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CAMPBELL PUBLIC AFFAIRS INSTITUTE

Commentaries on the American Presidency April, 2004

The Press and Presidential Politics

Charlotte Grimes When it comes to the press and presidential politics, it’s necessary to consider both the ideal and the real. Knight Chair in Political Reporting In the ideal, journalists pursue the press’ classic roles of witness and watchdog. They see themselves as serving as a surrogate for the public in following candi- The Newhouse School of dates’ campaigns. They record events. They are fact-checkers on candidates’ claims. They are professional devil’s advocates, testing the hypothesis of candidates’ pro- Public Communications, posals by seeking diverse perspectives and the insights of experts on complicated Syracuse University issues. They dig into candidates’ records, character and rhetoric – holding them accountable to the public. They provide what press scholar Michael Schudson calls “public knowledge”: our shared information about people, issues and events.1 They [email protected] see themselves as gathering, checking and disseminating the independent, disinterested, impartial information necessary for people in a democracy to be self-governing.

Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser of the Washington Post put the journalists’ view of their work vividly: “Independent, aggressive journalism strengthens American democracy, improves the lives of its citizens, checks the abuses of powerful people, supports the weakest members of society, connects us all to one another, educates and entertains us. News matters.”2

In the real, the roles of witness and watchdog are sometimes – and increasingly – distorted, subverted and manipulated. Today, journalists function in a craft that’s being profoundly reshaped by the relentless 24-hour news cycle, pressure from Wall Street for profits, the Internet and increasing acceptance of virtual journalism – a simulation of the real thing that blends entertainment, gossip and commentary with the news. Indeed, the press – specifically protected by the First Amendment – has all but lost its distinctive identity in an amorphous cacophony of “the media.”

The media of news, entertainment, talk and call-in shows and Web bloggers, are now a deafening echo chamber, endlessly mixing fact with opinion. Minor stories of candidates’ gaffes or political trivia lose their proportionality, distorted into a fun- house mirror of inaccurate reflections. Errors, gossip, innuendo and unsubstantiat- ed allegations quickly imbed in the public consciousness, with little chance for jour- Campbell Public Affairs Institute nalists to correct or refute them as part of valuable public knowledge. They become The Maxwell School of Syracuse University 306 Eggers Hall viruses in the public discourse that are almost impossible to kill. Syracuse, New York 13244 315-443-9707/ Fax 315-443-9734 And in the real world of today’s media conglomerates, journalists are an endangered http://www.campbellinstitute.org minority within their news organization’s parent company – a source of profit but less investment. Their public service mission is hedged around by the parent company’s multiple other goals and operations, some of which present the journalists with serious opportunities for of con- flicts of interest.

Caught between the ideal and the real are candidates and the public – though neither is an entirely innocent bystander. The public’s insistence on “news on demand” fuels the 24-hour news cycle. Investors’ expectations for return on their money have stepped up Wall Street pressure for profits from media companies, who have helped keep their margins high by cuts in staffing for labor-intensive newsgathering. The talk shows that offer anonymous callers the chance to share their own viewpoints and even unsupported suspicions are wildly popular, even viewed by some as “empower- ing” ordinary people to participate in political discussions. Many newspaper readers and TV viewers place a low value on disinterested reportage, preferring – as the Project for the Excellence in Journalism calls it – a “journalism of affir- mation” that reinforces their own views and opinions (Witness the popularity of Fox News, almost a return to the partisan press of the 1800s).3

And candidates are quick to feed the echo chamber with their own “spin” and allegations, to exploit the time pressures of a 24-hour news cycle on a shrinking press corps, and to manipulate the broader media as well as the press with increasing control over the flow of information.

All in all, not a great time or environment for the press and presidential politics.

