Has Story Been Botched? : Quayle Coverage Puts Spotlight on the Media

At ABC News, the switchboard lights up every time the network airs a Dan Quayle story.

At the Los Angeles Times, the calls and letters come in torrents--429 letters to the editor by Friday morning. “He’s not up there with Ollie (North), but it’s a lot of letters,” letters editor Mary Cox said.

Wrote Washington Post columnist Haynes Johnson last week: “Not since Spiro T. Agnew’s attacks on the press . . . 18 years ago have I received such an outpouring of hostile, threatening, obscene mail.”

Clamorous Hunt

The subject, at least the nominal subject, is the media’s coverage of Quayle, the largely unknown 41-year-old Indiana senator picked by Republican presidential candidate George Bush to be his running mate. Since his selection, Quayle has become the subject of a clamorous national character hunt. The inevitable army of reporters has deployed in Indiana and elsewhere to sift through his record, interview his high school golf partners and videotape him taking out the garbage.

In the process, the press--gangly and clubfooted gumshoe that it is--has become part of the story.

“Who appointed these ‘holier-than-thou’ media moguls the voice of our national conscience?” Edward Senesi of Huntington Beach asked The Times in a letter.

The public, argued Ralph Ballmer of Escondido, is a far better judge of Quayle’s behavior “than the cynical reporters.”

“I am sure the American people are not and will not be misled by the . . . media and their obvious one-sided” news judgments, wrote John Powell of Los Angeles.

Has the press botched the Quayle story? If so, was it because of some liberal bias? And has the press really appointed itself the national character truth squad?

Interviews with reporters, journalists and politicians last week and a review of the coverage bring some unexpected answers.

Even some journalists believe the press may not have done its job that well. But actually Quayle may be the beneficiary, not the victim, of the press’ excesses. The press focused on Quayle’s National Guard record for so long that many believe other issues received too little scrutiny.

Moreover, the Quayle controversy--like the furor surrounding coverage of Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine A. Ferraro in 1984--reflects not so much a growing arrogance by the media as it does the decline of political parties, the recognition that the public picks presidents on character rather than issues, and the proliferation of media power into more hands, not fewer.

“I think the press is doing what the vice president and his staff failed to do,” said Howard Simons, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. “Turn the guy upside-down and shake him and see what’s in his pockets.”

A more apt image may be a Mexican Christmas celebration, in which a blindfolded person with a stick tries to strike the pinata stuffed with gifts--and all the while someone unseen moves the target to help evade the blows.

The wildest swings, say the critics, were aimed at Quayle’s service in the National Guard, the subject that dominated presidential campaign coverage for more than a week.

In campaign appearances, Quayle has tried to depict the scrutiny as an attack on the reputation of the Guard itself. But even some conservative critics of the press dismiss this as a political evasion.

The issue is not the Guard, journalists such as New York Times political editor Adam Clymer argue. It is a question of character: What does it mean that a man who advances himself as an outspoken supporter of the military and a supporter of the Vietnam War deliberately avoided going to Vietnam?

Press Called Fixated

Maybe so, replies conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, but the press fixated on the National Guard issue too long.

“We don’t know anything more than we knew about Wednesday a week ago, yet this story has been . . . repeated and repeated,” Buchanan said on ABC’s “Nightline” last Tuesday.

Many journalists agree. “I don’t know why we are still bothering with the question of influence,” said Baltimore Evening Sun columnist Jack Germond. “We knew within two days that he called a friend on his father’s newspaper, who in turn called another Guard general.”

One reason for the fixation, even the Bush campaign admits, is that “I think the candidate stumbled when he first was asked questions about his military record,” Bush spokesman Mark Goodin said.

Then, say journalists, the Bush campaign apparatus seemed unprepared to answer questions. It took several days to get Quayle’s military records. And Quayle, after a shaky start in public appearances, was kept at a distance from reporters.

But if the Guard issue dragged on too long, some journalists blame the press.

Blames Handling of Story

“We have allowed our presentation to make it look like a very narrow issue because we have failed to give it sufficient context,” argued Bill Kovach, editor of the Atlanta Constitution.

“The fact is he used influence to get in the Guard, or tried to, at a time when almost no blacks or Hispanics could get into the Guard, and a disproportionate number of minorities were dying because they didn’t have the help Dan Quayle had to avoid it,” Kovach said. “And very few news organizations have dealt with it on that basis.”

“The Pulliam family (Quayle is a grandson) is a very powerful presence (in Indiana), and they needn’t do anything active to exert influence,” added Dennis Britton, deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. “They have influence by their very existence, not unlike the influence exercised by the Chandlers in California, and the media didn’t adequately explain that to readers.”

Where these journalists differ from critics within the Bush camp, however, is that they believe the scrutiny of Quayle was not overzealous, just misdirected.

“My sense is that the same or even greater zeal (applied to the Guard issue) should have been applied to his later public career,” said Tom Goldstein, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Staffs Reduced

Now that the National Guard story seems to have run its course with the disclosure of military records, most news organizations interviewed have reduced the number of journalists covering the Quayle story, although they contend they are ready to add staff if the story warrants.

