On the Campaign Trail, the Bad News Wins Out

Early in the 1960 presidential race, Newsweek magazine described Sen. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic Party nominee, as “mentally keen, vigorous, well-versed in national and international affairs and more experienced in them than most presidential nominees have been. He is a seasoned and astute politician. In all these respects, he is much like [Richard] Nixon,” his Republican opponent. “They are two of the coolest and toughest men in our public life.”

In today’s journalistic climate, it is difficult to imagine Time--or any other mainstream publication--lavishing such praise on the two top presidential contenders.

For all the criticism leveled at the news media for its cynical coverage of almost everything, it is clear--especially in this, an election year--that nowhere is that cynicism more conspicuous than on the political campaign trail.

Indeed, James Fallows, Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly and author of “Breaking the News,” recently characterized a group of Newsweek stories on the candidates for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination this year as typical of the “bleakly cynical” attitude the news media now take toward the people they cover, politicians in particular.

That issue of Newsweek, Fallows said in an interview and at a gathering of media and opinion leaders in New York last month, consisted of “seven or eight straight articles, each one of which was well-considered, but their summary message was, ‘Bob Dole has nothing to say’ . . . ‘Steve Forbes is a sham’ . . . ‘[Pat] Buchanan is a racist’ . . . ‘[Lamar] Alexander is slimy.’

“All of them have a cumulative message that these people are all putting something over on you.”

Newsweek is certainly not alone. Nor are Republican candidates the only ones who have been so summarily scorned. And the 1996 campaign is not the first in which this approach has been taken.

In the 1988 campaign, the Democratic candidates for president were collectively labeled “the Seven Dwarfs” in a Page 1 cartoon in the Des Moines Register, and they were so designated--and so derided--throughout the primaries, in print and on the air.

In the 1992 campaign, only 40% of all evaluative references to the two major party candidates in Time and Newsweek were favorable; in 1960, the figure was 75%, according to a study by Thomas Patterson, a professor of political science at Syracuse University.

He points out in his book “Out of Order” that public opinion surveys taken at or near the end of each election since 1960 show that the voters’ increasingly negative views of the candidates have closely followed the pattern of the candidates’ news coverage.

But were Kennedy and Nixon--and the candidates before them, who were generally treated as well if not better--really that much more qualified to be president than the candidates put forth by both parties in recent years? Or is the media just much more--pick your adjective--Critical? Negative? Aggressive? adversarial? Skeptical? Cynical?

“If you look at the presidential candidate pools since the 1970s and compared them with those from the mid-’40s on,” Patterson says, “I’d be hard-pressed to see any big difference.” Congress, which has also been subjected to increasingly critical coverage in recent years, is actually better than it used to be, Patterson says.

“If you did a person-by-person comparison of this Congress with the Congress of the ‘40s or ‘50s or ‘60s, this one looks pretty good to me,” he says. “This Congress and the last Congress, by the standards of congressional scholars, have actually been quite productive . . . and yet what do we find--70% negative coverage.”

Consequences of Negative Coverage

Such coverage is not without consequences for society at large.

“There can be no doubt that the change in the tone of election coverage has contributed to the decline in the public’s confidence in those who seek the presidency,” Patterson says. “News coverage has become a barrier between the candidates and the voters rather than a bridge connecting them.”

E. J. Dionne, political columnist for the Washington Post and the author of the newly published book “They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era,” thinks “something more profound is going on.”

“American politics,” he writes, “is mired in recrimination, mistrust and accusation. . . . The United States has fallen into a politics of accusation in which the moral annihilation of opponents is the ultimate goal. It is now no longer enough simply to defeat . . . a foe. Now, the only test of victory is whether an adversary’s moral standing is thoroughly shredded and destroyed.”

Dionne may overstate this. It’s not so much that most political candidates now want to defeat their opponents and destroy their moral standing; it’s that most candidates, egged on by their hired-gun consultants, have decided that the only sure way to defeat their opponents is to destroy their moral standing.

As the Wall Street Journal reported shortly after Republicans swept to victory in the 1994 congressional elections, Joseph Gaylord, the “chief behind-the-scenes operative” for House Speaker Newt Gingrich, had told Republican challengers in those races that “important issues can be of limited value” in a political campaign; instead of taking stands on issues, he said, candidates should “go negative” early and “never back off.”

Attack campaigning is not new in America. The campaigns against Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland and Warren Harding, among others, were often vicious. In the 1884 presidential campaign, Cleveland was accused of fathering an illegitimate son, and he was taunted by his Republican opponents with this campaign ditty:

“Ma, ma, where’s my pa?

