Post Recall, Will TV Ever Show the Capitol Again?

Now that the recall is over, will we go back to life as usual, where television cameramen rarely set foot in the state Capitol, political debates go by practically unnoticed and the nightly news is all about shootouts, car chases and the weather?

Based on how the recall election was handled by television news, it seems safe to bet on a return to normalcy — which, in this case, means inadequate, celebrity-driven coverage lacking in detail or significance.

Consider the coverage of state Sen. Tom McClintock’s candidacy. He was in the news almost every day during the last three weeks of the campaign, but was it because his message was resonating with Californians, or because he was head-and-shoulders above the competition in the big debate?

Nope. The only reason McClintock was in the news was because the reporters wanted to ask him if he was going to drop out of the race to make Arnold Schwarzenegger’s life easier.

Almost every night, some variation on this story was repeated: Schwarzenegger and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante are leading the polls, and Republican leaders are asking McClintock to drop out of the race to avoid splitting the GOP vote. Then, they’d cut to a sound bite of McClintock saying he was going to stay in the race.

End of news story, without even a cursory examination of how the two candidates hold such different views that they might as well be from different parties – a fact which makes the “unite the party” angle ridiculous to begin with.

After three or four days of rehashing this story, it should have been obvious to all that McClintock was sticking to his guns and wasn’t going to renege on his promise to finish what he started. So why was it “news” every night for several weeks?

Well, it wasn’t news. Still, the television stations stuck with the McClintock vs. Schwarzenegger angle for three reasons:

• It was easy to report, since there were no statistics to check, no claims to verify and no complicated issues to explain.

• There was an element of conflict involved, so reporters could make the story — and those annoying “news at 11” teasers — sound dramatic even after weeks in which nothing had changed.

• It gave the celebrity-obsessed stations an excuse to air Schwarzenegger footage even when he wasn’t really making news.

A related story that kept repeating itself, day in and day out, involved the candidates’ standing in the polls. Every few days, there was a new poll with new numbers predicting how the candidates would fare in the election. The television anchors would dutifully report whose numbers were up, whose were stagnant and whose were down — and, of course, whose numbers would change if only that stubborn McClintock would drop out of the race.

Why did the television stations focus so much on this so-called horse race coverage? Again, three reasons: It’s easy to report, there’s conflict that can be hyped, and it’s another way to make sure a movie star’s face gets on the evening news.

With the continual focus on the polls, it was easy to forget that the original purpose of public opinion polls was to gauge what people are thinking, not to influence their thinking and voting patterns. It also was easy to overlook the fact that the “undecided” category was massive in just about every poll, which meant that as a predictive tool, the polls were flawed.

The size of the “undecided” bloc also indicated that many voters wanted more information about the candidates before making a decision. Not more polls telling them who was likely to win based on what others thought, but more information so they could make up their own minds.

Television could have filled this information void with more stories on the candidates. We could have had in-depth features on Bustamante’s performance as speaker of the Assembly, or an examination of Arianna Huffington’s switch from a hard-core conservative to a socialist, or a story about how McClintock rescued an elderly man from a condominium fire in 1985.

If the stations ran out of new things to report about the candidates, they could have laid off the recall for a day. Instead of trying to manufacture news out of polls and campaign strategies, the stations could have covered other stories involving the state government – you know, that bureaucracy that the candidates all hope to run.

For example, an official with the Department of Industrial Relations recently was found to have collected almost $5,000 in moving expenses, even though he didn’t move. The same “public servant” later claimed a state office as his home address as part of a scheme to collect more than $10,000 in tax dollars for illegitimate travel expenses.

In another story that went unreported, a Department of Motor Vehicles employee was fired for inappropriately touching drivers while they were taking the behind-the-wheel exam. Another case of government ineptitude involved a state hospital employee who awarded $75,000 in contracts to businesses owned by a relative.

All of the cases cited above are detailed in a report given to the media by the California State Auditor, and any of them would have been more useful to viewers than the nightly rehash of “will McClintock quit?”

Newspapers did a much better job than television of providing informative coverage, but they, too, gave far too much space and attention to the horse race aspects of the campaign.

The newspapers and some television stations even paid for their own polls, which they then reported on. Instead of covering actual campaign news, they made their own!

Now that the campaign is over, there won’t be as many easy political stories to present, there won’t be as much conflict that can be presented without nuances, and it will be harder to put a movie star’s face on the news every night without seeming more desperate than usual.

So what will the television stations do? Will they actually report on details of how the governor governs, or will they revert to a steady stream of car crashes and weather reports until Kobe Bryant, Scott Peterson and the presidential election horse race save the day?

If you’re familiar with television news, you shouldn’t have to wait for a pollster to tell you the answer to that question.

David Kline is a Sacramento native who has been writing about seniors' issues since 1991. He has served as Spectrum's editor for the past five years — a period that has seen the paper receive awards from the California Newspapers Publishers' Association and National Mature Media Awards program.