politics

Through a Glass Darkly

June 4, 2004

News coverage of an event often isn’t about what actually took place there. Many ostensibly objective reporters come to political events with partisan agendas — and their coverage suggests that they’re more interested in cherry picking quotes to suit those agendas than giving readers an accurate rendering of reality.

This isn’t a terrible surprise, of course, but it’s jarring to see up close, as we did this week at the “Take Back America” conference in Washington, DC.

Going in, we had wondered to what degree the conference’s public relations team would be able to sway the coverage. As it turns out, the flaks didn’t have too much of an impact. At first glance that seems a blessing — the fact that the event was covered from a variety of perspectives suggests a healthy diversity in the media. But the predictability of the coverage — that fact that one could sit in the audience during George Soros’ speech and pinpoint, say, exactly which quotes would appear the next day in the Washington Times and which would appear in the Washington Post — was more than a little dispiriting. Having a number of unique voices covering an event only benefits the public, after all, if reporters are doing more than just filling in the blanks on an agenda sheet.

Media outlets associated with the right, for example, including the Washington Times, Fox News Channel, and the Weekly Standard, all led with word of how Soros, in Fox’s words, “compared the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist murders to Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse.” Reporters and editors know that news of such a comparison will elicit righteous indignation from certain readers, and so they make it their lede — never mind that Soros’ speech was much more nuanced than Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie’s claim that Soros asserted “that the abuse of Iraqi fighters is the moral equivalent of the slaughter of 3,000 innocent Americans.” Soros engaged in no such moral equivalency, but the Washington Times and other outlets printed Gillespie’s quote anyway.

The Weekly Standard’s piece — entitled “Bush-Haters of the World, Unite!” — took a snide, dismissive tone, saying that activists had come together “to rescue America from those pesky conservatives.” Erin Montgomery ignored the substance of the speeches and panels altogether, opting instead to highlight those quotes certain to elicit scoffs from Bush loyalists. She referred to one participant as “glib” and wrote, “Wait, there’s more,” — in case any particularly dim readers out there had failed to grasp her scorn for the assembled leftists.

The irony is that this conference actually produced news, in that it revealed a rift in John Kerry’s support. The lede that best captured the tenor of the conference came from the Boston Globe‘s Mary Leonard, who wrote, “Liberal Democrats say they are organized, united, and determined as never before to oust President Bush from the White House. But when more than 2,000 of these progressive activists from across the country gathered under a ‘Take Back America’ banner yesterday, it was Howard Dean, not John F. Kerry, who stole their hearts.” Anti-Bush, pro-Dean, lukewarm on Kerry — that was the story of the conference.

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The Los Angeles Times also got it right, but the Washington Post, in one of its two pieces on the event, decided that providing color meant providing condescension. Note the following description of the participants: “They’re the polite Left, the conference-attending Left, the politically pragmatic Left that has no interest in getting in a skirmish with riot police. These people are not so enraged by globalization that they want to race across the hotel lobby and trash the adjacent Starbucks.” Given that conference attracted unabashedly liberal Democrats — those who find Kerry’s centrist rhetoric dispiriting and unappealing — it was an odd description. Apparently, the Post felt it necessary to inform its readers that a conference attracting the likes of Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean wasn’t swarming with black-clad anarchists who just wanted to break stuff.

Those of us who were there are certainly relieved by that fact. But, just like readers of most of the above-mentioned publications, we’re far from enlightened.

–Brian Montopoli

Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.