ong before a single voter had spoken in the presidential primary process that reaches a crescendo with today's Super Tuesday, Chris Matthews made a bold prediction on his MSNBC talk show, ''Hardball.''
''I wouldn't be surprised if the primaries took place on these kinds of programs,'' Matthews told the pundit William Kristol last November. ''This is where the game is going to be played.''
For good or ill, Matthews may be right. Just as HBO's ''The Sopranos'' underscored the ascendancy of cable in the entertainment realm, so has the presidential race driven home the prominence of cable-news outlets in election time.
MSNBC and Fox News Channel, barely in their infancy in 1996, are now aggressively in the mix with the old standby, CNN. The trio have amplified cable's voice by sponsoring debates, devoting much more air time to daily campaign coverage than broadcast networks, competing for prime interview ''gets'' of the candidates, and, especially, by relentlessly dissecting every twist in the race on political talk shows like ''Hardball.''
''It is 24-7, all-coverage, all-punditry, all the time,'' said a Boston University communications professor, Tobe Berkovitz. ''It makes the strategy and the tactics as important as the candidates, the message and the issues.''
But it can also boost an issue from obscurity to the forefront of voters' consciousness. When George W. Bush spoke at Bob Jones University last month, it initially caused little controversy. But the college's ban on interracial dating and its founder's anti-Catholic views became an albatross for Bush once TV talk shows, along with John McCain, his chief GOP rival and other Republicans, began focusing on the questions it raised about Bush's judgment.
In general, cable is feeling its oats. Sean Hannity, cohost of Fox News Channel's ''Hannity & Colmes,'' proclaimed that ''this election cycle is just the beginning. ... Political news will be dominated in the years to come by the cable channels.''
''Things that maybe would end up on the cutting-room floor on a 22-minute nightly newscast now may get 20 minutes of air time on a cable channel,'' Hannity added.
While that may be true, it's also true that the collective audience of the three cable-news outlets still does not approach that of even one of their broadcast competitors. At any given time, roughly 1 million viewers are tuned in to CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC together, whereas 31 million collectively tune in to the nightly newscasts on CBS, NBC and ABC. An appearance on NBC's ''Meet the Press'' still counts for a lot more than an interview with any cable competitor.
Moreover, some critics say the conflict-driven, insider-oriented nature of cable news coverage and talk shows obscures more than it illuminates.
''It's a pursuit of the trivial in a lot of ways,'' said Everette Dennis, a professor of communications at Fordham University. ''There's a tendency to follow minute details of the campaign, whether it's a speech, a letter, a phone call by Pat Robertson. They beat it to death in a way that didn't used to happen ... It's such extensive coverage of so little.''
To Jeff Cohen, founder of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, the cable-news outlets are guilty of a missed opportunity to broaden the spectrum of political opinion. He says that voices from the left, consumer advocates, and critics of the political process are frozen out in favor of ''elite journalists and elite pundits and hired handlers talking among themselves.''
However, Matthews argues that shows like his have helped to energize the political process. ''We inspire enthusiasm for the personalities and the attitudes in the race,'' he said. ''We do more to jack up interest in these races than newspaper columnists, who aren't really doing the kind of florid commentary they once did.'' Matthews views shows like ''Hardball' as the contemporary version of afternoon newspapers.
Presidential primaries like the ones unfolding today often turn on decisions made by the most committed voters. And to that audience, cable's daily coverage and its talk shows loom large as a means of forming impressions of candidates - a fact of which campaigns are keenly aware.
Douglas Hattaway, a spokesman for Vice President Al Gore, said that while the unblinking eye of the cable-news outlets ''hasn't changed our typical day'' when it comes to scheduling events, it ''keeps you on your toes'' to know that CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC will ''run a lot more material from the campaign trail than the traditional evening news.''
Any campaign worth its salt has a cadre of telegenic spinmeisters prepared to go on political talk shows. To campaign operatives, such shows serve a dual purpose: They are ''free media'' that provide an opportunity to get a candidate's message out to likely voters, and they are a chance to influence the perceptions of journalists and political professionals, especially since such programs are often quoted by electronic newsletters favored by the political class, such as ''The Hotline.''
''They're really sensitive to the presence of the 24-hour networks,'' said Wolf Blitzer, host of a Sunday political talk show, ''Late Edition,'' and anchor of a nightly newscast on CNN. ''They want to make sure they don't neglect us.''
In fact, says Judy Woodruff, coanchor of CNN's ''Inside Politics,'' it's not unusual for producers to receive a call from a campaign while the show is still on the air, hoping for time to rebut a rival spinmeister during the telecast.
Of course, it is candidates, not spinners, who are the prized ''gets'' on such programs - and those programs lend even greater importance to a presidential candidate's media skills. In fact, some observers say that favorable coverage and analysis on cable-news outlets is partly responsible for the unexpectedly strong showing by the media-savvy McCain.
In Blitzer's view, the cable-news outlets have irreversibly changed the tempo of the presidential campaign. ''The 24-hour news cycle is now more like 24 minutes,'' he observed.
Woodruff, a former reporter for NBC and PBS, agreed. ''It used to be you could have one event a day, at 2, and you made the nightly news,'' she said. ''Now, if you do something in the morning it will be on CNN right away, and if you say something about your opponent it will be ping-ponging back and forth for several hours. You cannot wait for the evening news anymore.''