“Gone to the White House, haw, haw, haw.”

Dirty campaigns were “much worse” in the old days, says Michael Schudsen, professor of communications and sociology at UC San Diego. “All kinds of scurrilous charges that had no basis in fact were hurled back and forth in the mainstream press in the 19th century.”

What is different now is that the media have both magnified such charges and given them an air of legitimacy. When candidates “demonize” their opponents, the media too often “play along,” says Mayor Richard Riordan of Los Angeles.

And as Richard Goodwin, former aide to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson notes, “You can’t compare a nasty quote about Thomas Jefferson [200 years ago] with the intensity and penetration and volume the media, especially television, give” to campaign assaults today.

Journalists tend to blame the candidates--and their consultants--for the tone of today’s campaigns. “We’re just reporting what they say and do” is a common journalistic refrain. But this just may be an exercise in self-justification. A study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., shows that television coverage is often more negative than are the candidates’ campaigns.

Through the first seven weeks of 1996, the study said, Republican candidates received, collectively, “37% positive and 63% negative evaluations of their policies and behavior” on the three network evening news programs; comments by the candidates on these programs were 46% positive and 54% negative. The contrast was even greater when the center analyzed the candidates’ speeches and their paid ads--both of which are widely perceived as the quintessence of negative campaigning.

In the first seven weeks of the New Hampshire primary campaign, the center found that the candidates’ speeches and ads were, collectively, 75% positive in their evaluations of themselves and their opponents.

In other words, it was the media that was negative. In the candidates’ speeches and ads, positive references outnumbered negative references 3 to 1; in the evening network news coverage, negative references outnumbered positive references almost 2 to 1.

As the campaign wore on, media coverage became even more negative; through the first three months, ending with the California primary in March, negative evaluations of candidates outnumbered positive evaluations by a 3 to 1 margin on the evening network newscasts.

Ironically, the increasingly negative tone of campaign coverage in recent years has been exacerbated by a journalistic experiment originally designed, at least in part, to counter this very trend. During the last several elections, some newspapers and television news programs have offered “truth boxes” and “reality checks,” relatively brief stories that compare a candidate’s claims and charges in paid ads (and sometimes in speeches) with the official record.

Those stories have generally done what the news media are supposed to do--hold politicians accountable, show the discrepancies between rhetoric and reality, between what a political candidate says and what he does. But simply by “using catchwords such as ‘truth’ and ‘reality check,’ we [may] inadvertently contribute to the negative debate” and to the increased cynicism it produces, says Peter Jennings, anchor for ABC’s “World News Tonight.”

“Negative” stories are, of course, inherently “juicier,” more compelling than most “positive” stories. During the 1992 presidential campaign, the media wrote and broadcast a great deal about candidate Bill Clinton’s alleged philandering, but there was little emphasis on the fact that “he did not choose divorce, struggled through a tough marriage, made his peace with his wife, raised their kid together,” says Jeff Greenfield, political and media analyst for ABC News.

Similarly, although the media have published and broadcast story after story on the various charges of wrongdoing leveled at the President and Hillary Rodham Clinton on Whitewater, the media paid relatively little attention to an independent investigation done on the affair by the law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro for the Resolution Trust Corp. That report, as columnist Anthony Lewis wrote in the New York Times this month, found “one charge after another to be without substance.” Either or both Clintons may yet to be found to have behaved illegally, but Lewis rightly criticized the media for paying “scant attention” to this report. “It is as if they had an investment in the existence of a scandal,” he said.

Treating Issues as Political Battles

Scandal is but the most obvious kind of negative story. Stories on campaign strategies are, almost by definition, negative stories, because they often describe such tactics as spin control, attack ads and other efforts to manipulate public perceptions of the candidate.

“We’ve gotten into the habit since the glory days of the civil rights coverage and Vietnam coverage . . . and Watergate of treating every issue that comes along as essentially a political battle, be it health care or free trade or the flat tax or anything else,” says Walter Isaacson, managing editor of Time magazine. Journalists ask, “ ‘How does this affect the Dole campaign? How does this affect the Buchanan campaign?’ ” instead of asking “ ‘Does it make sense? Is it good for the country?’ ”

As James Fallows writes in “Breaking the News,” “Instead of talking about Bosnia, you can talk about whether Bob Dole will criticize Clinton over Bosnia. Instead of talking about the real situation in Medicare, you can talk about whether the Republicans have gone too far in scaring old people about Medicare.”

