Presidential campaigns are stuck in the spin cycle

I was a college sophomore during the Cuban missile crisis, and I can still remember walking across the UCLA campus with a friend, both of us singing “Once Was the Time of Man” and wondering if the world was about to blow itself to smithereens.

But I can think of no time in my life -- not then, not amid the race riots and other civil unrest later that decade, not during Watergate, not after the stock market crash of 1987 -- when I worried as much about the future of our country as I do today. By definition, that makes the Nov. 2 election the most important of my lifetime.

So why are both presidential nominees, their supporters and the news media spending so much time talking about what the nominees did or didn’t do 35 years ago and so little time, relatively speaking, talking about what they could and should do to safeguard our future?

I don’t care if John Kerry deserved his Vietnam medals or if he spent Christmas Day in Cambodia or Culver City. And I don’t care whether he threw his medals away. Or what he said about the atrocities committed by other U.S. troops in Vietnam. Nor do I care whether President Bush used high-level contacts to get into the National Guard and then received preferential treatment and skipped a physical exam or any other Guard responsibilities. I don’t even care if he used drugs when he was, as he’s put it, “young and irresponsible.”

None of that has anything to do with either man’s ability to lead this country in a world where the weapons now available to terrorists -- and the indifference those terrorists show toward human life, including their own -- represent a far scarier, far more difficult challenge than the Cold War ever did. Nor do any of Bush’s or Kerry’s words or deeds in the days before either held public office tell me anything useful about how they will end the war in Iraq, pursue a reasonable foreign policy elsewhere or try to improve the nation’s troubled economy, its health-care crisis or any of a dozen other serious issues now confronting us.

So why have the campaigns -- and coverage of the campaigns -- focused so vividly on the past rather than the future, on charges and countercharges rather than plans, promises and official performance?

Please don’t tell me it’s because the candidates’ behavior in the 1960s reveals something important about their character. That’s the same argument the media have invoked to justify another popular story in recent years, one also rooted in sensationalism -- did candidate A or B have an extramarital affair?

I don’t deny that infidelity, like heroism, cowardice, dishonesty and inconsistency, can tell us something about an individual’s character. But just as a public official’s official behavior -- votes cast, speeches given, bills introduced, programs supported or opposed -- is far more revealing, and far more relevant, than his sexual behavior, so I would argue that those same criteria are far more revealing, and far more relevant, than something he did or didn’t do 35 years ago.

But if you’re a candidate -- or the supporter of a candidate -- it’s always easer to throw mud than to make concrete proposals.

If you’re in the Kerry camp, it’s easy to say, “Our guy is a medal-winning combat veteran, and the other guy is a draft evader who didn’t even fulfill his National Guard commitment, so our guy is obviously a better man to lead the war on terrorists.”

If you’re in the Bush camp, it’s easy to say, “Our guy stood tall after 9/11 and has been consistent in his determination to oust terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the other guy lied about his war record, criticized our own troops in Vietnam and waffled on Iraq, so our guy is obviously a better man to lead the war on terrorists.”

Trivial pursuits

Not only is it easier to take these positions, it’s more provocative, more attention-getting -- and easier for the media to grasp -- than a series of position papers on the Mideast, the reform of Social Security or health insurance or immigration policy.

But the media shouldn’t be suckered into doing only what’s easy to grasp, into going for ratings and headlines about 35-year-old controversies.

Unfortunately, the dirty little secret of the news media is that for every example of great enterprise reporting, stories that intrepid reporters dig out on their own, there are hundreds of stories every day that the media cover simply because someone gives them the story or points them to the story. This is especially true of television, which thrives on conflict and has no use for nuance or complexity.

Even though reporters are better educated and more sophisticated than ever before, they’re more likely than ever before to be manipulated by spinmeisters on either side of the political spectrum. That’s because, media consolidation notwithstanding, there are more sources of news -- or if not news, then information, gossip and rumor -- than ever before.

Cable TV and the Internet -- genuine news sites, pseudo news sites and personal blogs -- can disseminate a report, no matter how fallacious or unsubstantiated, and other, presumably more reputable news organizations feel compelled to pick it up and even expand upon it.

If they don’t do that, they worry that they will either look biased (they’re deliberately ignoring it because it makes “their” candidate look bad) or slow and stupid (either they were beaten or they didn’t recognize the news value of the story).

Hence, the blizzard of media coverage given the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the documents purporting to show that George W. Bush received preferential treatment in the National Guard.

It’s worth noting, of course, that the latter story did not begin in the overheated blogosphere or the 24/7 world of cable news. No, it broke on CBS, once the Tiffany of networks and now -- increasingly, like many once-reputable news organizations -- more akin to Wal-Mart.

The result is the same.

Lies! Favoritism! Scandal! Big News!!

Gimme a break.

I’d like to see the nation’s news media declare a moratorium on the Vietnam War for the rest of this campaign and push the candidates to talk about real issues, international and domestic.

I know of at least one editor who’s decided to do just that.

“As we enter the campaign’s home stretch, we are taking a different tack,” Mike Jenner, executive editor of the Bakersfield Californian, wrote in a column last weekend. “We will decrease the prominence given to the latest accusations and counterattacks. If the news is truly noteworthy, we’ll run it -- but more likely on an inside page than on Page One. And more often than not we’ll summarize the news in a paragraph or two, rather than running a lengthy story.”

Jenner said he knew his decision would “disappoint some readers,” and he acknowledged that “some of the smartest editors on our staff believe this is a risky position.”

But he said he is “committed to giving readers more analysis, more context and more information about the candidates that is truly relevant, while diminishing the focus on what happened more than 30 years ago.”

Of course, that resolve could dissolve if someone turns up documented evidence that Kerry had a sexual affair with Ho Chi Minh, but for now, I applaud Jenner, and I wish others would join him. And come presidential debate time, I hope the moderator bangs a gong quickly -- and reaches for a hook -- every time either candidate, or any journalistic inquisitor, mentions Vietnam.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read his previous “Media Matters” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.