Some of the concerns are not new. Like every profession, journalism has never completely fulfilled its ideals. A century ago, Joseph Pulitzer was already warning of similar dangers. In 1904, Pulitzer wrote: “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”4

By 2004, Pulitzer’s warning has found new expression. Among the leading researchers and philosophers of the modern press is The Project for Excellence in Journalism, a non-partisan group headed by long-time journalist Tom Rosenstiel in affiliation with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. In March 2004, the group released an exhaustive survey, The State of the News Media 2004, rang- ing across newspapers, magazines, network TV, cable TV, the Internet, ethnic and alternative newspapers. The report concludes that, once again: “Journalism is in the midst of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television.”5

For the press and presidential politics, this latest transformation – into a “multi-media” world of print, TV, radio and Internet – offers opportunities for improving coverage, for living up to journalism’s ideals. But the newest transformation is also likely to highlight the real-world problems for the press amid the pressures of speed, profit and repetition. And going into the new era, the press and presidential politics carry the legacies of earlier epochs.

THE EPOCH OF TEDDY WHITE AND TV

For the presidential coverage that’s all too familiar today, the watershed year was 1960. That year, two forces coin- cided in the press. One was a man whom Robert G. Kaiser of the Washington Post once described as a “little bundle of energy with the cheeks of a chipmunk bulging between his gold-rimmed glasses.”6 The other was television.

In 1960, Theodore White was hard at work on the first in what would become a series of books on The Making of the President. And after it was published in 1961, political reporting would never be the same.

Before White’s book, journalists largely reported on the public aspects of presidential campaigns – the stump speeches, the charges and counter charges, the rallies and events – in what has often been derided as “stenographic” coverage. The New Hampshire primary, which now looms so large, was a minor blip on the radar for the press and the can-

2 didates. And journalists pretty much ignored the lengthy preparations before candidates actually declared themselves as official candidates.

In The Making of the President, 1960, Teddy White blew the lid off the public aspects of the campaigns. He had nego- tiated access to the behind-the-scenes maneuvering for John F. Kennedy’s presidential bid that started long before the campaign itself. White told of the strategies, the tactics, the planning in vivid detail. In almost a novelist’s style, he conveyed the behind-the-scenes story with flair, liveliness and – most importantly – drama.

His colleagues were agog. The public was enchanted. The book won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and became a best-seller. And succeeding generations of political reporters grew up with Teddy White as their role model.

“After the appearance of the 1960 book, no serious political reporter could ever again wait until the election year began to follow a presidential campaign. We now give readers and viewers many months of coverage during the pre- election year,” wrote Kaiser of The Washington Post on White’s legacy. Added Kaiser: “White made the process of selecting presidents a story in its own right. Today we cover the stages of this process ritualistically, moving by the hundreds and thousands across the early playing fields that White worked with only a handful of others in 1960. Now, reporters descend on Des Moines months before the first caucuses, then move in a giant herd to New Hampshire and beyond.”7 It was the beginning of the constant campaign that is the hallmark of today’s presidential politics.

In journalism’s ideals of witness and watchdog, White may not have been a toothy watchdog. His books were sometimes criticized as lacking in criticism of candidates, too often romanticizing them and their striving for public office. But he was one helluva of a witness, capturing down to the minute – 8:43 a.m. – on Election Day, 1960, when JFK cast his own vote for the presidency.

In the real world of the press and presidential politics, White’s revolutionary coverage soon came under the pressures of popularity, daily deadlines and lesser talents. It would be unfair to blame White for all the sins of later journalists. But his fingerprints remain on much of today’s coverage and his groundbreaking work helped lay the foundations for several of presidential coverage’s modern, and often troubling, characteristics. Among them:

The rise of the political correspondent as pseudo-political scientist

White mastered the art of blending social science research – polls, demographics, history – into his books. He primarily focused on the mechanics of the process, telling the how of presidential politics – strategy and tactics – in his vividly novelistic style. Today, that’s the hallmark of the political reporter – or more glamorously titled “political correspondent” – and his or her work, though seldom with White’s storytelling flair. The political correspondent (most still are “he”) now is expected to rival the political scientist with an encyclopedic knowledge of voting patterns, swing states, political party functionaries, fundraisers, spin doctors – the mechanics of campaigns and elections and what’s often called “the inside baseball” of politics.

