Squeeze on Media Coverage May Be Bad News for Dole

Consider the problems Bob Dole is having with his campaign news coverage: first, it tends to be pessimistic, and, worse, there is less and less of it.

As Dole’s poll numbers have lagged far behind President Clinton’s--giving the presidential race the look of a potential rout--news organizations have scaled back their time and space for presidential politics. As a result, the challenger has less chance to challenge while Clinton makes news more as president than as the Democratic nominee. Dole often seems like a campaigner trying to give a speech while standing in a hole.

“Poor Dole,” said Susan Estrich, who was campaign manager for Democratic presidential hopeful Michael S. Dukakis when he suffered from many of the same indignities in 1988. “So much of the coverage is driven by the polls . . . and even though he’s the Republican nominee, he’s not making news on a regular basis.

“One night even the little kisser in North Carolina got more news coverage than Bob Dole,” she added.

The drop-off in news coverage is sharp. The Tyndall Report in New York, which charts news coverage by the three major broadcast television networks, counted 1,607 minutes of presidential politics aired so far since Labor Day 1995, compared to 2,365 minutes for the same period in 1991-1992. In the last week, there were 40 minutes on the three nightly broadcast network news shows, compared to 89 minutes for the same week in 1992 and 94 minutes in 1988.

“The [presidential] campaign generated so little news that NBC assigned its crack political correspondent Lisa Myers to review a movie [the First Wives’ Club] instead,” the most recent Tyndall Report noted.

Similarly, the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed front-page campaign stories in the first 10 days of the general-election campaign and found that the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post together had published 23 presidential campaign stories in 1996, compared with 48 in 1992.

The lack of coverage has been particularly acute in the last few days, as Clinton has dominated television news by presiding over the Middle East summit talks while Dole has gone largely ignored.

All this has caused sleepless and frustrated nights for Dole aides. National news coverage, sometimes called “free media” by campaign operatives, is supposed to complement the paid media--advertising. Without front-page headlines and television news time, the candidate loses his chance to close the gap. In turn, in a vicious cycle, if he doesn’t close the gap, he gets less news coverage.

“Needless to say, it’s somewhat obscene to decide the race is over on the third Friday in September,” John Buckley, Dole’s communication director, said Wednesday.

As the campaign figures its media strategy in the last weeks of the contest, “we don’t look at liberal versus conservative,” Buckley added. “We look most clearly at [how] some news organizations feel the campaign is already over and just a function of coronating Clinton versus those who feel it is not only correct but obligatory to cover this election on a daily basis.”

Buckley did not want to name the news organizations that he felt had written off his candidate, but he noted that “the sin of wanting to say the race is over may be an easier temptation for print than for television.”

Still, it may be more than the polls that are pushing stories about Dole to the bottom of the television news and the back of the nation’s newspapers.

“The press isn’t covering Dole in part because of the horse race, that’s the obvious reason, but if Dole were out there saying new things and talking about things not talked about in presidential campaigns, he would get a lot more coverage,” said Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. “The press does like novelty. . . . “

Of course, Alter noted, “demands for saying something new, for being newsworthy” are at odds with the “demands for a consistent message” that can drive a campaign forward. The conflict is particularly acute for a candidate who is behind, he added. “This tends to put Dole in a box.”

As Dole has struggled, other events--everything from threatening moves by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to a busy hurricane season in the Southeast--have eaten into the space available for political news.

“Also, we may have overdone it in the past,” said Bill Wheatley, vice president of NBC News. “It may be that there’s some reaction to that, and people are saying now, ‘Let’s play the political news for what it’s really worth.’ ”

Several journalists said that with Sunday’s first scheduled debate between Dole and Clinton, the public may begin to focus more intensely on the presidential race. But for many of those covering the candidates on a day-to-day basis, not even a debate could change the difference in the working conditions on the Dole and Clinton campaigns--a difference they said easily helps Clinton and ill serves Dole.

Reporters following Dole who were interviewed in recent days noted that they seldom get to talk with the candidate. He has not had a press conference for the national media since March, they complained, and traveling reporters rarely get background papers or briefings on what the campaign is trying to accomplish.

“Too often we’re just sitting there on the plane like empty vessels, waiting for somebody to tell us their version of what’s going on,” said one top reporter who did not want to be quoted by name. “They don’t seem to know how to deal with us.”

By contrast, the aides who tend Clinton’s well-oiled press machine circulate among reporters before and after every speech to provide factual background material along with a layer of pro-Clinton propaganda.

“There’s almost no paper on the Dole campaign, no one to talk to,” one reporter complained, contrasting it to the Clinton operation, where everything from town histories to latest economic numbers are constantly being passed through the press bus.

“It’s really hard to say whether [Dole’s aides] don’t know how to deal with the press or they don’t want to do anything that might help us or whether they just hold us in such contempt that they’re not going to go out of the way for us,” said Jodi Enda, who has been covering Dole since the primaries for Knight-Ridder newspapers. “Whatever the reason, I think it only hurts them.”

“Generally reporters like Dole,” she added. “He’s nice. He’s funny. He’s easy to talk to when you talk to him, but . . . [the staff] worries about every little thing he says getting into print. . . . “

Of course, earlier in the campaign, “little things” that Dole said--particularly his offhand comments about tobacco perhaps not being addictive--did get into print, causing huge difficulties and making Dole’s aides understandably gunshy.

But, Enda said, one reason that such comments made for big stories was that “we didn’t have much ready access to him, so we wrote about everything we got.”