The Media And The US Elections

Philip Stone November 4, 2008

As America’s democracy celebrates its most important day -- the electing of a new President -- it brings to mind how closely the whole world watches. Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press secretary who later went on to head the ABC bureau in Paris and who became an admired journalist for L’Express, once explained that as far as the French were concerned, “The US Presidential election is far too important for just Americans to vote!”

His meaning was clear – the policies of the man who becomes President affects everyone throughout the world. And the world’s media, like the US media, have let it be known they prefer Barack Obama. On CNN International Monday, one of its I-Reports editors said that one of his most difficult tasks was finding international McCain support videos that could be shown on air to balance the Obama I-Reports video that overwhelmingly flooded the site.

In the US, according to an Editor & Publisher survey, newspapers by more than a 2:1 ratio endorsed Obama over McClain. In terms of circulation, it was by 3:1. And for an indication how the young see the election, 63 college newspapers endorsed Obama compared to just one for McCain, according to E&P.

But the editorial pages did not necessarily reflect the views of a newspaper’s owner. For example, two Tribune newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Times, endorsed a Democrat Presidential candidate for the first time (surely there must be Chandlers and McCormacks turning in their graves) and yet Sam Zell, as chairman of his Equity Group Investments, gave $40,000 to the Republican ticket.

Rupert Murdoch’s American newspapers came out for McCain – the Post enthusiastically, the Wall Street Journal tepid at best -- and in an interview Murdoch gave to his Australian newspaper – couldn’t get much further from the US than that – he really had little good to say about Obama. He described his tax policies as “crazy”, particularly the bit about higher taxes for Americans who earn more than $250,000 (which Mr. Murdoch certainly does.) And he doesn’t like the idea of lowering taxes for 95% of Americans. He called that “rubbish.”

And he seemed worried about what the Democrats might do with China trade issues with a Democrat in the White House -- News Corp., you will recall, has considerable media business in China. “For the past three or four years, some Democrats have been threatening to do things like put on extra tariffs (against Chinese imports) if they don’t change their currency. If it happened it could set off retaliatory action which would certainly damage the world economy seriously,” Murdoch said.

As for the campaign itself, you certainly have to hand it to Senator Obama’s team – they certainly understood how to get great broadcast advertising deals. That infomercial that ran on several networks last week cost him $3 million for air time, but based on the 33 million viewers who tuned in it works out at a cost of .00166 cents each (or put in Internet terms a CPM of $1.66). That compares to a typical prime time advertising buy that usually works out around a $12 - $14 CPM. In other words  Obama got a big bang for his bucks.

And talking of big bucks, no one seems to have done better in raising money and spending it on TV ads than the Obama campaign. Latest figures show that the two campaigns will have spent some $800 million on TV ads -- $1 billion overall -- with the Obama campaign outspending McCain by about a 3:2 ratio in the latter weeks of the campaign.

Obama was able to do that because he refused federal financing and instead raised hundreds of millions of dollars from individuals via the Internet -- his total fund raising from all sources is said to have topped $640 million. McCain accepted the federal $85 million, along with all the restrictions that brought, and overall his fund raising has been around $360 million. Last week alone, Obama ran 3,160 ads in seven states in a single day; McCain ran 1,543 on the same day.

There are already signs for the media that they had better not mess too much with Obama if he wins the election. Three newspapers that endorsed McCain suddenly found their correspondents thrown off Obama One. The campaign said they needed those seats to give to others for the last week of the campaign but it wasn’t lost on the press corps who lost their seats for such a “need”. As one editor whose reporter lost her seat said, “This feels like the journalistic equivalent of redistributing the wealth.”

On the other hand an editor at the Dallas Morning News says he accepts the decision was not based on politics but rather space. “While we’re a large regional newspaper, we’re not national and we’re not in a swing state. We’ve been on the road with them at key moments, but we’ve not been along for the entire ride, like, say, The New York Times and The Associated Press.” Incidentally, all the foreign press except AFP were off the Obama campaign plane for the last two days of the campaign.

The media did not get to travel for free with Obama; they paid through the nose for seats on his campaign plane, some $9.6 million for Obama seats and some $4.4 million for McCain seats. The New York Times is said to have spent the most on travel for its reporters covering the various campaigns – some $422,000.

And as for today itself, the major news sites have all geared up for record page views and it won’t just be for today but perhaps even more for Wednesday when people wake up and want to find out en masse what results came in while they were sleeping.

How much traffic might there be? Yahoo says that in the 2004 election it had 80 million page views on Election Day and 142 million the day after. For this year it expects twice, maybe three times more..

No doubt Internet techies will be monitoring real close to ensure the system holds up under such an onslaught.