“Because of White, political reporters now write a sort of pop sociology,” wrote Robert Kaiser in the Washington Post. “An entire school of ‘grass roots’ reporting, based on reporters’ efforts to combine interviewing and polling data to draw portraits of various geographic and demographic segments of the electorate, grew out of White’s first campaign book. Perhaps most significant in its impact on the behavior of the journalistic tribe was White’s entirely new way of looking at the campaign.”8

The emphasis on tactics and strategy

The political correspondent’s fascination with tactics and strategy, not surprisingly, dominates the coverage of campaigns and elections. The Project for Excellence in Journalism documented the dominance in a study of the coverage of the run-up to the first contests – Iowa and New Hampshire – in the 2000 election. The group looked at 430 stories published in five major newspapers or aired on nine television programs on five networks. Two of the key findings:

3 (1) Only 13% of the stories reported on things that would actually affect the American public, such as candidates’ “ideas, their honesty or how their constituents in the past” had been affected. (2) More than 80% of the stories focused on what affected the politicians or parties, “such as changes in tactics, who has more money, or internal organizational problems.”9

The pattern continues in the 2004 campaigns, as even a quick visit to the Web sites of many major newspapers shows the coverage remains dominated by stories on tactics and strategy.

The separation of issues from process

This is what British journalist Katherine Whitehorn calls the “gun-barrel” and “splat” approaches to coverage.10 In the gun-barrel approach, the coverage focuses on the source of the power – as in Chairman Mao’s famous dictum that “power comes from the barrel of a gun” – or the political process. In the splat approach, the coverage looks at the effect of a public policy, the results of politics, the issues that affect people’s everyday lives.

In his books, Teddy White seldom focused on the splat, or issues. Today’s political coverage generally separates them into special “issues packages” in the campaign seasons. But the coverage seldom explains the connections between campaigns, daily politics and issues. Indeed, all of the issues – health care, the economy, education, trade – are the substance of politics. But the journalists who cover them are not designated as “political correspondents.” And “politics” has become – in the minds of both journalists and the public – largely the process: tactics and strategies.

In its content study of early 2000 coverage, the Project for Excellence in Journalism put that division this way: The press, it concluded, is “offering the American public a fine education in campaign tactics but telling them little about matters that actually will affect them as citizens.”11

By the time of his death in 1986, Theodore White too had his regrets about the method of political reporting he had pioneered. Hordes of journalists tried, often stumblingly, to follow in his footsteps and – in his view – spoiling his technique. “I’d get into a room and disappear into the woodwork,” White later grumbled. “Now the rooms are so crowded with reporters getting behind-the-scenes stories that nobody can get behind-the-scenes stories.”12

Two years after his death coverage of presidential politics was being loudly denounced by just about everyone – journalists, scholars, politicians, citizens – as having reached its nadir. The press was too preoccupied with “inside baseball,” with the “horserace” of who’s ahead and behind in polls, with cynical portrayals of candidates and unnecessary invasions into their private lives – including Washington Post reporter Paul Taylor’s famous “Have you ever commit- ted adultery” question to Gary Hart. Worse was yet to come, with Willie Horton, Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky. Like alcoholics and cocaine addicts, journalists made pledges each election cycle to reform – only to fall off the wagon again. As voter turnout dropped, journalists and their coverage were accused of contributing to the decline in civic engagement. The press, in Pulitzer’s words of a century earlier, was deeply suspected of being “cynical, mercenary and demagogic.”13

By the 2000 election cycle, evidence was also accumulating that press coverage might be hurting public interest in presidential politics for reasons other than cynicism, feeding frenzies on scandals and even the general distrust of public institutions. In its content analysis of the early coverage, the Project for Excellence in Journalism put it this way: “The reporting is overwhelmingly focused on the internal tactics and strategies of the campaigns – concerns that research suggests people do not care much about and that even the study researchers found numbing to read.” (emphasis added).14

Translation: Press coverage of presidential politics too often has become, quite simply, boring.

