COLUMN ONE : Policing Political TV Ads : Media are devoting more attention to the accuracy of commercials, often in critiques known as ‘truth boxes.’ The new reporting is seen as a major advance in coverage of elections.

In Florida, Miami Herald state editor John Pancake is having political reporters skip some of the speeches at county fairs this year and instead watch a little more TV.

In Texas, Clayton W. Williams Jr., the Republican candidate for governor, had to redo one of his television commercials because reporters found he had exaggerated his claims with faulty statistics.

And in his TV ads in California, Sen. Pete Wilson, Republican gubernatorial candidate, has defended himself against an attack commercial by Democrat Dianne Feinstein by quoting newspaper articles critiquing the accuracy of Feinstein’s original ad.

This year, the American news media have embarked on what many campaign professionals and journalists consider the first real advance in press coverage of politics since Theodore White began looking behind the scenes at the mechanics of campaigning in his landmark book, “The Making of the President 1960.”

From California to Florida, the press is devoting a major part of its time and resources to policing the accuracy of political TV commercials--in most cases in systemic critiques set in special ad watch columns that have come to be known as “truth boxes.”

While this change might not strike casual readers as dramatic, it represents two important shifts. One is formal recognition that, to the extent elections define the national agenda, American political dialogue, in great part, now occurs in the exchange of TV commercials.

The other is that, amid broad discontent with the state of political campaigning, the press has decided to become less of a color commentator up in the booth and more of a referee on the field in the hope of cleaning up the game.

Frankly, for the last 20 years, “you got a kind of nostalgic reporting,” about politics, in the words of Democratic consultant Robert Squier. The media, particularly newspapers, focused on what candidates said in speeches and issue papers, things even the candidates themselves considered a largely symbolic part of their campaigns. “They were covering things that no longer really influenced the process,” Squier said.

Tom Fiedler, political editor of the Miami Herald, believes that the “ad watch” columns now appearing in several Florida newspapers have made print media “more relevant” to politics for the first time in a generation. One key reason is that candidates who are attacked in commercials are using the newspaper critiques of the attacks in their response ads.

“We are affecting the debate again,” Fiedler said.

Many political consultants are angry over the “truth boxes,” saying the press has overstepped its neutrality.

Yet so far, the effort has not stopped dishonest, distorted and false political advertising. “We’ve had some pretty rancid commercials here in Texas,” said political editor Jim Simmon of the Houston Chronicle.

Some observers say that the media’s more activist approach will take time, and that there are already signs of change, while others say the effort will only lead candidates to become more sophisticated and subtle in their distortions.

‘88 Campaign Cited

The change this year was inspired, in part, by revulsion with the distortions, vitriol and 30-second rhetoric of the 1988 presidential campaign. But the roots go far deeper.

Keith Love, now an executive with McClatchy Newspapers in Sacramento, publicly advocated something like truth boxes in 1986, after being disturbed by what he saw in the California Senate campaign. In that race, Alan Cranston and Ed Zschau spent a staggering $25 million combined, most of it to air commercials.

“What I saw in 1986 is that candidates really don’t do anything any more but raise money and put up TV ads,” said Love, who covered the race for the Los Angeles Times.

But since the media scarcely dealt with ads, consultants and candidates were able to “get away with murder,” Love said. “We had to become a referee (over advertising) or print would become obsolete to politics.”

After the 1988 presidential race, those concerns crystallized, journalists around the country say, in a series of columns Washington Post political reporter David Broder began writing last January.

Broder argued that politics had become so “negative and nauseating” that the press had “to become partisan--not on behalf of a candidate or party--but on behalf of the process.” Among the recommendations: “We need to treat every ad as if it were a speech” and not “be squeamish about saying in plain language when we catch a candidate lying . . . . “

Links to White’s Books

For much of the television age, political reporting in this country was fashioned on a variant of the model Theodore White developed 30 years ago for his series of books on “The Making of the President.” White’s innovative books saw elections as heroic clashes of men and ideology, offering insights into the national mood. But the books also were among the first to look backstage to the role of the campaign strategist and the growing emergence of campaign technology.

As the black arts of campaigning became ever more refined--through focus groups, polling and advertising techniques--political reporting began to forgo the sense of national mood-taking and focus even more on internal matters, such as tactics, who was ahead, who had momentum and why. From White’s “Making of the President,” in effect, came Joe McGinnis’ “The Selling of the President” in 1968, a book that saw campaigns largely as exercises in marketing and focused entirely on their inner workings.

Eventually, a campaign stop came to be analyzed not so much for what a candidate said as why he felt a need to say it.

At its best, this could be a fascinating look at what was occurring day to day inside the campaigns. But was it relevant to voters?

And did writing about the strategy behind campaign rhetoric help check the rhetoric’s distortions and manipulations or merely glorify the more effective manipulators?

“Even as we have decried these tactics,” Broder wrote, “we have magnified their effectiveness by publicizing the very messages we deplore.”

Ads: Least Covered

Oddly, advertising, the key component of most campaigns, was perhaps the least covered aspect of all. The reasons are complex: it was difficult, reporters disdained it and most of them wanted to be with the candidate, not back home watching the tube. Besides, they argued, it was up to the candidates to counter the claims made against them.

In truth, reporters on the road often never saw the TV commercials voters were seeing, and they privately scoffed at their simple messages.

