CNN, Stop With the Screen Litter

Did the graphs, scorecards, and heart-rate monitors on CNN's vice-presidential debate coverage last night force you to change the channel?

The cable news network wanted to pack a punch last night with its myriad of scientific looking instruments it crammed on screen. All this was set up for viewers to gauge the reaction of a focus group of 32 voters in Columbus, Ohio, as they watched the debate. From the CNN press release leading up to last night's coverage:

"During the debate, the participants will operate electronic dial testers that will allow television viewers and CNN.com Live users to see the group's reactions in real time. In addition, viewers watching the broadcast in high-definition will see exclusive scorecards gauging positive and negative information from our panel of commentators."

Those positive-negative scorecards appeared as three red circles on each side of the screen, if you have high-definition. The focus group's reaction appeared as a heart-rate monitor-like graph at the bottom. So there was constant movement and a thick frame of activity surrounding the candidates.

We scraped the blogosphere to do our own focus grouping to see if these bonus features are helpful or annoying.

The blogger for Question Technology wrote:

"The CNN graph is a distraction, of course, and yet another manifestation of the triumph of surface/sensationalist crap over reflection and substance, but it's more than that too. People's perceptions will be shaped by it, both directly, in the sense that the scores guide them in their thinking, and indirectly by what they cause people to miss by not paying closer attention to the candidates. Can CNN not leave the viewers alone for 90 minutes to think for themselves?"

Over on the Huffington Post, Nora Ephron was of a similar mind:

"This graph on CNN affected me, it affected me so much that I could barely focus on the debate, I was so busy watching the graph. I knew it was completely unreliable and irrelevant, and yet my heart sank and rose according to it."

A commenter on CNN's blog for their international correspondents In the Field, found the way the focus group was divided by gender to be troubling:

"I am appalled by CNN and quite dumbfounded that the viewer response graph running during the debate is divided by Men and Women. This is very sexist on CNN's part. The viewer responses should be by Democrates, Republicans and Uncommitted exactly as it was for the McCain-Obama debate. This is an election between two political parties with their own solutions, not between the sexes."

One Wired.com reader commented:

"It was distracting, moved predictably and quickly (once you saw the pattern), so not surprised to learn of the small sample size. I wonder why CNN is doing it?"

Other than adding to the spin and buzz over CNN's coverage, do these instruments add any value?

"It might be revealing, but probably not enough to justify it getting as much screen attention as the debate itself," Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia told Wired.

Comedian Jon Stewart called the Perception Analyzer -- the technology that CNN used to monitor the reactions of their debate focus groups, "a patronizing piece of made-up technology."

Here's what David Bohrman, executive producer of CNN's election coverage, had to say:

"I thought it was really mesmerizing, I was able to listen to the debate, I was interested in seeing the reactions in the group, especially [different lines for] the men and the women."

Bohrman says he's trying to shake things up and move television forward and that viewers can handle getting more visual information all at once. Expect the same bells and whistles at the next two debates.

He also called the current debate format for the general election "stale" in comparison to the more relaxed formats in the primary, such as CNN's YouTube debates, which drew a little under 3 million viewers on average.

Last night CNN held the attention of 10.6 million viewers who could have tuned in elsewhere if they didn't want all the fixings. So maybe Bohrman is actually onto something.

by Andrea Chalupa

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