Media Politics : Dukakis Gaining? Media Relying on Instinct, Sources

At the Sunday morning basketball game, the lawyer turned to the reporter and, sounding as if he no longer believed everything he read, asked: “Do you think the presidential race is really getting closer?”

In the last three days, the media have described a contest once seemingly over as now suddenly tighter. But readers might have reason to wonder.

Most of these stories rest on the word of those ubiquitous unnamed officials in both the Bush and Dukakis campaigns, who privately assured reporters that their internal polls show the gap narrowing.

Both sides may have reasons to promote the idea of a tightening race and, because of pledges of confidentiality, none of the stories published actual poll numbers.

The anatomy of this latest shift in campaign perceptions discloses the varied, often subjective factors that go into the making of a media trend. Sometimes, political news is at best an educated guess. And, in the absence of harder evidence, that may be good enough.

In this case, reporters trusted instinct about whether sources were lying. And that, combined with subjective evidence about how the campaigns were performing in the field, added up to a story.

The fact that the influential Washington Post led with the story first also likely influenced the media. As time runs out on the campaigns, a fear sets in among journalists about missing the last trend before Election Day.

“I was worried that we had gone too far, that we had made it look like a landslide (for Bush) and that we would look like fools” if the election were close, said one journalist who helped produce one of the stories this weekend.

It was the Dukakis campaign that first pushed the theme of a tightening race. The campaign had been peddling this without much success most of last week, but it started selling in earnest Friday after an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed a 9-point Bush lead but offered some evidence that the lead was narrowing.

Washington Post Story

However, the networks barely nibbled Friday. Then, on Saturday, the Washington Post ran hard with the idea across most of the top of Page 1: “Bush Lead Shrinks in Big States.”

That, in turn, influenced the weekend talk programs. The Los Angeles Times led its Sunday editions with a story echoing that the race could be tightening. Monday, Newsweek weighed in.

All of the stories were carefully hedged, and even now most of the journalists involved concede that they can’t be 100% sure Dukakis is actually narrowing the gap.

“This is a scam by the Democrats,” conservative columnist Robert Novak argued this weekend.

“It is a little difficult to tell . . . whether this is a question of Democrats trying to keep their spirits up,” ABC anchorman Peter Jennings said. “Some people have actually said Republicans are trying to keep their voters from losing interest.”

Support From Pollsters

Robert Kaiser, deputy managing editor at the Post for national news, was skeptical, too, when he first heard the Dukakis camp push the story. He and his reporters were somewhat persuaded by finding other Democratic pollsters who supported the idea, Kaiser said.

But what led the Post to go with the story was that sources in the Bush campaign conceded it was true. And, although it was possible that both camps were lying, the people at the Post in effect bet that they weren’t.

“It was our perception that the Bush people were scared and surprised by the results,” Kaiser said.

Why believe the Bush camp? One reason, Kaiser said, was a feeling at the Post that the paper is “well plugged in” in the Bush campaign and thus could trust the sources.

Robert Shogan, political correspondent for the Los Angeles Times who wrote Sunday’s story, agreed that he was influenced because he trusted the sources of the internal poll results.

The story, too, seemed supported by other subjective factors, such as what reporters saw in the field--a defensive Bush and an energized Dukakis. A week earlier, political correspondent David Broder at the Post had detected a close race in the Midwest, a story that “was laughed at” by competing journalists, Kaiser said.

Campaign Schedule Cited

Then there was Bush’s campaign schedule. The vice president was spending his time in key states, an indication he still had concerns about the race. “If Bush were out there in Florida or trying to bail out the Senate, I’d find it hard to believe any of these numbers,” Shogan said.

And the Bush camp’s explanation of the shrinking gap--that traditional Democrats heretofore undecided were returning to the party at the last minute--struck many journalists as plausible. It occurred in 1984, as well.

The story, in short, had the smell, the taste, of plausibility.

“As always . . . are we all delighted there is a tightening in the race?” Kaiser said. “Sure we are. It is our instinct,” referring to any journalist’s innate affection for drama, which, of course, makes for a better story.

But he doesn’t think that the Post is misleading anyone. “Certainly our readers, I would hope, recognize from our coverage” that the only thing so far in prospect is a Bush victory.