Where Politics Is Primary

MANCHESTER, N. H. -- In one of its latest anti-Howard Dean editorials, the Union Leader newspaper here attacked the Democratic presidential front-runner for broaching the prospect that President Bush may have had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

What galled him, said Publisher Joseph W. McQuaid, was that the former Vermont governor said he didn’t believe it, but he “had heard” it mentioned as a theory. So McQuaid decreed that his next front-page commentary would assert that confidential records from Vermont prove Dean was “a wife beater and child molester.”

Somewhat slyly, he added: “Now, I don’t believe it. But that is what I have heard.”

Not long ago, a drubbing by New Hampshire’s voice of conservatism might have upended even a firm-footed Democratic candidate. But no more. The days when the Manchester Union Leader dominated New Hampshire are long gone, as Granite State voters rely on increasingly diverse sources of information -- from Web sites to local papers to a statewide TV station that blankets its airwaves with political coverage.

As proprietors of the nation’s first presidential primary, New Hampshire voters know they exercise outsized influence in U.S. politics. And the electorate takes seriously its responsibility to be well-informed, said Richard Winters, a government professor at Dartmouth College.

“They are sorting information for the rest of the nation, and they know that,” Winters said. “These are highly efficacious voters who can have real impact on the outcome of a presidential election.”

A new poll from the University of New Hampshire showed that 29% of the voters get their information from the state’s only network-affiliated television station, WMUR-TV -- making it the state’s predominant news force. Local newspapers, of which there are more than a dozen, came next, with 20%.

Only 6% of those polled said they favored Boston television stations or the Boston Globe. But it was not necessarily politics that drew New Hampshirites to the Northeast’s largest newspaper.

“What people here read the Boston Globe for is the Red Sox,” said former Republican state chairman Tom Rath.

In a state with high rates of Internet connections, PoliticsNH.com is one of several flourishing Web sites devoted to politics.

New Hampshire Public Radio has broadcast live, one-hour interviews with every major Democratic candidate -- and plans two more with each before the Jan. 27 primary.

The Concord Monitor, in the state’s capital, has two reporters assigned to each of the nine Democratic candidates -- a dexterous feat for a paper with a reporting staff of 15 (some reporters cover several candidates). Monitor Editor Mike Pride said that to attune himself early on to the nuances of each primary season, he begins going to “as many events as I can” a year before the vote.

“We take it very seriously,” Pride said of the paper’s political coverage.

For decades, the Monitor and the state’s other newspapers were overshadowed by the Union Leader, a paper that routinely bullied Democrats. After the paper labeled him “soft on communism,” John F. Kennedy stood in the Union Leader’s parking lot in 1960, lambasting Publisher William Loeb.

Maine Senator Ed Muskie held a news conference outside the newspaper after it wrote that his wife Jane smoked cigarettes and wanted to tell dirty jokes on the campaign bus. In a moment that many say cost him the Democratic nomination in 1972, Muskie was so overcome by emotion that he shed tears.

But today, said Winters, “The Union Leader is basically an ordinary newspaper with a right-wing slant.”

In part because of a steady flow of newcomers into a state that now has about 1.3 million residents, “the Union Leader simply came to have less and less influence,” said former New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen.

In its place, said Shaheen -- national campaign chairwoman for Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts -- WMUR-TV Channel 9 has “very much usurped the Union Leader with average voters.”

As the only statewide television station, WMUR has benefited from a symbiotic relationship with primary candidates who want visibility in New Hampshire. For instance, as part of his unsuccessful Republican presidential bid in 1996, Steve Forbes spent more than $1 million on TV ads in New Hampshire. Newsroom employees at WMUR -- an ABC affiliate -- playfully refer to the station’s headquarters as “the house that Forbes built.”

Scott Spradling, WMUR’s only full-time political reporter, does political stories on Channel 9’s evening, morning, midday and late-night news shows. He anchors a Sunday political talk show, and, with Ted Koppel, he co-hosted the most recent nationally televised debate of the Democratic presidential candidates.

The daily diet of politics at WMUR reflects a calculated news decision. Weather and crime, as in other states, are top news priorities, said Rath, the former GOP state chairman. “Unlike any other state,” he added, the third topic that brings people to news is politics.

“One of the reasons for this primary is the informed electorate,” he said. “These people can discuss how Howard Dean is different from John Kerry. They are receptors of all this data in a way that other people are not. The media up here is challenged to be as good as they have to be because the voters expect it.”

In turn, said Spradling, candidates recognize what New Hampshire’s media can do for them. “It doesn’t matter who is holding the microphone,” he said. “It could be Ted Koppel. It could be a monkey. A candidate who spots our microphone is going to come talk to us. They want to be on Channel 9.”

New Hampshire’s public radio station also has found a high level of cooperation among candidates.

The station recently abandoned its classical music format in favor of newsier programming, and as a centerpiece of its primary coverage, producer Keith Shields said NHPR decided to interview each Democratic candidate. But instead of grilling the candidates about issues, the station went for personality -- asking “who is this person?” questions.

Only the Rev. Al Sharpton and former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois declined to take part in the series of hourlong interviews on a morning show called “The Exchange.” Five of the others have done the show twice.

“I came up here from Boston, where I worked at two national NPR shows,” Shields said. “We couldn’t have dreamed of getting a Dean or a Kerry on for an hour. Here, they want to come on.”

Cybernews also is playing a greater role in New Hampshire. Managing editor James Pindell said PoliticsNH.com attracted about 500 visitors a month when he began working there in 2002, a year after the site was founded. Today, Pindell said, the site draws 12,000 hits a day.

“We have not advertised one penny,” Pindell said. “This thing has been entirely word of mouth.”

The site, with a staff of four, is part of a loose affiliation of political Web sites across the Northeast run by the Publius Group. Several other Web sites focusing on politics in New Hampshire have sprung up -- and in the city of Nashua, Dr. William Siroty, an allergist, has hundreds of subscribers for the “New Hampshire News Links” e-mail he puts together each day.

“From a media and communications standpoint, I believe what we are really seeing is the first technology primary,” said Republican media consultant Patrick Griffin.

“We used to worry when a poll [was completed] that a reporter would get it the next day,” Griffin went on. “Now reporters and voters alike can visit these sites and get the data immediately. And this ability to get information quickly is clearly affecting this campaign.”

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Times staff researcher Susannah Rosenblatt contributed to this report.