Candidates Primp, Networks Prep for Super Tuesday

CANDIDATES PRIMP, NETWORKS PREP FOR SUPER TUESDAY
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: Marisa Guthrie]
Television loves a good horse race. And so far, the neck-and-neck presidential-race heats in the Democratic and Republican fields have created the biggest -- and earliest -- Super Tuesday in memory. The broadcast networks are poised to dive deeper with expanded election-night coverage. As the writers’ strike drags on, this election night -- which involves states with more than 40% of the U.S. population -- might well offer the freshest and most compelling drama on television.
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6528337.html?rssid=193

* Going Live on Super Tuesday: History in the Making
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: Marisa Guthrie]
A Q&A with ABC News President David Westin. The pitched tenor of the 2008 campaign has sparked discussion inside broadcast-news divisions grappling with how much airtime to dedicate to the primaries and caucuses. This is a departure from recent election cycles, when networks have all but abdicated live coverage to the cable news channels. Cable’s gains during the 2008 campaign have certainly not gone unnoticed by their broadcast brethren.
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6528336.html?rssid=193

* In Election of Change, TV Gives Voice to Insiders
ABC News and NBC News are the front-runners in the competition to cover electoral politics. What is striking in an election cycle in which all politicians, even the Republicans, seek to distance themselves from the past is how much the best-known television pundits who hold them to account are entangled in old partisanship and past allegiances. On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, viewers instead met the strategists: Robert Shrum, a Democratic consultant and Senator John Kerry’s senior strategist in 2004; Mike Murphy, a consultant who worked for Senator John McCain in 2004; Mary Matalin, who worked for President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney; and her husband, James Carville, an adviser to President Bill Clinton. ABC's "This Week" had all the same kind of incestuous ties as the ones on NBC: Victoria Clarke, who was a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain before she became the Pentagon spokeswoman under former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; Dee Dee Myers, a press secretary for the Clinton White House; Robert B. Reich, who was President Clinton’s secretary of labor; and George F. Will, a columnist whose wife was a senior adviser to former Senator Bob Dole in his 1996 presidential race. Both networks are careful about balance: there are equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats. But they are careless about bias: the experts are supposed to be impartial, but it is left to viewers to parse their complicated pedigrees and entwined political obligations. It’s not that they have nothing to say, it’s that what they say is not accompanied by an asterisk.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/us/politics/04watch.html?ref=todayspaper
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