Campaign ’96 / MEDIA : For Voters, Campaign Trail Can Provide a Study in Contrasts : They’re favorably impressed when they see candidates in person. Print, TV images offer more negative views, they say.

Sharon Grunwald had seen Republican Sen. Bob Dole on television many times. Even though she liked him as a candidate, she worried recently he did not look strong and confident enough to be president.

So she went down to Bort’s Custom Cabinets near her home last week to check out the real thing. “I really had never seen Sen. Dole in person before,” said Grunwald, a 52-year-old housewife. “And I thought he looked really healthy and robust in real life.

“That was something I was looking for, even though I’m not really concerned that he’s 72, I thought he looked very good. And I liked him. I liked what he said. I thought he was funny.”

Similarly, Diane Guess, a secretarial worker for Maytag Corp. in Newton, Iowa, saw publishing heir Steve Forbes give a speech last week at a company meeting hall. The candidate she witnessed in person and the one she sees in the media seemed like different people. “I thought he seemed confident, and on TV he doesn’t come off as confident or comfortable,” she said. “I thought he was pretty direct and sincere. I was more impressed, seeing him in person.”

At other events, as presidential hopefuls shake hands at a mall or walk the breadth of a state or sit around a family’s kitchen table, individual voters experience the vast difference between the real candidate and the one who has been filtered into print or onto television. In general, the candidate is far more likable and believable than the person who appears in the news.

In early caucus or primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire, many voters can actually see candidates and weigh the differences between the real person and the politician they see in the media. But as the presidential election continues throughout the year, the balance shifts and the percentage of voters who have actually seen the candidates becomes minuscule in comparison.

“I’m always struck by the fact that the events always seem far more lively in reality than in the news. When I go to these meetings, I don’t find them boring,” said Hugh Winebrenner, professor of public administration at Drake University in Des Moines. “What they see in the media provides a very limited picture of such things. The press, including people I like very much, they’re a pretty jaded bunch. They go to these things day in, day out. They don’t ever smile, don’t ever applaud, just scribble a few notes.” They “mechanically” go “through the mechanism of gathering the news.”

Such contrasts raise the question of whether there are really two campaigns--one presented by the candidate and other by the media.

For the candidate, the idea is to win votes, often handshake by handshake, speech by speech. The job for the media has increasingly been viewed as explaining what happens behind the scenes, what today’s speech means in relation to yesterday’s, how this candidate’s events contrast with the opposition.

The media often see any serious candidate as a politician on the make, according to a number of analysts and campaign workers. Motives for running are often viewed as a lust for power rather than a push for progress or change, and the campaign’s strategies are depicted as attempts to lure the voters into spending their currency--their votes--on a candidate concocted in a political research laboratory.

Some members of the media suggest that such coverage stems from years of being tricked and manipulated by candidates who view the networks and the major newspapers as “free coverage.” Thus any journalist who offers positive news about a candidate is “in the tank.”

Deborah Potter, a former CBS and CNN correspondent who now teaches at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla., said some members of the media are changing by increasingly looking to citizens or voters for news about politics and issues. She cited a CBS-TV round table after the president’s State of the Union speech where commentary came not only from “the usual suspects in the blue suits” but also from ordinary citizens.

“It was a small step but a good step,” she said.

Other journalists have suggested that part of the reason that coverage is so different from reality is that the candidates often repeat the same message--often word for word and gesture by gesture--at each event. What might thrill a first-time consumer grows quickly old on the second round or third or 14th round for a journalist.

“Most of the coverage I’ve seen seems to be pretty negative and doesn’t mention any benefits of anybody’s ideas, just the problems” said Shawn Risseeuw, a 30-year-old engineer who witnessed a Forbes speech last week. “On television, they only showed one little bit of what I witnessed. It was just the first few words of one of his jokes and then everybody was laughing. They didn’t even have the whole joke.”

This tendency to focus on who is beating up on whom--the Tom-and-Jerry nature of political coverage--has become stronger over the last 30 years, some scholars have said. News, under this definition, is conflict, even if the conflict is “artificially constructed,” as Thomas Patterson, a professor of political science at Syracuse University put it.

In a new book entitled “Out of Order,” Patterson has traced the news coverage from the ‘50s to the ‘90s and found that Watergate and Vietnam brought negative comments from the media “that were the result of reasonably good reporting in most cases, but later, journalists sometimes began manufacturing conflicts by stating one view and then turning to someone almost certain to attack that view. It becomes then an artificial debate . . . that accentuates the negatives.”

“As this campaign moves on, I think any campaign event gets almost completely distorted by the media,” Patterson said. “The difficulty comes when the campaign really gets going and you get into this day-to-day reporting. . . . The media says, ‘Oh, we’ve done that issue, done that background story,’ and they begin to cover the strategies or what’s different or new. In a yearlong campaign like this one, that day-to-day coverage works against the news being a good mirror of the campaign.”

Robert Lichter, a longtime analyst of the media, believes that even well-meaning media reforms have added to some of the problems being encountered by voters in the 1996 campaign. In a recent book called “Good Intentions Make Bad News,” Lichter and Richard Noyes argue that after the 1988 campaign, journalists believed that they needed to “take control of the coverage” from the manipulative political handlers working with the candidates.

Lichter’s Center for Media and Public Affairs recently analyzed the campaign coverage on the major networks and found that between Jan. 1, 1995, and Jan. 15, 1996, the networks ran 525 campaign stories, using about 14 hours of network time most of it a few minutes per segment. Of those 14 hours of campaign coverage, the candidates spoke only a total of two hours, Lichter said. And his center found that 70% of the time that reporters, voters or pundits were speaking, their analysis was “negative” toward the candidate. Dole’s was rated 68% negative, Gramm’s 69%, and Forbes, who was doing well in the press until he did well in the polls, drew an 80% negative analysis in January 1996.

For the candidates, this kind of coverage is often dispiriting, especially if they cannot afford as much political advertising or “paid media” as someone like Forbes who has spent millions in ads to help launch his campaign.

Mike Murphy, media manager for former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander in his run for the GOP presidential nomination, found a vast difference between what he sees on the campaign trail and what he sees or reads about in the media.

“They’re all process questions now,” Murphy said of the reporters calling him in this stage of the primaries. “You know, ‘What’s going on inside, what’s your new ad trying to do.’ It’s all sausage-making.”

For potential voters, still trying to gauge which candidate has the right ideas or the best character, such coverage can be frustrating as well.

John Stafne, a 40-year-old hydrogeologist for an environmental company outside Des Moines, watched Dole at an event last week and then watched for coverage the next day.

What was in the media was “very limited,” he said. The Des Moines Register featured a very short story, and the local TV news was even briefer.

“It wasn’t much,” he said of the television version of the 45-minute event he attended. “I think it ran about 10 seconds.”