ABSTRACT
Modern presidential candidates spend most of their campaigning time, money, and effort to appear on America’s millions of television screens. Campaign managers would undoubtedly agree with newsman James Wooten’s comment that “the entire apparatus, focus and structure of a campaign and 99.9 percent of staff energies are directed toward the evening network broadcast.” 1 The reasons for this focus of efforts are easy to grasp. The candidates want a chance to display their personalities and talents before the vast television audience. Often, they would like to get their stands 011 issues across, too. But television news stories are far too short to explain issues adequately. So the emphasis in the nightly news is not on issues but on demonstrating the capacity to handle issues of all kinds well.