In the watershed year of 1960, it wasn’t always so. As Teddy White was burrowing inside the political process, the adolescent medium of TV was beginning to bring politics into ordinary Americans’ homes. To see or hear a presiden-

4 tial candidate, a potential voter – or the merely curious – would no longer have to go out to a speech, a rally, a parade, a political party event, or even wait to stumble across a candidate at the factory candidate. Now, with TV, Americans could sink into the couch and the candidates would come into their living rooms.

It’s hard to imagine now, but until 1960 a presidential debate among candidates was still a public gathering, not a private viewing opportunity at home. And it’s even harder to imagine now how big a deal was that first televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. It actually took an act of Congress, with votes in the Senate and the House, to suspend portions of the Fairness Doctrine regulating broadcasters to allow television to carry the historic debates.15 The day: Sept. 26, 1960. More than 70 million Americans watched, an extraordinary TV event for the time. And the debate passed into political-TV legend, with many scholars and journalists crediting Kennedy’s television performance with giving him the debate victory – if not the election – over the more ill-at-ease Nixon.

Certainly the marriage between television and politics was strengthened by having as its first star the charismatic, handsome, witty young Kennedy; his beautiful young wife and his telegenic young children. He and they made easy watching. And the intense coverage of his funeral cemented television’s place as the national unifier in times of crisis and tragedy, the creator of much of our shared memories. Teddy White – ever the wordsmith and storyteller – gave us the description of the Kennedy years as “Camelot.” Television – with its powerful and poignant images of the witty, charming president; his stoic, bereaved widow; his small son’s salute to the passing casket – helped Americans believe in it.

Through its adolescence in the 1960s and early 1970s, television seemed a magic connector for Americans and presidential politics. The nominating conventions of the Republicans and Democrats were novelties, with enough action and often suspense, to draw large audiences. A generation of American TV-watching children grew up waiting for the dramatic “roll call of the states,” to cheer when their homestate’s name was called and its delegation cast its ballots.

Off the campaign trail, the nation through the 1970s was embroiled in dramatic political stories that profoundly reshaped our society and our view of most major institutions: The civil rights movement led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The assassinations of King and Robert F. Kennedy. Riots in Watts and across the country. Vietnam. Watergate.

In a typical division of labor, reporters for the print press often unearthed the stories, provided the details and gave more substantive background and context. But with its special emotional connection to audiences and powerful visu- al imagery, TV’s coverage of those stories broadened their reach and often made the events into almost personal expe- riences for viewers. The drama – sometimes the horror, as in the unforgettable images of civil rights marchers being beaten by police or white mobs – helped provoke political action. After TV, for example, captured the searing images of “Bloody Sunday” – when civil rights marchers were beaten, teargassed and trampled by horses of Alabama State Troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965—Congress quickly responded with the 1965 Voting Rights Act that guaranteed every American older than 18 the right to vote.

But the dramatic political stories of the late twentieth Century – especially Watergate and Vietnam – also seemed to exhaust faith in public institutions, to dampen interest in political affairs and to mark the end of the magical connection between TV and presidential politics. Now in the twenty-first Century epoch, the coverage of politics in general, and presidential politics in particular, is increasingly fragmented by the new multi-media world.

THE EPOCH OF THE MULTI-MEDIA WORLD

In the ideals of journalism, the 21st Century multi-media world would seem rich with opportunities – and the means – for the press to fulfill its classic roles of witness and watchdog over presidential politics. The Internet and comput- er databases put once-unimaginable amounts of information literally at journalists’ fingertips. With a few strokes on the keyboard, reporters can tap into the Federal Election Commission’s fundraising and expenditure reports from candidates – making it easier than ever for journalists, in the famous admonition from Deep Throat to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during Watergate, to “follow the money.” The electronic library of Nexis-Lexis maintains a read-

5 ily accessible institutional memory of what candidates and presidents have said and done, as reported in news stories and in transcripts from interviews. Web sites of candidates, government agencies and news organizations make the actual text of speeches, proposals and legislation easily available to the press and the public.

