February 10 - 17, 2000
![[Don't Quote Me]](/standard/image/headers/dont_quote_me_header.gif)
They are the most unexpected and least remarked-upon winners of the New Hampshire primary: ordinary voters, who, against all odds, actually have two closely fought primary races from which to choose, at a moment when they're finally beginning to pay attention. The accidental primaries
How the media can make a difference in the campaign that wasn't supposed to matter
by Dan Kennedy
Early on, the prognosticators intoned that Al Gore and George W. Bush would be all but crowned by now. When the Iowa caucuses went according to the script, some pundits suggested that it was already over, and that the other candidates should just get out (see "Don't Quote Me," News and Features, January 28). Certainly that's what the party pros wanted. After all, the primary schedule was front-loaded and compressed for the express purpose of avoiding divisive intraparty battles.
But John McCain's stunning victory over Bush, and Bill Bradley's surprisingly close loss to Gore, have made it likely that the Republican and Democratic nominations won't be decided until Super Tuesday, March 7. Even voters in Massachusetts, who go to the polls on that day, may have a rare opportunity to do something more important than merely ratify (or reject) two already certified nominees.
These developments make the media's role crucial. The media have something they had no reason to expect just a few weeks ago: a real campaign, the attention of the public, and a reform-versus-establishment dynamic that is not just cheap political symbolism but has some semblance of reality. What we have now is an honest-to-God national campaign. As has been repeated to the point of cliché, the retail portion of the campaign is now over. From this point forward, the four remaining serious candidates will be flying from tarmac to tarmac, delivering set speeches and getting their messages across through TV and radio advertising. If news organizations can get beyond their obsession with who's up and who's down and actually focus on the issues and the characters of the candidates, they have an unusual opportunity to help voters make an informed decision when casting their ballots.
"What do citizens need to help them decide which of these candidates would make the best president? That's what the press should be offering them, in addition to the race itself," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism. Unfortunately, according to the results of a study released by Rosenstiel's organization last week, the media's performance fell short of that standard in the run-up to Iowa and New Hampshire: only 13 percent of stories were about substantive matters such as the candidates' ideas, reputations, and records, whereas more than 80 percent focused on fundraising and campaign tactics.
Still, you can hardly argue that the voters of New Hampshire were uninformed, not with the hundreds of town meetings held by McCain, Gore, and Bradley (Bush's lack of same was itself important information for New Hampshire voters, judging from the primary results). The unprecedented number of televised debates let political junkies across the country in on the action, too. Trouble is, the town meetings have now become little more than photo-ops, and the debates have all but disappeared from the airwaves. Yet it's only now that normal people are starting to tune in.
Surveys taken by the Vanishing Voter Project, at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, show that the proportion of people who are paying attention to the presidential campaign rose from 12 percent to 32 percent between January 2 and 30. Tom Patterson, who's co-director of the project, is hoping the newest data -- compiled immediately after the New Hampshire primary -- will show another big boost in interest. In other words, nothing the media have done up until this moment has counted for as much as what they will do during the next few weeks. Patterson says that now is the time to "go deep into these candidates and really try to do both solo looks and comparative looks."Or as Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor and the author of last year's What Are Journalists For? (Yale University Press), puts it, "Journalists can recognize that the dawn of an attentive public is a key moment, and that the journalism you might do now should be perhaps different from what you would do otherwise." Rosen's recommendation: "Take four or five very important themes and make the next two weeks the time when you put the issues to the candidates."
Of course, to a large extent the media can only play the hand they've been dealt. On a wide range of issues, especially on economics and trade, the four serious candidates are in broad agreement. These are, after all, professional politicians from the establishment, pro-business, centrist wings of their parties, which makes it all the more amusing to listen to them try to paint their opponents as extremists (see "Don't Quote Me," News and Features, December 31).
Nevertheless, there are two crucial issues the media can illuminate, and those issues are related: the character of each of the candidates, and the role of money in the political system.
