Are the two major political parties hosting primaries this winter? Or is it just the Democrats? Viewers who saw Monday's edition of Good Morning America might assume the latter. The ABC program devoted a lopsided 14 minutes and 56 seconds to breaking down the race between Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. A scant 31 seconds were given to the competitive Republican race.
Over the course of the two hour program, GMA featured four segments on the Democrats and only a solitary (and brief) piece on the GOP contest. This included co-host Diane Sawyer interviewing Barack Obama twice. ABC anchor and former Bill Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos talked to Senator Hillary Clinton. Kate Snow discussed the state of the New York senator's White House bid. Aside from mentioning the latest GOP polls in the show's intro, the only analysis of the Republicans resulted from Sawyer asking Stephanopoulos this banal question: "And what about the Republicans?" The conversation that followed lasted 31 seconds.
[This item, by the MRC's Scott Whitlock, was posted Monday afternoon on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org ]
Now, this might have been understandable in 2004 when President George W. Bush ran unopposed for his party's nomination. But in 2008, with a wide open race, it's rather amazing that ABC would focus on the Democrats by a margin of 28 to one.
There was one additional segment on the presidential campaign. But since it related to the general subject of the human brain and how people make political decisions, it was not included it in the time count. However, the tone of the piece did follow GMA's template of emphasizing Democrats over Republicans. In the segment, correspondent Claire Shipman looked at a new company that claims to be able to be able to discern what Americans really think about a politician, based on chemical reactions in the brain.
As ABC has repeatedly done in the past, Shipman speculated over whether this would show whether voters will "really pull the lever for a woman, an African-American." At the close of the piece, the network journalist admitted, "Now, we didn't have any indication from our group that they would hesitate to support a woman or an African-American. Of course, we only spent an afternoon with them." For more on previous speculations from GMA reporters on race and politics, see the January 3 CyberAlert: http://www.mrc.org/cyberalerts/2008/cyb20080103.asp#5
