Tuesday, September 16, 2008

TV Watching


Tonight on CBS, Katie -- who is rumored to have secured the next Palin interview -- had an exclusive with Obama. She asked short questions and allowed him to give long answers. CBS seems to be going for access as its watchword. CBS and NBC both invoked "It's the economy, stupid" from 1992. CBS introduced a new feature in which the two candidates will be compared on a single issue.
ABC has basically the same feature.
NBC tried to make the race seem more heated, more fun. The McCain camp claim about fostering the development of the Blackberry was mentioned on NBC but not, I think, on the other two nets. There were clips of the two candidates zinging each other on NBC. They did a feature on raising money -- more of the horse race aspect -- and they -- as ABC I think did also -- got into the whole question of whether its bad to have Barbra Streisand raise $9 million for you. Is it so bad that, say, $8 million could not fix the damage? So you'd still come out ahead?

2 comments:

joeydee said...

How can anyone hate Katie Couric? She's so perky!

BR said...

Time has been doing the whole comparing the candidates on the issues thing for a little while now and it's been awesome. In a few cases they've used actual articles written by the candidates themselves and it certainly makes me wonder about the intentions of the magazine, just in terms of how they arrange it. They had an article written by Rory Stewart about how to deal with Afghanistan, saying that more war there is certainly not the way to go, and literally immediately thereafter is McCain's first line, essentially more war in Afghanistan! Obviously paraphrasing, but it was interesting because Obama wouldn't have lost anything from having the spot after the article rather than coming after McCain, whereas McCain was made to look like an idiot by immediately (and unwittingly) contradicting an expert opinion.