Campaign Lite

Washington Monthly, Jan, 2001 by Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel

Why reporters won't tell us what we need to know

THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION of the 21st century may go down in history as the moment when campaigning disappeared into private space. Eighty years ago, radio allowed people to hear candidates by their firesides for the first time. Thirty years later, television added pictures, which transformed even party conventions into events arranged for people to absorb in their living rooms. Video tapes, computers, and direct mail added to the precision. This year, the Internet, with its personal "cookie" technology, joined automated celebrity phone calls, push-poll proselytizing, issue Web sites, and political e-mails to drive politics even further into a personalized, invisible space.

All this has presented a challenge for journalists, a challenge that the 2000 campaign suggests we are failing to understand. As the mechanics of the campaigns have become more sophisticated, the press has changed the way it focuses its attention. Unfortunately, however, the press has moved further away from the invisible space where elections now largely occur. The new culture of political journalism gives us a better understanding of large-scale campaign mechanics, but a weaker grasp of how voters are actually reacting. As a result, we have a shallower understanding of what our elections say about America, and why elections turn out the way they do.

Political Reporting to Campaign Reporting

In the last decade, the press has turned more of its focus to understanding the mechanics, tactics, and strategies of increasingly elaborate campaigns. This may seem a natural response--even logical. But it has significant implications for citizens. Political reporting has given way to something else--and something narrower. It has become campaign reporting. In 2000, the Committee of Concerned Journalists and the Project for Excellence in Journalism conducted four studies of campaign coverage that offered clear evidence of the trend.

The first study examined 430 stories in five major newspapers and nine programs on five television networks over the two-week period leading up to the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. This was when voters were just beginning to focus seriously on the presidential campaigns. The study reveals that during that period, the press provided only scant reporting on the candidates' backgrounds, records, or ideas. Remarkably, less than one percent of the stories--two of the 430--explored the candidates' past records in office with more than a passing reference. Instead reporters focused more than 80 percent of their stories on matters that affect the campaigns or the political parties (i.e., changes in tactics, fundraising strategies, and internal organizational problems).

This focus knocked Bush's main competitors, except John McCain, out of the race, and it played a crucial role in the final lap before the election as well. The October debates were notable, particularly the first, for being substantive and outlining differences of philosophy and policy between the two major candidates. But a study of the coverage during this period found that the reporting on the debates was quite different. In all, seven out of 10 stories focused on either the candidates' television performances or their strategies. Less than one in 10 stories focused on the candidates' policy differences; three percent were framed around the veracity of a campaign or candidate; a mere one percent focused on their broader vision for the country.

News You Can't Use

At times, the coverage read more like reviews than news. Just 14 percent of the pre- and post-debate stories were written as straight news, except for those about pure logistics. The great majority were notably thematic or interpretive. Consider David Von Drehle's front-page story in The Washington Post about the third debate: "The bigger man never looked so big as he did inside the debate hall tonight. Vice President Al Gore has a couple of inches and a couple of pounds on Texas Governor George Bush--but it might have well been feet and tons ... Bush read Gore's effort to overshadow him and, in an odd way, opted to make himself a bit smaller. There was something puppy-like about him."

The coverage also tilted more towards performance criticism as time went on, the study found. For example, Richard L. Berke's lead story in The New York Times on the first debate began: "Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush presented starkly different stands on issues ranging from taxes to abortion to oil drilling tonight as Mr. Gore repeatedly cast Mr. Bush as a friend of the rich and Mr. Bush upbraided his rival as a Washington insider"

By the third debate, Berke's lead account, by contrast, went 22 paragraphs before outlining any policy positions. Even then, it cast these positions in the context of theater instead of policy. The first substantive policy mention in the story was this: "One of the most heated exchanges was over reducing the cost of prescription drugs"