Annenberg keeping Election 2000 alive

Although most Americans welcomed the end of the 2000 presidential election, scholars will be examining the results for years to come. Researchers from Penn, Harvard and Stanford spent the past year studying the election process and are now beginning to crunch their numbers and derive preliminary results. This process will heat up on Saturday, when the Annenberg School for Communication will hold a private debriefing to discuss the campaign, with top campaign leaders, pollsters and media officials participating in order to define future election research. "Once we set a framework around it, it's the likelihood that that's how it'll be interpreted for the next 30 years," Annenberg Dean Kathleen Hall Jamieson said. Although the debriefings are held after every presidential campaign, a major topic of discussion this year will be the Annenberg 2000 Survey, the largest national election survey ever. Researchers conducted 100,000 interviews over 15 months to determine Americans' political knowledge, media use and opinions about candidates and issues, according to Annenberg visiting scholar Richard Johnston, a political science professor from the University of British Columbia. Previous election surveys had never focused on campaigns, instead examining other factors that affect elections, such as the economy, Johnston explained. "It's as if physicists had been working out theories of particles without having cyclotrons to smash the atoms, and then somebody comes along and builds an atom smasher," Johnston said. "That's what we've done." In addition to its size -- 10 to 20 times larger than most academic political surveys -- and focus, what sets the Annenberg survey apart is that it is a "rolling cross-section survey." In such a survey, people are interviewed every night for the survey's duration. Annenberg post-doctoral fellow Paul Waldman said this allows changes in opinion to be tracked over time. "Typically, election surveys are done right after the election or right before the election," said Waldman. "Whatever changes take place have already happened." Annenberg researchers plan to write several books based on the survey's results, although in order to do that the data must be "cleaned," which Jamieson says will likely take two years. The debriefing itself will be videotaped, and then edited and distributed to Penn government and communication classes. Political Science Professor Henry Teune said that examining the role of the media during the campaigns is critical, especially since all of the main polls are conducted by such media outlets as Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal. "Education polls as an issue, the media reports it, the campaign picks it up and presents it and the media reinforces it and education keeps coming back," Teune said. "But I don't believe that education is a major issue in America." However, attempts to change the media's influence on the election process have already begun. Groups such as the Alliance for Better Campaigns -- chaired by former president Jimmy Carter, newsman Walter Cronkite and former president Gerald Ford -- have sought to convince television stations to air five minutes of "candidate-centered discourse" 30 days prior to the election, according to Ed Schwartz of the Institute for the Study of Civic Values. "It seems like it would be an easy objective to achieve, but it's not," said Schwartz, president of the Institute, which is the Pennsylvania representative to the Alliance. Although national networks such as CBS and NBC agreed to the standards, most of their affiliates -- including those in Philadelphia -- did not. "WPVI [ABC] was quite belligerent about it," Schwartz said. "They were going to determine what was on their station, and no non-profit was going to do that for them." WPVI General Manager Dave Davis countered that his station carried a "record number of debates and a record number of coverage in our news and public affairs program." "To my knowledge, none of our viewers complained about a lack of political content," said Davis. "Some complained about too much political coverage." Tuene believes that radical changes in media campaign coverage will not come anytime soon. "I think that the people who are in the business of doing the intermediary critiquing -- reporters, newscasters and so forth -- are extraordinary status quo people," Teune said. "They don't want to change the campaign. They live off the campaign." Teune proposed that since Congress regulates broadcasting, it should legislate the campaigns' television advertising, calling it "the most reasonable thing." "If you're worried about money in politics, then you got to know that 75 percent or more of the money goes to buy blocks of television [advertising]," Teune said.