And journalists do indeed regularly use all those resources for fact-checking, for analyzing candidates’ records, for tracking presidential politics through campaigns and into the White House. In its better moments, the press of the multi-media world can make that sort of solid reportage available to the public faster and in more detail than ever before. But the better moments also are often overwhelmed by the challenges of the multi-media world.

Among those challenges, and their effects on the press and presidential politics:

The pack mentality

Being on the bus, aboard the plane, in the White House pressroom is standard operating procedure for journalists covering the president and presidential candidates. It is the only way to be eyewitnesses, to collect the inside baseball that’s such a prominent feature of coverage, to avoid missing the story from the campaign and the president’s handlers. But being part of the pack also can mean being hostage to the candidate or the administration, isolated in the bubble that surrounds the candidate. In the pack, reporters swap stories, theories, complaints – reinforcing their own perceptions of candidates, building what scholars often criticize as the “master narrative” of presidential politics: Al Gore wasn’t trustworthy. George W. Bush is dumb. John Kerry is stiff and calculating. It is not an intentional or con- scious act, merely the by-product of a comparatively small group spending months together and coming to a sublim- inal consensus on their reality – without outside checks on it.

In the spirit of Teddy White, many journalists believe intensely that they must be part of the pack, despite the down- sides. In an interview with The Campaign Desk,a website run by the Columbia Jouralism Review, Becky Diamond, who had been with the Kerry campaign for six months by late March on behalf of NBC News and MSNBC, described the life and work in the press pack this way: “Covering a campaign is an incredibly intense experience – I spend eight- een hours a day, seven days a week with virtually the same group of fellow reporters covering the same story. While there is an obvious competition, there is also an intense camaraderie. We help each other when appropriate – with common knowledge, sharing sound bites or quotes made in public events and debating the meaning and implication of the candidate’s statements and actions. All of these things are incredibly helpful. The feeling of competition is there – but – while there might be some envy when others break news or report a great story – that also comes with respect for another person’s work as well as motivation to do an even better job yourself.”

Added Diamond: “As for my perspective on John Kerry: Having followed Senator Kerry on the road for such a long time, I have a deeper sense of perspective on his candidacy in certain ways than others who have not ‘logged’ those hours. However, I lack a perspective that others who don’t travel constantly with the candidate have as I live in a fish bowl and I must look out and gather information that isn’t readily available on the John Kerry campaign trail. It’s important to seek out opinions from Bush supporters, from other Democratic leaders and from the opposition in general.” 16

In the small world of the campaign caravan, reporters hear the candidate’s stump speech over and over, listen to similar exchanges with crowds at campaign events. The repetition becomes boring. Forgetting that the public hasn’t heard the speeches and exchanges as often as they have, reporters soon consider it no longer news. They look for breaks – even small ones – in the routine and that often becomes that day’s story, that day’s success in getting something new. It’s a skewed perspective. In her interview with The Campaign Desk, for example, Diamond received compliments on breaking the revelation that President Bush had made a surprise call to Kerry on his cell phone, congratulating Kerry on his Super Tuesday victories and saying he looked forward to a spirited “debate” for the rest of the campaign. The call from a sitting president to his presumptive challenger was unusual. It’s unclear how important voters would rate it as they choose whom to vote for. But for Diamond, it was a “gem.”17

6 The conquest of the “handlers”

With the decline of the political parties, the rise of TV in campaigning and coverage, and the evolution of the constant campaign, presidential politics gave birth to an industry of “handlers” to feed the demand for information and to shape the candidates’ images. The handlers – from Roger Ailes to James Carville to Karl Rove, Joe Trippi and Mary Beth Cahill – manage the all-important strategy, tactics and pre-packaged messages that are the mainstay of most reporting on presidential politics.

