Photo by Chris Meyer Grabe “After every major political event, there’s the endless spinning—journalists talking to journalists, putting themselves at center stage and acting like experts. If we think about journalism and its more lofty ideals, this seems in dire contrast.” —Betsi Grabe, associate professor of journalism,

So says Betsi Grabe, associate professor of journalism at IU Bloomington.

Grabe, whose research focuses on the content and effects of audiovisual messages, is completing an analysis of television coverage of the last four presidential elections to determine exactly how the candidates are “framed”—or packaged by news workers— and presented to the public.

“There’s the classic example of how people who listened to the 1960 debates on radio thought Nixon was the winner, but the television audience believed that Kennedy won. Kennedy was the first presidential candidate who truly knew how important visuals could be. His appearance at the debate was very carefully constructed—he was tan, his suit contrasted with the backdrop. By contrast, poor Nixon, who had just gotten out of the hospital, was pale and had a five o’clock shadow. That was the beginning. From there, you can pick out the savvy ones,” said Grabe.

According to Grabe, Ronald Reagan and his advisers were the most skilled at using visual language to their advantage, although Bill Clinton ran a close second. “Reagan was always shot against a backdrop of cheering, adoring, flag-waving crowds, but Clinton was positively gifted in his ability to work the camera. He demonstrated a wide range of facial displays that were presidential and emotionally appropriate—sadness at a state funeral, harshness in a debate and so on,” she said. “If you have two candidates to choose from and they basically are saying the same thing, then it’s not so much about what they stand for in terms of policy, but how they appear.”

The extensive list of rules that governed this month’s presidential and vice presidential debates is a recent indicator of the candidates’ and their advisers’ awareness of the power of visual images and their attempt to control visual representation. “Everyone has this kind of intuition that visuals make an enormous difference, but what we don’t yet understand as academics is precisely how they work. There is a lot of good theory scattered across disciplines. We’re rather like little squirrels gathering information here and there. What we do know is that visual images and the way they operate are both similar and vastly different than how verbal language works, the most prominent difference being that the visual is far less explicit. In other words, we can say things visually that we could never get away with saying in words,” said Grabe.

Grabe’s research spans the past four presidential elections and involves the time-consuming collection and analysis of data. Using a detailed coding instrument that examines more than 100 variables, Grabe and her researchers view news stories from Labor Day until election day on the three major networks and record what they see—from camera angles, to the clothing the candidates are wearing, to their every facial display. Should some interpretation be required, Grabe has clearly spelled out definitions for the researchers to follow. “It’s an excruciatingly slow process and takes close to a year just to do one election,” she said. “From there, we use a data analysis program and can run something as simple as percentages or frequencies. Broad patterns begin to emerge—who is doing what, or who is getting more air time? I must compliment American journalists in that department. If you take a stop watch, you see that they do a very good job of giving each candidate the same amount of time.”

While the networks might be doing an equitable job at divvying up air time among candidates, Grabe’s research indicates that they are getting significantly less of it. “The duration of political candidates’ sound bites has been shrinking over time and is now stabilized at seven or eight seconds. So, candidates have learned to speak in sound bites. As this has happened, the on-camera time of journalists has increased,” said Grabe. “The journalists have appointed themselves the ones to tell us what the candidates are saying rather than letting us hear what they are saying. After every major political event, there’s the endless spinning—journalists talking to journalists, putting themselves at center stage and acting like experts. If we think about journalism and its more lofty ideals, this seems in dire contrast.”

Grabe expressed concern for the public’s lack of awareness of subtle messages delivered to them through the visual language of television. She believes that school curricula must expand to teach students to read and to interpret visual texts critically, just as they are taught to read and analyze written texts.

“It’s stunning to me how we ignore the visual component, because it’s so indirect, so much more open for interpretation—almost dangerously so. We do understand a lot, and it’s time we started sharing that information with children,” she said. Grabe used the example of the low-angle camera view to make her point. “We know that the low-angle view that looks up attributes power to a person, and, in politics, we know what that means. The reason for this is that the first authority figure we knew as children were our parents, who were taller than we, and we had to look up at them.”

When the 2004 election is over, Grabe’s investigation and analysis of exactly what happened—visually—will commence. Ultimately, she expects that her research will take the form of a written text. “The book I want to do is not so much on points of visual communication, but how the candidates are visually framed. How long do they appear in the news? What do we see? What kinds of people were there? Were there celebrities or flags in the background? Whatever I find I cannot put on the doorstep of journalists, because, more often than not, that’s how the advisers stage the candidates. Depending on the data, there might be an opportunity, literally, to see if some of this analysis of framing can be used to predict who wins in the end.”