By Susan Q. Stranahan
Is this presidential election campaign being covered any differently, or any better, than past campaigns?
While there are seven months to go before the initial vote is tallied, there has already been plenty of election sturm und drang, first from the contentious Democratic primaries and then throughout March from the hit-the-ground-running attack dogs of both the Kerry and the Bush camps. But a case can be made that little has come of all this but noise — name-calling, chest-thumping and, yes, flip-flopping. Noise from the candidates’ operations, and noise dutifully passed on, often even amplified, by the attendant campaign press. A nation hungry for bread is getting circuses.
On the three issues of the most concern to voters (according to a January study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press) — the economy, jobs and terrorism — we’ve gotten little more than slogans and finger-pointing from each side. So, how to resolve this disconnect between what the candidates are yammering about and what the voters really want to hear? More to the point, does the media have a role in helping to shape this political dialog? And if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
“That’s an old debate and one that’s ultimately unresolvable,” says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, affiliated (as is Campaign Desk) with Columbia University’s School of Journalism. “Journalists disagree on this issue even within a single newsroom.” And they’ve disagreed for years, according to Rosensteil, a former media reporter at the Los Angeles Times.
On the theory that both the campaigns we get this year and the campaign coverage of them will each be shaped by the experience of the press and of politicians in the recent past, Campaign Desk herewith offers a little history.
The viciousness of the 1988 presidential campaign, which pitted George “Read My Lips” Bush against Michael “The Guy Who Released Willie Horton” Dukakis, stunned even veteran political reporters. For the first time, polls showed that Vice President Bush improved his favorability ratings with negative ads against Dukakis, who belatedly mounted his own ad offensive. Prior to that race, according to Rosenstiel, conventional wisdom had it that negative ads were high-risk, carrying the potential for doing more damage to the sponsor than to the target. The results of 1988 eradicated that theory.
A few weeks before the ‘88 vote, ABC News Correspondent Richard Threlkeld aired a brief segment on “World News Tonight” in which he challenged the accuracy of claims made in both Bush and Dukakis ads. It was a first for TV and perhaps for all media. Asked later what prompted him to assemble such a report, Threlkeld told The Washington Post’s political writer David Broder: “I don’t know what the hell we get paid for if we don’t make an effort … to keep those guys honest. If we don’t, who will?”
A few days later, the Post’s Lloyd Grove, assigned to monitor media coverage of the race, did his own accuracy analysis. “There are lies, damned lies and political commercials — and the 1988 presidential campaign is providing at least its share,” wrote Grove. Soon after, the Bush campaign held a news conference to defend the disputed ads. That, in turn, prompted more coverage about the role of the media as “truth squads.”
In January 1989, looking back on the election campaign, Broder, who had already written numerous articles decrying its tenor, summarized the escalating debate over the media’s role in policing the accuracy of campaign rhetoric. At the heart of the issue was this question:
Should the media be bystanders or referees?
Supporting the latter premise were some surprising sources, including Don Sipple, a Republican consultant. He told Broder: “If reporters don’t analyze the truth and falsity of the ads, it’s bastardizing the role of the press, which is to inform. We [consultants] have a right to free speech, but the press has a responsibility to inform and educate voters.”
Republican pollster Richard Wirthlin disagreed: “The primary, if not the sole, responsibility for setting the record straight remains with the [opposition] candidate and campaign. The press should report the facts as they are, but it gets on rather tenuous ground when it judges whether these are half-truths or not.”
In the end, Broder himself arrived at no conclusion. But Rosenstiel credits Broder with wading into heretofore uncharted waters and raising the broader subject of the media’s role in campaign give-and-take as one worthy of scrutiny.
In March, 1990, The New York Times weighed in with its own in-depth assessment of American political discourse and leadership, in a four-part series called “The Trouble with Politics” (you can read parts one, two, three, and four on the Times’ web site). The series grew out of frustrations among several Times reporters who had covered the ‘88 campaign. They concluded that the political process “had run off the rails,” according to Michael Oreskes, who joined colleagues Robin Toner and Richard Berke in the project.
“Politics had become nothing but a blood sport and was completely separate from crucial decision-making,” said Oreskes recently. “It wasn’t a political system, it was an election system.”
“[T]he American political system is unable even to define and debate critical questions, let alone resolve them,” wrote Oreskes in 1990. He quoted former Idaho Sen. James A. McClure who decried the new breed of “wet-finger politicians” — those driven by polls that measure emotional response, not thought-out views.
Fourteen years later, the Times articles seem eerily on point. The first-day lede of the series reads, in part: “[A]n unhappy consensus has emerged at home that domestic politics has become so shallow, mean and even meaningless that it is failing to produce the ideas and leadership needed to guide the United States in a rapidly changing world.”
At the time, one of the solutions to elevate the political debate (and eliminate the influence of negative ads and big money spent on them) appeared to be free television. The proposal — popular among newspaper editors, at least — would have required the networks to give each candidate five minutes of open mike each night to air his views. “To fill five minutes, you’d have to put on substance, and you’d have to be very thoughtful,” Lee Atwater, chairman of the Republican National Committee and a top strategist in George Bush’s 1988 campaign, told Oreskes and Toner.
Not surprisingly, the networks didn’t buy the idea of free anything, and the idea went nowhere.