In a dizzying revolving door between the press and presidential politics, retired or sidelined handlers – like Carville and Mary Matalin – often become “analysts” and “commentators” in press coverage of other campaigns. In two amaz- ing spins of the revolving door, George Stephanopoulos of the Clinton Administration landed in the anchor’s chair for ABC News This Week program and Roger Ailes of the Reagan and first Bush Administrations is now president of Fox News. While they are on the inside of campaigns, the army of handlers is a shrewd and effective manipulator of coverage, often overwhelming the press corps with a sophisticated machinery of spin. By March of the 2004 campaign between President George W. Bush and presumptive-Democratic challenger John Kerry of Massachusetts, for example, watchdogs of coverage at The Campaign Desk were methodically tracing the roots of many stories to press releas- es from the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee. Sometimes, according to The Campaign Desk watchdogs, reporters do little to verify the information or check the spin from the party handlers.18

When the handlers cross over into the news business, like Ailes and Stephanopoulos, the lines blur – or even are erased – between the press and the politicians. Little wonder that the public is no longer sure when the politicking ends and the news reporting begins.

The 24-hour news cycle

In the 24-hour news cycle, journalists are quite simply on deadline constantly. And while this may please viewers and readers who want their news on their own schedule, it aggravates many of the press’ flaws.

In their book, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, veteran journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel describe journalism with simple clarity: “Its essence,” they write, “is a discipline of verification.”19 With a constant deadline, journalists have less time – and often NO time – to verify their information, check facts, or get additional and different perspectives.

The 24-hour news cycle also puts a premium on “live” coverage, which has its own weaknesses. In live interviews, for example, candidates or their critics have considerable control and are able to manipulate both the interview and the public’s perception. The interview can easily – and often does – throw out charges and allegations that immedi- ately reach the public with no time for verification. For cable television, live coverage has become almost the routine, says the Project for Excellence in Journalism in its State of the News Media 2004 report. As a consequence, the public usually sees the process of gathering the news, rather than the news itself. “We are increasingly getting the raw elements of news,” concluded the report, “as the end product.” 20

That played out vividly on Election Night 2000 when the TV networks once again competed fiercely to be the first to “call” – or declare – the winner. The call has long been controversial, with critics suggesting that revealing the pre- sumed winner so early can actually depress voter turnout and affect the electing. In 2000, the networks showed just how dangerous the practice can be. Based on faulty projections, and leaving out the qualification that it was just a pro- jection, all five networks – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and newcomer Fox – by 8:02 p.m. on November 7, 2000, had declared Al Gore the winner in Florida, and thereby in the election. Shortly after 2 a.m., the networks knew they were wrong and this time called Bush as the winner. By 3:50 a.m., the networks had realized that even that wasn’t accurate and finally declared the race too close to call. But by then, most of America was asleep. Many newspapers had gone to press with versions of “Bush Wins” headlines. Al Gore had called Bush twice to concede defeat and then to with- draw his concession.

The networks were roundly damned for the debacle. “The networks had altered the course of history, setting up first

7 one false expectation, then another, in the process sorely exacerbating relations between the two candidates’ camps,” wrote Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert Kaiser in The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril.21

And the 24-hour news cycle also has another reality: Not enough news to fill it up. That’s contributed to the prolifer- ation of cheaper, easy-to-produce talk shows – Hardball, O’Reilly Factor, The Capital Gang – that have also become a major factor in the multi-media echo chamber.

The echo chamber

In the 24-hour multi-media world, reporters chase a few big stories or unearth minor details that are endlessly repeated in print, on TV news shows, on the talk-show circuit and through cyberspace. The repetition tends to burn into the public consciousness a few items that can assume disproportionate importance – after all, if it wasn’t important, it wouldn’t be so pervasive. And sometimes the repetition in the echo chamber distorts the coverage itself.

