Abstract
Michael Parkin’s Talk Show Campaigns begins, understandably, with Bill Clinton’s groundbreaking appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show in June of 1992. Clinton’s sunglass-clad saxophone performance has been well-discussed, but as Parkin reminds us, Clinton and Hall also engaged in a meaningful discussion of politics and policy that night, accelerating Clinton along his path to the Democratic nomination and then the presidency. For many, this was a watershed moment in American politics—an early indicator that the domains of public affairs and popular communication were fusing, and that entertainment television was becoming a key resource for the democratic process. More immediately, it illustrated for a generation of presidential campaigners that sending their candidates onto the sets of entertainment TV talk shows might be sound strategy. It suggested that TV talk could function as an alternative venue to more serious news and public affairs programming where candidates could reach different kinds of audiences and emphasize different aspects of their public personas.
Parkin’s work builds on the increasing scholarly interest in political-entertainment media and reflects the mounting understanding that such media forms are difficult to dismiss simply as “infotainment.” In particular, he offers careful examination of the political-entertainment interview—its audience, its content, and its outcomes—recognizing that the broadcast interview long has been a central mode of political media, but that its more recent hybrid variations have, with a few notable exceptions, received less scholarly attention than they deserve. Even as candidates increasingly have added appearances on entertainment TV to their standard campaign strategy, Parkin rightly suggests that the field of political communication has lacked longitudinal empirical data on the political-entertainment interview across a range of programmatic forms. That is the shortcoming this ambitious work seeks to correct.
To do so, Parkin compiles a remarkable data set of more than two hundred interviews with presidential candidates collected from the six campaigns between 1992 and 2012. Individual interviews are drawn from a number of entertainment TV talk shows, which Parkin groups into three categories: daytime talk (i.e., Oprah or The View), the network late variety show (i.e., the CBS Late Show and NBC’s Tonight), and the more recent mode of late-night cable satire and parody programming (i.e., The Daily Show and The Colbert Report). Impressively, Parkin tracks down video clips or written transcripts for most of those interviews, and Nielsen ratings data for individual episodes and season program averages. In addition, he also assembles an extensive collection of news articles about individual interviews, and also conducts a series of online experiments designed to tease out their possible effects. The goal, ultimately, is to assess the parameters and viability of what Parkin calls “the entertainment talk show strategy”—the functional ability of candidate interviews on entertainment TV to impact electoral outcomes.
Thoughtfully systematic, the research here is rich and comprehensive. The detailed analysis Parkin provides is both welcome and necessary, if in the end count not entirely surprising. His findings generally support conclusions reached by previous scholarship in the field. The political-entertainment interview appears as a space where candidates do engage in qualitatively different conversations than they have in more traditional news venues, which in turn reach broader audiences. The interviews are often quite substantive, have the potential to inform voters and improve candidates’ public images, and at times generate significant subsequent media exposure. Much, however, appears to depend on the specific program, the status of the candidate, the time-frame relative to election day, and even the flow of a particular interview—all of which Parkin’s findings suggest may influence audience attention patterns, media coverage, and potential exposure effects. That is to say, Talk Show Campaigns makes a convincing, if not entirely intentional, case that its object of study is difficult to consider a singular phenomenon that generates reliable outcomes. The impact of the talk show interview is, as Parkin notes, “complex and conditional” (p. 201)—the diversity of the form demands careful parsing.
As a whole, Talk Show Campaigns makes a useful addition to the literature on political-entertainment media. Greater theoretical consideration than is necessarily on offer, however, might shed more light on the dynamics in play. The division of entertainment TV talk into three categories is helpful, but these fundamentally different programming modes at times are conflated back into a singular concept of “talk show” that might obscure more than it reveals. Likewise, entertainment talk is contrasted with what is described as “more formal new shows”—a category that sensibly includes the traditional Sunday morning network public affairs shows, but also NBC’s Today and CNN’s erstwhile Larry King Live, both of which might be better understood as variations of hybrid political-entertainment programming. That point speaks to the deeper melding of news and entertainment, politics and performance, and candidacy and celebrity that has occurred since Bill Clinton played the sax on Arsenio. As Parkin’s analysis makes clear, political media have transformed, but so too have political practices. More than simply a new strategy to achieve an old goal, the many forms of TV talk show interviews demonstrate the shifting nature of mediated politics and political culture in a hybrid age—transformations that lie beyond the tightly formulated research questions that guide Parkin’s inquiry. None-the-less, Talk Show Campaigns provides an encyclopedic resource that is certain to inform future scholarship in the field.