And much of the time campaign consultants who produced the ads flatly refused to make their commercials available to the press, arguing that they did not want to give away the element of surprise. Critics, such as Larry Sabato, professor of political science at the University of Virginia, argue that they also did not want to be subjected to scrutiny.

Even Broder, an advocate of the “truth boxes,” concedes, “I have a lot of uneasiness,” with the media moving into such an active role. “It changes the professional relationship from what it was,” he said.

In March of this year, while still covering politics for The Times, Love persuaded the paper to start analyzing TV commercials in print after seeing distortions in an attack ad produced for Democratic gubernatorial candidate John K. Van de Kamp in the California Democratic primary.

Once The Times started, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee and KRON-TV in San Francisco quickly followed.

Papers in Texas also soon adopted the tactic, in part, in reaction to the vitriol of the state’s gubernatorial primary. So did papers in Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Georgia, Minnesota and elsewhere.

In Alaska, the Anchorage Daily News has taken the process one step further. Unwilling to let the candidates alone decide which issues define the governor’s race, it conducted a comprehensive study to find out what Alaskans care about and is demanding that the candidates address those concerns in their campaigns.

And the practice may spread. A survey of political reporters and news directors around the country, conducted by People for the American Way, found that 80% now believe they “should play an aggressive role in exposing false or misleading advertising by political candidates.”

So far, however, local television news organizations have not taken up critiquing commercials, with the apparent exception of KRON-TV and one station in Austin, Tex.

The reason, television news reporters say privately, is that most stations’ news directors are convinced by conventional research that finds audiences are bored by politics, and so they devote little time to the subject on a regular basis. Most local TV stations, for instance, do not have reporters covering politics on a full-time basis.

But KRON’s critiques suggest that TV has one great advantage newspapers do not: By showing sections of the ads, they can reveal the full nature of the distortions.

In print, the styles of the “truth boxes” vary from strictly fact-oriented to wildly subjective. The Detroit Free Press has gone so far as to criticize the music in ads by gubernatorial candidate John Engler for sounding “more like a hardware store commercial than a spot touting someone to lead the state.”

The Miami Herald’s “Ad Watch” boxes are designed to be as subjective and “critical in their approach as our movie critics,” Fiedler said. “That has made them more controversial but more effective.”

Some journalists even question whether “truth boxes” work, if they are too restrained.

The New York Times, whose editors at first raised questions about the propriety of ad boxes, may be the most cautious. One of its recent boxes, for instance, analyzed an ad by North Carolina Senate candidate Harvey Gantt that begins: “These days you need a warning label for your TV screens, because Jesse Helms ads are hazardous to the truth.”

The New York Times’ cautious analysis offered something one would have thought obvious: “This commercial . . . tries to raise a credibility question about Helms’ advertising.”

The reaction among political consultants to being critiqued has varied. “I don’t think any of it should be done,” Republican consultant Adam Goodman told the Political Hotline newsletter in August. “I think newspapers should present factual news and allow people to make their own endorsements.”

Others praise the practice. “At some point, you have to say I am a participant in a larger process and I have a professional responsibility to the process beyond just winning,” said Don Sipple, the political consultant for Pete Wilson. “I think it is very very positive.”

And most news organizations involved in the critiques report that so far audience reaction has been unanimously favorable, even though this involves giving even more influence to the media.

What good the critiques have done is hard to say. “We haven’t turned Florida politicians into choir boys,” said Pancake, the Miami Herald state editor.

“All they’re doing is exercising some kind of moral pressure on those of us in the business to be a little more accurate in our specific charges,” Democratic consultant Ben Goddard told the Hotline.

But campaigners who once refused even to give the press videotapes of their ads now often present them with full dossiers to substantiate the claims the ads contain.

“The innuendoes are now documented,” Democratic consultant Raymond Strother said.

Another result, experts say, is that the critiques are being picked up by candidates in their response ads, which consultants say has greatly enhanced the ability of a candidate to respond to a false charge.

Most in politics say that a single newspaper “truth box” run one time is not enough to stand against a distorted commercial that airs dozens of times a day. The criticism needs repetition to be effective.

The Miami Herald has tried running a capsule of its critiques several times a week.

Sabato of the University of Virginia believes that newspapers should also publish election guides that devote a section on each race to advertising campaigns and their ethical highs and lows.

There is also concern that, in time, TV commercials will evade the media police by becoming more sophisticated in their distortions. Kathleen Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has identified several techniques by which political advertising typically uses accurate facts to create distorted or misleading inferences.

One technique invites the audience to add its own inference, as in one famous ad for 1968 presidential candidate Hubert H. Humphrey that showed a picture of Richard M. Nixon’s vice presidential candidate Spiro T. Agnew--with a soundtrack of a man laughing hysterically.

Another is to juxtapose otherwise accurate pictures, narration and words on the screen in such a way as to mislead, as occurred in Bush’s so-called “revolving door” ad during 1988. In this commercial the narrator talked about “first-degree murderers” escaping during prison furloughs, while graphics on the screen gave the vastly larger number of convicts who escaped on furlough, the overwhelming majority of whom were in prison for lesser crimes.

“I just sat through a focus group that saw two different versions of the same ad and had two completely different reactions,” said Doug Bailey, editor of the Political Hotline newsletter and a longtime Republican consultant.

Most observers believe that several elections must pass before the effects of the new reporting can be seen.

What is clear now, for better or worse, is that the media, with varying standards of approach, are moving to assert more conscious influence over the political process.