A classic example: The so-called “Dean Scream” after the Iowa caucuses on January 19, 2004.

As Diane Sawyer of ABC’s Good Morning America dissected the coverage of Dean’s speech, she found that his micro- phone had emphasized his high-emotion quality, eliminating the crowd sounds and feeding a startling snippet of video into the echo chamber. There it played nearly 700 times on the networks in the next several days.22 It turned Dean into the staple of the comedy and talk shows.

And, as The Campaign Desk found, the repetition changed the tone of the coverage as the video embedded into the press and public consciousness. The first stories on the speech, the watchdogs reported, were fairly neutral with descriptions of his delivery as “roaring” or “gravelly” and “like a victory address.” In its initial coverage, the Los Angeles Times even took note of the loud applause that made him hard to hear. But within days, as the video was repeated, the characterizations in stories became increasingly negative: A “throaty howl” in the New York Times. “Almost shrieked” in the Washington Post. Soon the characterizations turned into psychoanalyzing Dean, with coverage raising questions about whether the speech demonstrated he was unstable and unfit for the presidency. “In the her- metically sealed world of campaign coverage, “ as The Campaign Desk put it, “Dean’s post-caucus speech is no longer just a speech – it’s a symptom.”23

USA Today even reported on how the joking and speech-video were recycling throughout the media of the talk shows and the Internet – closing the circle of the press and the entertainment media in the echo chamber.

The media vs. the press

For the press and presidential politics, there is a certain irony in the submersion of the press into today’s amorphous media. Indeed, we can largely thank a president – Richard M. Nixon – for today’s widespread use of “media” instead of press. And he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Before the early 1970s, the Watergate era, the term “media” was not all that common, says press scholar Michael Schudson in The Power of News. But Nixon and his aides knew the power of language. The press was named in the First Amendment. It had a certain respectability. The media did not. “The very term ‘the media’ was promoted by the Nixon White House,” writes Schudson, “because it sounded unpleasant, manipulative, a much less favorable term than ‘the press.’”24

In his memoir of his days as a Nixon speechwriter, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House, William Safire is even more blunt. Nixon, recalled Safire, considered the press as “the enemy”.25 And going into the 1972 presidential campaign, Nixon was intent on discrediting the press. “In the Nixon White House, the press became ‘the media,’ because the word had a manipulative, Madison Avenue, all-encompassing connotation, and the press hated it,” wrote Safire.26 “Press” conferences became “news” conferences, creating even fewer opportunities to men-

8 tion “the press,” that phrase from the First Amendment.

Today, the “media” often evokes just the impressions that Nixon had hoped for: loathsome, invasive, dishonest, untrustworthy. In its survey, The State of the News Media 2004(note the word), The Project for Excellence in Journalism portrays those impressions as a serious disconnection between journalists and the public. “Journalists believe they are working in the public interest and are trying to be fair and independent in that cause. This is their sense of professionalism,” says the study. “The public thinks these journalists are either lying or deluding themselves. The public believes that news organizations are operating largely to make money and that the journalists who work for these organizations are primarily motivated by professional ambition and self-interest.”27

The press, of course, doesn’t help itself by adopting the Nixonian language. Worse is the real-world submersion of journalism’s ideals in the multi-media culture of entertainment. It has become a serious identity crisis for the press and with the public. Nowadays, Internet gossip-writer Matt Drudge triggers the feeding frenzy of Monica Lewinsky coverage and earns a place next to Tim Russert on political talk shows (in one healthy sign of reclaiming its identity, the press largely resisted Drudge’s rumor-floating about Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in the spring of 2004). ABC hired Titanic star Leonardo di Caprio to interview then-President Bill Clinton about the environment.28 And the talk shows feature weekly or daily shouting fests. More and more, news is cross-dressing as entertainment.

