Daily Service Updates Battle on Abortion

Doug Bailey has two masters degrees, a Ph.D. in international relations and 22 years’ experience as a high-powered political consultant, so no one had to hit him over the head with a ballot box when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its controversial Webster ruling last summer.

Bailey knew right away that the court’s decision giving states greater latitude in regulating abortion would generate enormous political controversy--and, not incidentally, provide him with a unique opportunity to expand his newest business.

Less than two years earlier, Bailey had created the “Presidential Campaign Hotline,” a daily, 20-page compendium of excerpts from campaign stories and polls published and broadcast that day in major media throughout the country. Reporters whose news organizations subscribed to the hot line could gain instant access to it with computers or fax machines, and soon after its September 1987 debut, Hotline became a uniquely influential echo chamber during the 1988 presidential primaries.

Hotline is still published as a daily political briefing for journalists and politicians, and with the heat turned up on abortion, Bailey figured he had a similarly apt--and rapt--”need-to-know” audience for news on that front.

He could package stories on state legislative battles over abortion, political campaigns in which abortion was a major issue, polls on abortion and news of various other abortion-related developments and use the same distribution network to send a daily “Abortion Report” to journalists, politicians, activists on both sides of the abortion battle and other interested parties.

Bailey pitched his idea to several organizations active in the campaign for abortion rights, among them the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Rights Action League and the National Organization for Women. These groups had formed a loose coalition of sorts--the Pro-Choice Media Strategies Group--and Bailey asked if they would provide the seed money to help finance start-up of the Abortion Report.

Several of the organizations agreed to provide, collectively, about $4,000 a month for six months, and on July 19, the first issue of the Abortion Report was published. It’s been published Monday through Friday morning since then.

Bailey was a longtime political consultant for national Republican candidates, including former President Gerald Ford. Since 1980, the Republican Party platform has called for a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion, but Bailey, the 56-year-old father of two, describes himself as “absolutely pro-choice” on abortion.

He says that is not, however, why he sought his seed money from abortion rights advocates.

“There aren’t many large organizations with substantial dollars on the other (anti-abortion) side, and they’re not as organized in a coalition sense as the pro-choice side,” he says.

But Bailey says he told his original backers that the Abortion Report would only have the credibility necessary to its success if it were “steered absolutely down the middle,” with no favoritism shown to either side in the volatile debate.

Interestingly, neither Nancy Myers, communications directors for the National Right to Life Committee, nor Loretta Ucelli, communications director for the National Abortion Rights Action League, both based in Washington, knew that abortion rights activists had been the source of the original money for the Abortion Report until told this week by a Times reporter. But both Myers and Ucelli agree that the Report has largely achieved the evenhandedness Bailey said was essential.

They note that the Abortion Report is one of the few publications that describes each side by its chosen designation-- pro-choice and pro-life. In fact, some of Bailey’s original backers in the abortion rights movement have criticized him for using that language; they think it gives their opponents a rhetorical edge.

Bailey was also criticized--by both sides--when early issues of the Abortion Report included what he calls “analysis on what was important and why” in the ongoing political scrimmaging over abortion. Bailey uses analysis and commentary to good effect in the Hotline, but the abortion issue is so emotional, he says, that “whatever we said seemed to irk people on both sides.

“We concluded that they didn’t need our analysis.”

Subscribers say they use the Abortion Report to monitor both political activity on abortion and media coverage of that activity, especially in newspapers they don’t regularly see.

“It helps our political people gauge how elections are going in a certain state and how the abortion issue is playing in elections,” Myers says. “We clip the New York Times and the Washington Post, but we don’t see a lot of the other major regional papers. The Abortion Report helps us keep up with what they’re saying.”

Ucelli calls Bailey’s electronic clipping service “a daily status report on the issue,” and she said NARAL eagerly participates in the Report by regularly faxing its statements and press releases to the Report staff.

The staff of 12 that produces both Hotline and the Abortion Report operates out of Bailey’s American Political Network office in Falls Church, Va., just outside Washington. They begin work at 5 o’clock every morning, Sunday through Friday, on Hotline. Two hours later, several turn their attention to the Abortion Report. The work consists of a fast-paced, often frenzied reading, watching and clipping of material from the staff’s daily monitoring of newspaper and network television coverage and from information that subscribers, activists and political and media junkies submit by computer, fax and overnight mail.

At 11 a.m., the final writing process begins on that day’s Abortion Report. At 1 p.m., the Report is ready for its subscribers. Then work begins anew for the next day’s Report.

“It’s a constant process, six days a week,” says Valerie Syme, 25, editor of the Report.

Syme and one other staff member work full-time on the Abortion Report, and on any given day, five or six Hotline staffers work with them. There is an inevitable overlap in material, as well as in staff, between Hotline and the Abortion Report, but the overlap in material is generally limited to 25% as a matter of policy.

On a recent, typical day, the Abortion Report’s 10 single-spaced pages included, among other items, excerpts from:

* A Baltimore Sun story about abortion rights advocates campaigning against three state senators in Maryland.

* A Denver Post story on a county Republican group passing a “protection of human life resolution.”

* An Illinois poll on abortion.

* A syndicated column on the Catholic bishops’ decision to hire a public relations firm to help in their anti-abortion campaign.

The Abortion Report has “in the neighborhood of 30 subscribers,” about half of whom are in the media, Bailey says. (Hotline has about 300 subscribers, about 40 or 50 of them in the media, he says.) Subscribers pay $200 to $600 a month for the Report, depending on the size of the organization and the use it makes of the material.

Bailey says--not altogether convincingly--that the sharing of costs and overhead with Hotline enables him to consider the Abortion Report a financial success, but he doesn’t necessarily regard it as a long-term business venture anyway.

“Abortion is a specific subject that is very highly relevant in a political context for a very short period of time,” he says. “It’s entirely possible that the 1990 elections will be so decisive on the subject that at least for the time being, interest and need for such a publication will greatly diminish.”

If the elections are decisive, in what direction does Bailey think those decisions will be made?

“If it is decisive,” he says with the certitude so characteristic of experienced political consultants, “it will be decisive on the pro-choice side of the issue. If there are going to be campaigns waged on this issue alone, my instinct is that in most, if not all election districts and states, the pro-choice side of the moral issue has the edge in the polls.”

But for all his certainty, Bailey has been in politics long enough to know that the first rule of political prognostication is what might be called the Rudyard Kipling rule--the biggest word in the political vocabulary is if .

“There are all kinds of ‘ifs,’ ” Bailey says, ticking off a few of them: “If the issue is a pro-choice candidate vs. a pro-life candidate, and if the pro-choice people are able to define the language of the debate . . . and if the pro-choice side . . . which has a demonstrable majority in most constituencies in the country . . . is capable of summoning that majority, and if . . . . “

Abortion opponents vigorously reject any suggestion that supporters of abortion rights are a majority--politically, morally or in any other way--but abortion could decline as a major political issue whichever side comes out ahead at the polls or even, ultimately, if there is no clear winner. What would that mean to the Abortion Report?

“When it is not as hot a subject, obviously we will have to look at the economic viability of the project,” Bailey says, sounding like the bottom-line businessman he also is.

But if events do abort the Abortion Report, Bailey has another idea or two up his political/journalistic sleeve.

“There are other areas where it seems to us there might be a need-to-know audience for a 24-hour news service that can report on news around the country and put it through some sort of expert filter,” he says.

Such as?

“Maybe the environment.”

What else?

He smiles.

“Nothing I’m willing to talk about right now.”