In 1990, the media tried a different tack: Truth boxes. Used by newspapers in both the California senatorial race and the Texas gubernatorial race that year, the boxes were a shorthand way to challenge campaign ads’ accuracy. “It represented a change from the press being a color commentator to being a referee on the field, throwing flags and saying that ad is not true,” said Rosensteil. “By the 1992 [presidential] campaign, that movement had taken on real force.”
But even then, said Rosenstiel, some journalists held back, holding to the tradition that all journalism should be reactive, not proactive.
As the 1992 election neared, editors were determined to find a better way to cover the campaign, to avoid being manipulated by spin doctors. In the end, as Rosensteil sees it, that only led to another trap: Saturation coverage of tactics instead of detailed coverage of issues, sparking the now nearly universal complaint that too many reporters spend more time handicapping the contest in front of them than do horse-racing writers.
In addition, Rosenstiel observes, “You had [another] breakdown of the mainstream press [taking place], with people like Larry King and talk radio emerging as an important vehicle for the candidates to reach voters directly.”
Bill Clinton proved to be a master at this tactic. Who knows how much support he won with his sax-playing on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” or his response to the “boxers or briefs” question on MTV? (Conversely, it might be added, who knows how much support he lost for the same stunts?)
Into this muddle rose yet a new idea that quickly gained a following in the media: something called “civic journalism” or “public journalism.” In a nutshell, this was the theory: Journalists, in consultation with voter focus groups, would set a political agenda that they deemed to be in the “public interest” — and then appoint themselves traffic cops to ensure that the candidates didn’t stray from it.
The whole premise seemed more than a little presumptuous to some editors. But since the idea was a brainchild of the late James K. Batten, chairman of Knight-Ridder Newspapers, Inc., it had legs. Batten devoutly believed that for newspapers to survive they needed to be more responsive players in their communities. Pew Charitable Trusts was an enthusiastic underwriter, eventually spending $3 million to fund a variety of civic journalism efforts around the country before halting the program last year. (Pew also funds Rosenstiel’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.)
In 1996, a group of six North Carolina newspapers, including Knight-Ridder’s Charlotte Observer, as well as the Raleigh News & Observer, five TV stations, public television and three public radio stations banded together in an experiment to cover races for governor and U.S. senator. The project was called “Your Voice, Your Vote.”
In explaining the concept, the Observer’s Rick Thames told the Times’ James Bennett: “There’s more concern than ever before in the media as to whether candidates are really addressing issues that matter to readers and the public.”
Based on a survey of North Carolina voters, the media participants drew up their issues list and then agreed to target their coverage accordingly. If an issue was not on the agenda, it was largely ignored. Coverage tended to be identical across the state, no matter the outlet. Candidates found themselves unable to attract coverage if they weren’t addressing the prescribed issues.
Alarmed, critics of the whole notion of journalists setting public agendas leaped to their keyboards. Among the most vocal were the late Michael Kelly of the New Yorker and Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. “Several of the state’s prominent newspapers and broadcasters have formed a cabal the purpose of which is to take the political agenda out of the hands of politicians and place it in the hands of journalists,” wrote Yardley. “This does not exactly qualify as good news.”
Editors were using polls to decide what to cover, wrote Yardley, and worse, they were trying to coerce politicians to use the same polls to fashion their campaigns. In summary, he decreed, “Public journalism is an insidious, dangerous idea.”
Though the concept lives on even today, public journalism ultimately failed in its mission to move politics or political campaigns to higher ground, and it never rose to the level of national politics or presidential campaign coverage. And by the time of the 2000 presidential election campaign, public journalism had been relegated to the back burner. Journalists went back to covering tactics, and found them wanting. The campaign of that year produced book titles such as Smashmouth by current Washington Post political reporter Dana Milbank, and Down And Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency by Jake Tapper, who covered the race for Salon.com.
Which brings us to today. Have things improved this cycle? You’re reading the latest experiment designed to enhance campaign coverage. Earlier this year, Campaign Desk was created with a mission to bird-dog the campaign press on a meaningful, daily and ongoing basis. The premise: An alert monitor, catching errors of fact and/or distortions in framing story lines as they occur might in some small way cause press outlets to improve the quality of news and information voters get. In addition, we try to pointpoint what is not being covered — errors of omission lead to a distorted campaign report as often as errors of commission. How the Desk is doing, of course, is a matter for journalistic historians of the year 2005 to decide.
Which takes us back to our original question: What is the role of the media in the politics of 2004? As Rosensteil noted at the beginning of this piece, the debate continues. Michael Oreskes, now the Times’ assistant managing editor for electronic news, agrees that nothing is settled. “Most of the questions are still out there for us,” he said.
Certainly, there are differences in this election versus the others. The growth of the Internet, cable news, targeted advertising and weblogs have diminished the role of the traditional media in delivering information. But, as Rosensteil dryly notes, “much of the [so-called] information revolution is about repackaging second-hand information, not gathering it first-hand.
“The thing that no one else does and that the press still can do – and that the voters still need — is to dig into these guys’ backgrounds, their political positions, their records and tell me what they’re really like,” says Rosenstiel. “Bloggers and 24/7 live chat shows and interview programs and reporter stand-ups at events don’t replace that.”
But that niche — the task of telling readers who these guys are, what they stand for and how they perform under pressure — is in danger of eroding, warn both Rosensteil and Oreskes.
“We’re going in the wrong direction,” Oreskes concludes. “What news coverage there is more headline-driven and more ratings-driven. You can’t make great journalism by market research, any more than you can be a great political leader through market research.”
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.