All of that has profound implications for the press and presidential politics. In their book Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media, journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel documented the trends in the coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. In a “snapshot” of typical coverage in the first week of the scandal, they found, 41 percent of the coverage was not factual reporting but “journalists offering their own analysis, opinion, speculation or judg- ments;” and 12 percent was repetition of unverified reporting from other news organizations. That’s a total of 53 percent of the coverage, write Kovach and Rosenstiel, that “was either passing along other people’s reporting or com- menting on the news.” 29 Journalism’s classic functions of witness and watchdog, they conclude, is “being displaced by the continuous news cycle, the growing power of sources over reporters, varying standards of journalism, and a fascination with inexpensive, polarizing argument.”30

All of that alarms a growing number of journalists, scholars and citizens. In Elements of Journalism, Kovach and Rosenstiel sum up that concern – and the state of the 21st Century relationship between the press and presidential politics – with a poignant warning: “At stake,” they write, “is whether, as citizens, we have access to independent information that makes it possible for us to take part in governing ourselves.”31

9 ENDNOTES

1 Michael Schudson, The Power of News, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, 16, 19-21. 2 Leonard Downie Jr and Robert Kaiser, The News About the News: Journalism in Peril, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, 11. 3 The State of the News Media 2004: An Annual Report on American Journalism, http://www.stateofthemedia.org/ narrative_ overview_ intro.asp 4 Joseph Pulitzer, The College of Journalism, North American Review, May, 1904. 5 The State of the News Media 2004: An Annual Report on American Journalism, http://www.stateofthemedia.org/narrative_ overview_ intro.asp 6 Theodore H. White, “The First Insider; How Teddy White Revolutionized Political Reporting in America,”Washington Post July 17, 1988. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 “In the Public Interest? A Content Study of Early Press Coverage of the 2000 Presidential Campaign,” Feb. 3, 2001, www.journalism.org 10 Katharine Whitehorn, “We Never Had Orgasms on the Front Page... Of Course, It’s All Changed Now,” The Observer, Dec. 7, 1997. 11 “In the Public Interest? A Content Study of Early Press Coverage of the 2000 Presidential Campaign,” Feb. 3, 2001, www.journalism.org 12 Simpson, James Beasley, comp., Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations: The Most Notable Quotes Since 1950, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988, 26. On his method of reporting, recalled on his death, May 15, 1986. 13 Pulitzer, The College of Journalism. 14 “In the Public Interest? A Content Study of Early Press Coverage of the 2000 Presidential Campaign,” Feb. 3, 2001, www.journalism.org. 15 Review of Section 315 of the Communications Act (1960 Temporary Suspension of Equal Time Provision). Hearings, January 31- February 1, 1961. Washington, D.C., Govt. Print. Off., 1961. 117p. (87th Cong.) U148. 16 The Campaign Desk, “The Water Cooler: Becky Diamond on ‘Pulling Teeth and Orange Bowling on the Kerry Campaign,” http://www.campaigndesk.org/archives/000338.asp. 17 Ibid. 18 The Campaign Desk, www.campaigndesk.org. 19 Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001, 71. 20 The State of the News Media 2004: An Annual Report on American Journalism, http://www.stateofthemedia.org/narrative_ overview_intro.asp 21 The News About the News, 141. 22 The Campaign Desk, http://www.campaigndesk.org/archives/000080.asp 23 Ibid., http://www.campaigndesk.org/archives/000051.asp 24 The Power of News, 156. 25 William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House, New York: Ballantine Books, 1975, 440. 26 Ibid., 453. 27 The State of the News Media 2004: An Annual Report on American Journalism, http://www.stateofthemedia.org/narrative_ overview_ publicattitudes.asp?media=1 28 “President Clinton Discusses the White House and Environmental Issues,” ABC News, April 22, 2000. 29 Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel, Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media, New York: The Century Foundation Press 1999, 17. 30 Ibid., 5. 31 Elements of Journalism, 11.