By DAVID BAUDER AP Television Writer
NEW YORK Mar 4, 2007 (AP)— Two months before the 1992 presidential election, an NBC reporter cornered a man to ask whether he preferred Bill Clinton or President Bush.
The man said he didn't care. He just wanted them off his TV screen.
Imagine how he'd feel today?
The 2008 campaign is already playing out so intensely that it dominates airtime at a point where only political junkies usually pay attention. Remember: it's 20 months before voters will make the ultimate decision.
This is uncharted territory for people in both politics and television, who wonder when campaign fatigue will set in. Many Americans may be sick of seeing their next president before he or she even takes the oath of office.
In one measure of news interest, campaign stories have consumed 95 minutes of attention this year through Feb. 27 on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts. That's more time than in the comparable periods for the previous four presidential election cycles combined, according to the Tyndall Report.
Presidential politics was so far off the radar in January and February 1991 that the three newscasts together spent less than a minute on the upcoming campaign.
The study doesn't even take into account time chewed up by the cable TV networks, with their gaping 24-hour news holes. CNN was around in 1991, but Fox News Channel and MSNBC didn't exist. Neither did "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart.
"It used to be that campaigning was the interval between governing," said Bob Schieffer, host of CBS' "Face the Nation." "Now governing is the interval between campaigning."
Behind Iraq, the 2008 campaign is the top news story of 2007. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which compiles a weekly news index taking broadcast and cable TV, newspapers and the Internet into account, said the campaign was the top story the week of Feb. 18-23. The biggest development then was Hollywood mogul David Geffen taking shots at Hillary Clinton, and the campaigns of Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama sniping at each other in response. The story is likely to be forgotten in two months, let alone 20.
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