politics

Parroting the Party Line

As reporting on the Connecticut Democratic Senate primary shows, coverage of Campaign 2006 is already falling prey to the pathologies that plagued the press during 2004.

August 10, 2006

In early June, a prickly Jim Lehrer told CJR Daily’s Liz Cox Barrett that “My part of journalism is to present what various people say … I’m not in the judgment part of journalism. I’m in the reporting part of journalism.” In other words, it’s not his job to have an opinion or even reach a conclusion; his place is only to report the who and thewhat and the where, but not the why. “Best I can do for [his viewers],” Lehrer continued, “is to give them every piece of information I can find and let them make the judgments.”

Some critics might call this stenography — indeed, plenty of bloggers make that charge every day — but what Lehrer was getting at was that he is an “objective” journalist, concerned with the facts and the quotes, but not, presumably, with figuring out which party (political or otherwise) might actually be telling the truth, and which is just practicing spin.

But that method of reporting — which is actually of somewhat recent vintage — has some huge drawbacks. This is especially true for the casual news consumer who is trying to navigate her or his way through the rocky shoals of political reporting, with all of its competing agendas and professional spinners muddying the waters of public discourse.

Consider a piece this morning by Time‘s Mike Allen on the partisan battles brewing in the wake of Ned Lamont knocking Joe Lieberman out of the Connecticut Democratic primary on Tuesday night. The piece quotes a veritable Who’s Who of GOP agenda-setters, with RNC chair Ken Mehlman, Vice President Cheney and White House spokesman Tony Snow (more on him later) all mouthing obviously scripted Republican talking points, as they hammer home their Fall ’06 rallying cry — that the “radical left” has hijacked the Democratic party, and that Lamont’s victory can only boost the spirits of — Osama bin Laden?

Allen seems utterly indifferent about whether these charges are true or not. He shows an utter lack of curiosity about any possible Democratic rebuttal to the Republican spin until the final paragraph, when he mockingly writes, “Trying to look on the bright side, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean issued a statement this morning pointing to strong turnout in the primaries and declaring that Democratic voters ‘are energized.’ The challenge for Dean, and his party, is to channel that energy in a direction that makes victory more likely, not less.”

Now, Allen is an excellent reporter, and we’re hoping that anything he writes for Time magazine will be more textured than his work on his Time.com blog. Nonetheless, this piece is totally perplexing. He paints the Democrats as “doleful” and Republicans as “gleeful,” while wondering if the “Democrats’ rejection of a sensible, moralistic centrist has handed the GOP a weapon that could have vast ramifications for both the midterm elections of ’06 and the big dance of ’08.”

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But is that even true? All the big-ticket names in the Democratic Party publicity supported Lieberman in the primaries, from Minority Leader Harry Reid to Charles Schumer to Hillary (and Bill) Clinton to Joe Biden to Barbara Boxer. They didn’t reject him — rather, it was the voters of the Democratic party of the state of Connecticut who rejected him. That would be the liberal state of Connecticut, with whom Lieberman had fallen out of favor, and not just on Iraq. Making more of that fact than it is feeds into the tendency of many national reporters to take an isolated incident and extrapolate national ramifications from it, whether called for or not. And in doing so, reporters help shape the reality they are trying to describe. This time, the conventional wisdom of the pundits is that MoveOn and a host of liberal bloggers have hijacked the Democratic Party, and now Republicans can cash in on the public’s disdain of the “radical left.”

Don’t believe us? Consider Jacob Weisberg’s piece in Slate yesterday, where he proclaimed, without the benefit of any inkling of evidence to back up his reasoning, that “the 2006 Connecticut primary points to the growing influence within the party of leftists unmoved by the fight against global jihad.” Who these leftists unmoved by global jihad might be is left to the imagination.

But more to the point, there is a telling moment in Allen’s piece that shows, with perfect clarity, the problems inherent in Lehrer-style “objective” reporting. He quotes Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, saying “I know a lot of people have tried to make this a referendum on the president; I would flip it. I think instead it’s a defining moment for the Democratic Party, whose national leaders now have made it clear that if you disagree with the extreme left in their party they’re going to come after you.”

While Allen plays the straight man and lets the quote stand alone, it was up to the oft-maligned Adam Nagourney of the New York Times to inject some reality back into the debate. Nagourney also quotes Snow, but follows it up with the coda, “In fact, the vast majority of Democratic Party leaders supported Mr. Lieberman in the primary, and did not endorse Mr. Lamont until after the results were in.”

The Los Angeles Times also published an article dealing with the Republican response to the Lamont win, which, while sharing many of the faults of the Allen piece, at least treats the Republican pushback as a coordinated spin campaign rather than the spontaneous outpouring of honest opinion that Allen portrays it as.

But we could go on and on.

It’s all too reminiscent of the political horse race coverage we read during the 2004 presidential campaign. After all of the mea culpas, hand-wringing and breast-beating that the national press corps engaged in after that sad-sack performance (and indeed, after the 2000 race as well), we held out some hope that things might be different this time around.

And maybe they will. But this is not a promising start.

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.