Many critics say this is simply “the product of laziness,” in the words of Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. Reporters focus on strategy rather than issues, in part because the latter are more complex and more difficult to cover.

Michael Gartner, editor and co-owner of the Daily Tribune in Ames, Iowa, and former president of NBC News, says there is another reason that campaign reporters seem more interested in tactics than issues. The well-paid, big-city reporters who set the journalistic agenda are often “not affected by most of those issues, so therefore [they] . . . are not compelled to examine them,” he says. “Maybe our kids go to private schools. Maybe we don’t worry how we’re going to pay to get the refrigerator fixed when it breaks. Maybe we’re not worrying so much about mom and dad getting old because mom and dad can take care of themselves financially.”

Even on mid-size metropolitan papers, Gartner says, reporters and editors still tend to congregate in the same section of town and are likely to “only write about the issues that affect that . . . ‘yuppie’ section of town. . . . They’re not covering issues because maybe they don’t know what the issues are . . . don’t understand the urgency of the issues.”

This is not to suggest that the major news media--the best daily newspapers in particular--ignore the issues. They don’t.

“If we stacked up the big daily newspapers . . . we would find long, substantive stories on the positions of the candidates,” says Terry Eastland, editor of Forbes MediaCritic.

But many, if not most, of the substantive stories on the candidates--the personality profiles and the analyses of issues--tend to come very early in a campaign, before most readers and voters are paying much attention.

By the time the campaign is in full swing, most reporters on the campaign trail have heard the candidates’ basic stump speeches so often that they’re bored. Besides, those positions rarely change significantly. What do change are tactics and poll standings. Change is news. The new is news.

Some news organizations--notably the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal--do continue to cover and analyze the issues in the course of a campaign. Journals of political opinion such as the New Republic, National Review and the Nation do so, too, as do--periodically--the newsmagazines and the better television news shows.

But even in the print and broadcast outlets that do such reporting, coverage of the twists and turns leading to the final outcome tend to dominate--in part because in a political campaign journalists become something of a captive audience for the candidates, the consultants and the pollsters. They find themselves trapped in a giant echo chamber, a traveling cocoon, and they may lose perspective.

The politicians and their various aides are obsessed with one issue: Winning. They worry constantly about who’s ahead and how to get (or stay) ahead. This obsession is absorbed by the press corps, and it results in a campaign-long journalistic preoccupation with what has come to be called “the horse race”--who’s winning, what the public opinion polls show and what tactics and strategies should be implemented (or abandoned) to ensure victory on election day.

Thus, in the 1994 congressional campaign, the media gave “short shrift” to the Republicans’ “contract with America,” treating it as just another campaign ploy rather than as the “platform for the Republican agenda” that it became when the GOP took control of Congress, says Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal.

According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the evening network news programs have continued to give short shrift to substantive issues in the 1996 presidential campaign. These programs broadcast 2 1/2 times more stories on the horse race and campaign strategy and tactics of the Republican presidential contenders than on “policy issues” during the first three months of this year--through the California primary--according to a center study financed by the nonpartisan Markle Foundation.

The media were not simply reflecting the candidates’ own preoccupation with the horse race and strategy.

In the weeks leading up to the New Hampshire primary, the center said, “The candidates were three times as substantive as the media coverage. Nearly half of all comments in the GOP candidates’ speeches and ads (49%) concerned policy issues, compared to only one out of six statements (16%) about the candidates on TV news.”

Like a sports play-by-play announcer who tries to keep fans interested in a hopelessly one-sided game by continually suggesting that a miracle comeback is possible, the media’s political analysts often get so carried away with the incremental developments in the campaign that they create doubt and excitement where none exists.

Before the current primary season began, most pundits and political reporters made a persuasive case for Dole as the prohibitive favorite to win the Republican nomination. But after Forbes began to climb in the opinion polls and Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary and Forbes won in Arizona, many media analysts suddenly ignored their original sound reasoning and began warning of Dole’s alleged weakness with Republican voters.

There was talk of Dole being in trouble, of a brokered convention, of a movement to draft retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, even of Buchanan “going into the [Republican] convention with more delegates than anyone else,” as McManus of the Los Angeles Times, predicted Feb. 24 on television.

As the primaries heated up, Buchanan made the covers of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. Forbes made the covers of Newsweek and Time. The Baltimore Sun editorialized that Dole “can’t afford to lose in New Hampshire.” The New Republic published a story in which Dole was referred to, on the cover, as “Dead Man Walking.”