Some press critics believe the press has backed off in part because of the public backlash. “The press is very sensitive to criticism,” Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution said.

Many journalists contend they are pulling back simply because the story is dwindling. Nonetheless, many of them also think the Bush campaign has gone to great effort to encourage the public outcry.

The day after the Republican convention, for instance, the Bush campaign announced that it would not have a formal press conference, which would have allowed for orderly conduct, but that Quayle would answer questions at one event, a rally in his hometown of Huntington, Ind. As it turned out, reporters were spread across a narrow pit so that they had to shout their questions. The campaign then broadcast the encounter over loudspeakers, and the hometown crowd reacted by jeering the questions and cheering Quayle’s answers.

Seen as Carefully Staged

It strikes some journalists as carefully staged, also, that Quayle’s lone appearance before cameras last Tuesday to react to allegations about his personal life was to help trash collectors empty the cans outside his home. He then referred to some of the allegations about him as just that, trash.

Quayle was referring to the story that has attracted more press criticism than any other: the comments from sometime Playboy model and former Washington lobbyist Paula Parkinson.

Eight years ago, Quayle attended a weekend golf retreat where Parkinson was present. She was later revealed to be having an affair with another congressman, although no proof was ever documented that she had any involvement with Quayle.

Last week, Playboy fished out some old pictures of Parkinson, called her for a new quote, and let it be known that next month’s issue would contain the charge that Quayle propositioned her.

CBS News led its broadcast that night with the story. ABC and NBC mentioned it at the end of longer stories on Quayle, which were near but not at the top of their newscasts.

‘Mildly Revolting’

Commentator Buchanan, who has served as a White House aide in the Reagan and Richard M. Nixon administrations, called the prominent play “mildly revolting.”

But Bob Schieffer, the CBS correspondent who anchored that broadcast, noted that while “you can question whether this woman is a credible source,” CBS had an audio tape, which it did not broadcast, of Parkinson’s 1981 interview with the FBI, and it corroborated her story.

Again, said Atlanta editor Kovach, however, the problem is the press failed to provide context: “The key question is a member of Congress who is considering legislation agreeing to go on a golfing weekend in Florida paid for by the lobbyists, at which one member of Congress is sleeping with a lobbyist.”

Is the press’ coverage of Quayle symptomatic of a liberal ideology? Even Bush high operatives generally say no.

“I do not sense any great . . . liberal conspiracy of the press trying to constantly hack up Republicans,” a senior Bush campaign official said recently. “I do think more reporters are liberal than not, but . . . if Dukakis screws up he is going to get nailed.”

Reject Criticism

And journalists dismiss the criticism out of hand. They note simply that Quayle is the first Republican to undergo such intense scrutiny this campaign, while Democrats Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado both were forced to drop out because of press revelations. And the two other vice presidential candidates who probably have received the most intense scrutiny also were Democrats, Thomas F. Eagleton in 1972, who was dropped from the ticket after disclosure of past psychiatric care, and Ferraro in 1984, who had to continually contend with questions about her husband’s tangled finances.

Instead, there is a deeper question here: whether the press appointed itself somehow the moral gatekeeper.

It is true, most political and media professionals agree, that 20 years ago Dan Quayle might not have undergone such scrutiny.

But the reasons are not necessarily that the media have amassed more power.

Process More Open

Instead, it has to do with reforms designed to make the political process more open. In the days when candidates were picked mostly by party bosses, many of the issues now public were dealt with in private.

Was there anything to the rumor that this fellow drank or womanized? The press willingly left it to the party bosses to decide.

Once the country started electing presidential nominees in open primaries--in which any candidate who wanted could enter--such personal information needed to become part of the public dialogue.

The most dramatic example of change came last May, when the Miami Herald staked out Hart’s Washington home and reported that he had spent most of the weekend with a Miami model. It destroyed Hart’s candidacy and caused some people to conclude that adultery was now an issue in the campaign. As it turned out, the issue never significantly resurfaced for other candidates, in part, politicians say, because the issue attached itself to some deeper question of character in the case of Hart.

In the case of Dan Quayle, Kovach of Atlanta sees the story as “the failure of party to do the job they have forced the American press to do in their stead, and then complain about the press doing it. . . . It is irresponsible of the party to ask the American public to place faith and confidence in someone they know nothing about.”

The decline of parties also has given rise to more focus on character and less on issues.

“Candidates now try to create their own followings, and they do this by selling themselves on the grounds of character and personality rather than issues or interest groups,” said New York Times political editor Clymer. “When they sell themselves that way, it is our job to test what they claim to be.”

Process Not Pretty

Journalists acknowledge that the process of public scrutiny is not pretty. If anything, it has become more clumsy in the last two elections because of the proliferation of reporters from local newspapers and television now covering the campaign.

Two decades ago, the press corps fit in one bus. Last week, Bush had 130 reporters in his entourage, including some from cable and local television, local and regional newspapers.

At least one prominent editor believes it is time for the press to re-examine its technique.

“Everyone is asking the same question,” said Kovach of Atlanta, “and there is an unfortunate unwillingness to accept the answer if we didn’t ask the question ourselves.”