CNN Says It Overplayed Dean's Iowa Scream
Sun Feb 8, 5:16 PM ET
By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer
NEW YORK - It probably means little now to Howard Dean, but CNN's top executive believes his network overplayed the infamous clip of Dean's "scream" after the Iowa caucuses.
"It was a big story, but the challenge in a 24-hour news network is that you try to keep all of your different viewers throughout the day informed without overdoing it," said Princell Hair, CNN's general manager.
The breathtaking media explosion turned the former Democratic presidential front-runner into a punch line and arguably hastened his campaign's free fall. It's also an instructive look at how television news and entertainment works today.
Whatever handwringing there may be in retrospect — and there's only a little — comes with a sense that repeats are inevitable.
"It was unfair," said Joe Trippi, Dean's former campaign manager, who lost his job in the fallout. "It was totally unfair. I don't think there was any question about it."
Trippi accepts that the footage was newsworthy, but he figured it was a one-day story.
Instead, the cable and broadcast news networks aired Dean's Iowa exclamation 633 times — and that doesn't include local news or talk shows — in the four days after it was made, according to the Hotline, a Washington-based newsletter.
"It shouldn't be an anvil that you keep hammering to destroy his candidacy," Trippi said. "I don't think there was a big conspiracy to do that, but that's what was going on."
Sitting in his Manhattan apartment watching the Iowa caucus coverage, Conan O'Brien saw Dean's speech and thought: Ooh, this is odd.
The NBC "Late Night" host immediately figured he'd be joking about it the next day, and he did, "interviewing" a raving Dean impersonator.
He wasn't alone.
David Letterman ran a clip that appeared to show Dean's head exploding. Jay Leno quipped: "I'm not an expert in politics, but I think it's a bad sign when your speech ends with your aides shooting you with a tranquilizer gun."
The cable news networks ran and reran the video clip. They analyzed it. They ran footage of the late-night comedians joking about it. They played the instant Internet songs that sampled Dean's shout.
Virtually overnight, the "I Have a Scream" speech became legend.
"With so many competitive 24-hour news channels and so many competitive talk shows, if you add the two together, it's a nuclear reaction," O'Brien said. "Once the core gets so hot, there's no stopping it."
It took on such a life, said Paul Slavin, senior vice president of ABC News, that "the amount of attention it was receiving necessitated more attention."
Neither Slavin nor Mark Lukasiewicz, NBC News executive producer in charge of political coverage, believe the coverage was overdone. Roger Ailes, Fox News chairman, told ABC News it was "overplayed a bit."
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