MSNBC, CNBC, Spanish-language Telemundo and MSNBC.com, will make a play for similar synergy during the campaign, hoping to boost also-ran MSNBC in the process. CNN has long had strong political coverage, but Fox News Channel surpassed it in the ratings last year. With early action focused on the Democrats, the chattering class in Washington thinks Fox, with a strong base among conservatives, will be sidelined for a few months.

“So far there’s been zero evidence of that,” said David Rhodes, Fox’s director of news gathering, noting that the network already has devoted extensive time to the early campaign wrangling that candidates might be lucky to find mentioned briefly on the network evening news. Fox too is working on a politics-specific newsletter to start closer to primary time and has exclusive broadcast rights to a January Democratic debate just prior to the South Carolina primary.

For its part, CNN just cut its must-watch “Inside Politics” in half, an oddly timed move.

Among broadcasters, NBC News’ ratings dominated the drawn-out 2000 post-election proceedings, and Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press” -- which drew attention Sunday for his unyielding interview with former Vermont governor and Democratic hopeful Howard Dean -- is No. 1 on Sundays. In addition, “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw has announced he’ll step down after the election, perhaps giving him the sentimental edge.

ABC and CBS, with much less air time, are battling to remain relevant. And they are fighting over the politics-heavy Sunday morning turf, where George Stephanopoulos’ “This Week” was overtaken for second place this season by CBS’ “Face the Nation,” anchored by Washington veteran Bob Schieffer.

CBS says its air time may be limited but not its influence. “While we don’t have the 24-hour cable, when we do put something on air, a lot more people are watching it,” said CBS political editor Dotty Lynch. “I really haven’t seen a difficult time getting sources to return phone calls.”

ABC aired the first debate among Democratic contenders at the beginning of May, seen among rivals as an attempt to give Stephanopoulos, who moderated, an early boost.

The political cycle itself has gotten an early start this year, because of the wide-open Democratic nomination and earlier-than-usual primary and caucus dates. Major newspapers have been profiling the candidates and handicapping the race for weeks (The Times and CNN recently announced they are co-sponsoring a Democratic candidates’ debate Feb. 26); Stephanopoulos two weeks ago hit the trail with candidate Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) for “This Week,” the kind of coverage that previously has “never been seen this early,” said Mark Halperin, ABC News political director.

Eyeing the popularity of ABC’s the Note -- which started as an internal report in 2000 and became a public Web posting in January 2002 -- CBS early last year started Washington Wrap (https://www.cbsnews.com).

Lynch said Wrap, which has 20,000 subscribers, is designed to reach a broader audience than ABC’s the Note, suggesting that CBS Web executives “didn’t want 13,000 words a day that only appealed to political reporters.”

After the Iraq war ended, CNN also got into the act with Morning Grind, which so far is a non-public, e-mail-only distribution to a select group of CNN friends.

All compete with the granddaddy of insider Internet handicapping, National Journal’s the Hotline, which has been around since 1987 and follows all political races, not just presidential, for 30,000 paying subscribers.

The Internet reports are a reflection of the work that broadcast TV producers, in particular, already are doing but must leave on the cutting-room floor because they have such little air time. They don’t have direct links to bringing more viewers to a network, but the Note in particular has been invaluable in source development, giving ABC News cachet inside and outside the Beltway.

“I will say proudly that my colleagues and I have built a reputation for having a political unit that’s amongst the best, perhaps the best, in the business, and a lot of that is driven off the Note,” Halperin said. At a time in the campaign when politics isn’t on the air every day, he said, “it allows us to be on the phone with all kinds of sources, developing the kinds of relationships that we will be able to take advantage of come January and the general election. It builds relationships and proves to people that we’re not unsophisticated when it comes to following politics.”

NBC’s First Read (“because we hope it’s going to be a must-read for people every morning,” said Mark Lukasiewicz, NBC’s executive producer of specials, which includes political coverage) will hit computers and e-mail pagers first thing in the morning, “part news summary, part analysis,” of the political day ahead. Available through the MSNBC Web site starting July 1 (www.msnbc.com), it “points you very concisely at what to pay attention to over the next 24 hours,” Lukasiewicz said.

But Wilner said, unlike ABC’s the Note, First Read is written first and foremost for internal NBC planning use. “If people outside NBC want to look online and see what we’re focusing on in politics every day, that’s terrific” she said.

NBC said First Read will be “concise and crisp.” (In a swipe at how lengthy ABC’s missive has become, some NBC insiders are jokingly calling their shorter version the Half Note.) It will also be on desks several hours earlier than ABC’s late-morning posting, which reaches tens of thousands of readers (ABC declines to say how many).

Whether readers have time for all the newsletters is questionable, although Hotline editor Chuck Todd said, “If you can make it skimmable, people will read it.” In the new Internet era, he said, people read “10% of 100 things, not 100% of 10 things.” He expects even more such postings from newspaper reporters and says he welcomes them, because “it only leads to better reporting,” even though critics worry that they only enhance the pack journalism tendencies of major news organizations.

Todd thinks the newsletters also are a smart move because they allow top network executives and bean-counters “to actually see what the political units at the networks do on a given day. In an age when everything is a potential future budget cut at a news division, any way you can show on a daily basis their relevancy means they are less likely to end up on the chopping block.”