But in the end--long before the end, actually--Dole did what virtually everyone in the media had originally said he would do: He won far more delegates than anyone else and wrapped up the Republican nomination.

“The truth of the matter is there never was a story,” Emily Rooney, supervisor of political coverage for Fox News, told the Washington Post after Dole all but locked up the nomination with his sweep of the “Junior Tuesday” primaries. “We created the whole thing. The charade about Iowa and New Hampshire is over. We make them the bellwether states. They never are and yet we pretend they are.”

The Perils of Prognostication

This is not the first presidential campaign in which the pundits got it wrong, of course. The late Edmund Muskie was the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination in 1972. Jimmy Carter was deemed unelectable when he began his quest for the 1976 nomination. George Bush was considered a shoo-in for reelection in 1992 after the Gulf War.

The pundits have been wrong so often, says Fallows, that they should “give up” prognostication.

“If you can’t do any better job than to be surprised each week,” he says, “why not spend the time on” substantive issues.

But journalists say that in covering the horse race and behind-the-scenes machinations in a campaign, they are only giving the readers what they want.

“One of the attributes of news is that it’s information that people want,” says Steiger of the Wall Street Journal. “People want to know on what grounds an election strategy is being based and . . . who the likely winners are.”

But how do the media know that readers and viewers are more interested in poll standings and election tactics than they are in issues?

Studies show that when newspaper readers are “given a choice . . . between a headline that signals substance and a headline that signals strategy,” they are “about equally likely” to read the one as the other--and most likely to go to whichever headline “includes something relevant to them,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

When “strategy stories . . . force out substance stories . . . and voters are exposed to a diet that focuses on strategy,” Jamieson says, “they are more cynical about politics and about the news media that bring them politics.”

The contrast between the questions that journalists ask and those that “ordinary people” ask troubles many journalists, among them Joseph Lelyveld, executive editor of the New York Times. “They [the citizens] ask about [what] touches their daily lives, about educational issues, health care issues, in very basic ways.”

Or they ask about broader social issues. But they don’t ask about politics, per se.

When voters were given the opportunity to question candidates on television call-in programs such as CNN’s “Larry King Live” in 1992, they asked about the economy, foreign policy, possible Supreme Court appointments and race relations rather than the “strategy-oriented questions that campaign reporters tend to ask candidates at press conferences,” as Patterson notes in “Out of Order.”

The emphasis on strategy has its roots in the shift of the American press from the rabid partisanship of the 19th and early 20th centuries to the more professional, evenhanded approach of recent decades.

This transformation was triggered largely by the reform and progressive movements in politics and also by changes in technology that made possible the production of larger, mass circulation newspapers. Instead of serving relatively small numbers of like-minded readers who shared a given newspaper’s ideological predisposition and provided the revenue to support it, newspapers began to appeal to larger, more diversified mass audiences--and to the advertisers who paid an ever-increasing share of the newspaper’s costs.

To avoid gratuitously offending readers and advertisers who did not share their political views, newspapers became more balanced--more “objective”--stressing facts rather than opinions in their news columns. “What no one could have foreseen,” as Adam Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker in late 1994, “was that this pointed the way, in the long run, to the current style--to abstract aggression, divorced from wisdom or any real moral experience.”

Writing in “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy,” the late cultural critic Christopher Lasch even argued that the advent of a nonpartisan press contributed significantly to a decline in serious political debate and voter turnout. “The 19th century press created a public forum in which issues were hotly debated,” he said. “Newspapers not only reported political controversies but participated in them, drawing in their readers as well.”

No reasonable journalist or politician seriously advocates a return to the openly biased news coverage of earlier generations. But many journalists and politicians--as well as historians, sociologists and political scientists--worry that in their zeal to avoid even the appearance of partisanship, many in the media have replaced the previously partisan “My guy’s great, the other guy is a bum” with the nonpartisan but cynical, “They’re all bums.”

Although many critics--especially conservatives--continue to accuse the media of partisanship, it is “cynicism . . . not liberalism [that] is the dominant ideology of the Washington press corps” (and of the campaign press corps and big-city journalists in general), as Steven Waldman of Newsweek writes in his book “The Bill,” which recounts “the Adventures of [President] Clinton’s National Service Bill.”

The media’s focus on tactics rather than issues in political campaigns derives from this cynicism and the shift away from partisan political coverage.

