By Andrew Tyndall

So that was it, was it?

Last night as we went to sleep, the television networks and their exit polls had all but shut up shop. The Presidential primary season is over for another four years. The anchors announced that 1999's establishment front-runners Al Gore and George Bush have effectively swatted away their reform-minded challengers John McCain and Bill Bradley.

It was only 12 years ago that news viewers and voters could look forward to an entire early spring of political debate. As recently as 1988, the primary season attracted more than 900 minutes of coverage on the three broadcast networks' weekday nightly newscasts (ABC, CBS and NBC combined). Just like this year, those primaries stretched from the Iowa caucuses to the New York primary, where Michael Dukakis finally disposed of the challenges by Jesse Jackson and Al Gore.

This year that same process — Iowa through New York and the other Super Tuesday states yesterday — attracted only half the coverage of 1988. At least Republican voters heard some of their issues thrashed out. The networks faithfully followed the Bush-McCain fight over whether the religious right should have a leading role in the Republican Party through South Carolina, Michigan, Virginia and Washington.

Democrats got next to nothing. Before yesterday, the only primary election that counted was in New Hampshire, because of party rules. Since then, Gore accumulated his lead over Bradley without competing in a single primary election with delegates at stake — and therefore with almost no coverage on the nightly news. "This could be Bill Bradley's last hurrah," said CBS's Dan Rather last night, "before he even has his first."

Why was the primary season almost half as newsworthy in Campaign 2000 as it was in 1988? The figures show a decline (465 minutes in 2000 through last Friday versus 454 in 1996 when Bill Clinton was running opposed, 632 in 1992, 902 in 1988). Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson charges the television networks with "neglect." He cites the example that the three networks combined spent a total of less than one minute last Thursday on the conviction of Democratic National Committee operative Maria Hsia for fundraising abuses in the 1996 campaign.

Chairman Nicholson was right about the Hsia coverage. But his party and his Democratic counterparts must bear most of the blame for the diminished newsworthiness of politics during the primary season. After all, it was the political parties, not the networks, who decided to truncate the season, rushing it through in eight or nine weeks when it had taken more than three months back in 1988, when Michigan and New York followed Super Tuesday by six weeks.

While the total volume of the networks' coverage has been scaled back, its intensity has hardly changed over the last four election cycles. So far this year during the primary season, weekly coverage of Campaign 2000 has averaged 58 minutes (compared to 65 minutes a week in 1996, 57 in 1992 and 64 in 1988). If the process by which the nominees are chosen nowadays receives less coverage, seems less deliberative and less accountable to the voters, it is because the political parties themselves have structured it that way.

It was the parties' decision to rush to a nominee. Frontloading the process made it inevitable that coverage would concentrate on the so-called horse race, and that money and organization would be formidable and, as it turned out, insurmountable assets for both Bush and Gore. Given those conditions it is amazing that the less partisan, more independent-minded McCain was able to mount the challenge that he did. The free-wheeling McCain took advantage of the big changes in the political media environment since the last election: The proliferation of 24-hour news cable channels and relying on interviewers rather than reporters allowed him to showcase his straight-shooter style; the Internet allowed him to raise unexpected funds.

Calculating that the primary race had cost Republican candidates $100 million this year and Democrats $50 million, ABC political analyst George Stephanopoulos last night delivered this epitaph on the process: "Never before has so much money been spent in such a concentrated period to determine the nominee so quickly — and we have ended up right where we started with the establishment candidates ratified.

"The parties rigged the system with the front-runners in mind," he continued, "and it worked out for them. Independent analysts will have an awful lot of complaints that too many people were shut out of the system even though we did have a national primary."

If the primary process of the Democratic and Republican parties seems less relevant to the electorate, that is not the fault of mainstream journalists. It is the parties' own doing. So does that mean there was nothing wrong with the style and volume of the networks' campaign coverage during the primary season?

Not quite.

When the networks give the primaries less coverage than 12 years ago they accurately reflect the diminishing importance of the established political parties. What we have not seen is a corresponding increase in coverage of independent political life outside the two parties. The unprecedentedly long hiatus that now looms between the end of the primary season and the nominating conventions will be the real test of Campaign 2000 journalism. How will they cover the rest of the body politic, which the two main parties spurned by closing down their primary process?

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

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