Ever since McCain announced he was running for president, pollsters have said that campaign-finance reform ranks low on the list of voters' concerns. Yet he and Bradley have made reform the centerpiece of their insurgent campaigns, and both -- especially McCain -- have done better than expected. The reason for this likely isn't a tremendous public outcry for campaign-finance reform per se, but, rather, is a yearning for the reform of a political system that's hopelessly out of touch with the concerns of average people. Bradley, with a reputation for rectitude, and McCain, whose courage and candor tend to offset concerns about some of his more questionable actions, have been able to capitalize on that yearning. Bush, tool of the Republican establishment, and Gore, shaker-down of Buddhist nuns, stand firmly on the other side of the reform divide, no matter how much Bush may wish to portray himself as an outsider or Gore to cast himself as a long-time advocate of publicly financed campaigns.
In fact, it's possible that the issue of money and politics may be reaching one of those rare moments of critical mass at the same time that the presidential campaign is at its peak. Last week, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team of Donald Barlett and James Steele wrote the first in what is intended as a year-long series for Time magazine. Titled "Big Money & Politics: Who Gets Hurt," the debut painted a sordid picture of favors worth millions of dollars for big donors, and a thoroughgoing screwing-over for those who don't play the game. Barlett and Steele's series comes on the heels of a new book by Charles Lewis, head of the Center for Public Integrity. Titled The Buying of the President 2000 (Avon), Lewis's book details the moneyed interests that hope to profit from this year's presidential campaign.
"This is a window, and it's incumbent on the media to shove something through that window," says Washington City Paper editor David Carr, a vocal critic of what he's called the "fuck the issues" approach of the Washington Post, the paper he follows most closely. Carr's suggestion: use the campaign, and especially the differences between the McCain-Bradley reform axis and the Bush-Gore establishment axis, to have "a serious conversation about money and politics."
Unfortunately, even some of the best journalism produced during this campaign has tended to fall into hoary paradigms from campaigns past. McCain and, to a lesser extent, Bradley have been subjected to an old-fashioned hypocrisy watch. In early January, the Boston Globe detailed McCain's intervention with the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of a major contributor. Last week, the Wall Street Journal outlined his cozy relationships with lobbyists who come before the Senate Commerce Committee, which he chairs. The media have also delved into Bradley's actions on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry, which casts a long shadow in New Jersey, where he served as a US senator for 18 years. These stories are not unimportant. But McCain himself has pointed out that the current system makes hypocrites of all reform-minded politicians, since they can't survive unless they play the game. The media should take a closer look at how (and whether) the reforms proposed by McCain and Bradley would really change the corrupt system, and not just content themselves with pointing out the obvious fact that Bradley and McCain are, of necessity, part of that system.New Hampshire was, except for those who live there, a spectator sport. Now comes the participatory part. By the time the polls close on March 7, more than 70 percent of the delegates to the Democratic and Republican national conventions will have been chosen. Emily Rooney, host of WGBH-TV's Greater Boston and a former television news director at the local and network levels, thinks her much-maligned medium did a good job of covering New Hampshire. But now that everything is on the line, what will the media's next act be? "If you really weren't paying attention to the New Hampshire primary, then you missed a lot of that," says Rooney. Her hope is that, with the marginal candidates on the Republican side now either gone or having proven they have little support, the networks will zero in substantively on the four legitimate candidates.
Not that campaign coverage is about to turn into an exercise in civic journalism. As Danny Schechter, executive editor of the Media Channel, puts it, "The inside-the-Beltway political pundits are the ones who are still shaping the coverage." Indeed, it may well be that every network sighting of David Gergen or Cokie Roberts subtracts slightly from our collective political intelligence. But that shouldn't detract from the special quality of what will take place over the next few weeks.
"More voters may have more influence over who gets the Democratic and Republican nominations than they have had in many years," Richard Berke wrote in Sunday's New York Times. "And the compressed calendar could resemble a European-style election: a compact but intense primary season where many voters pay attention."
This is a gift, and an entirely unexpected one at that. Let's see whether the media can rise to the occasion.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.
Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