“Because of our nonpartisan, nonideological nature in the American press, [we] feel uncomfortable often analyzing issues, analyzing substance [for fear of appearing to take sides], so we turn to an analysis of the process--who’s a good player, who’s up, who’s down,” says Alan Murray, Washington bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

“I do think that feeds cynicism,” Murray says. “If you treat politics as a game that doesn’t have anything to do with the lives of real people, then inevitably, those people are going to see it as a game and become more cynical about it.”

Because presidential campaigns now last so long, political reporters don’t want to wait until the “game” is over to give the score-- the final verdict of the voters; they report what in sports would be known as “partial scores”--the results of public opinion polls taken throughout the campaign.

The Impact of Polls

The emergence of polls as the centerpiece of most campaigns has given a quasi-scientific validity to this approach and exacerbated the reliance on horse race and tactical journalism. Now, it’s not just the candidates who take polls but the media as well.

There is the New York Times/CBS Poll, the ABC News/Washington Post Poll, the Los Angeles Times Poll, the Wall Street Journal/NBC Poll, the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll.

Polls cost money, and once news organizations create polling operations they feel compelled to use them--prominently and frequently--even when they don’t have any particular news value. Often, especially at the beginning of the primary season, polls can be self-fulfilling prophecies. Candidates who do well in the early polls find it easier to raise money, which makes it easier for them to buy television time, which enables them to reach more voters, which (usually) improves their standings in the next poll, which. . . .

The emergence of public opinion polling and the disappearance of blatant partisanship in the mainstream news media are but two of the factors that have contributed to the rise of cynicism in campaign coverage. To some extent, this cynicism is the legacy of Theodore White and Joe McGinniss.

White’s “The Making of the President” books--especially the first one in 1960--provided many Americans with their first insider’s glimpse of a political campaign. Although White waited until the election was over to write his account of what he had learned by firsthand observation and intimate conversation with Jack Kennedy and the other candidates and their aides, he inspired the political reporters who came after him to try to write similar stories in the course of the campaign itself. They have become fixated on what makes the candidates tick and what tactics they plan to follow and who has the candidate’s ear--and what’s being whispered into that ear.

McGinniss’ “The Selling of the President 1968” was a very different kind of behind-the-scenes look at a presidential campaign. McGinniss provided the first insider account of the modern packaged candidate--the television candidate. He showed how political ads were conceived and put together, how TV appearances were orchestrated, how Nixon staffers picked a panel of questioners based on age and ethnicity correlated to the areas in which the show would be broadcast. White’s books were respectful of the candidates and the political process; McGinniss’ account of the marketing and maneuverings of Nixon was irreverent, iconoclastic . . . cynical.

McGinniss may have been closer to the truth than White, who--though a great reporter and arresting prose stylist with a fine eye and ear for detail--romanticized his protagonists. Many critics say that what is needed now is a balance between the two mens’ approaches.

“We should be somewhere between where we are now and where we were then,” in the words of Van Gordon Sauter, former president of CBS News and now general manager of KVIE, the public television station in Sacramento.

Instead, as Fallows says in “Breaking the News,” “Twenty-five years after ‘The Selling of the President,’ the day-in, day-out coverage of politics owes much more to McGinniss’ model than to Theodore White’s.”

Next: “The culprit [mostly] is television.”

Jacci Cenacveira of The Times’ editorial library assisted with the research on this series.

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Negative Press?

The number of favorable references to the two major presidential candidates in Time and Newsweek has plunged over the last three decades.

FAVORABLE REFERENCES*

1960: 75%

1992: 40%

* Based only on references that evaluated the candidate in some way

Source: “Out of Order,” by Thomas E. Patterson

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Perception, not Reality

The news media’s preoccupation with the “horse race” aspects of a campaign often lead them to create doubt and excitement where none exist. That happened again in this year’s Republican primaries with coverage of Bob Dole’s problems and Pat Buchanan’s prospects.

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Covering the Primaries

The news media consistently pay more attention to strategy, tactics and the “horse race” aspects of a political campaign than to policy issues--2 1/2 times more attention in the case of the evening network news shows during the first three months of the 1996 Republican primary season.

Who’s ahead: 269

Tactics and strategy: 159

Policy issues: 166

Source: Center for Media and Public Affairs, Washington, D.C.

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Setting the Tone

Theodore White’s influential “The Making of the President 1960” provided the first inside look at a political campaign. Joe McGinniss’ “The Selling of the President 1968” was a much more irreverent look at the same process, and it helped set the tone and style for much of today’s campaign coverage.