By Eric Frandsen
Franklin, Jefferson, Washington and the other founding fathers set up our American political system with a series of checks and balances to keep any one branch of government from becoming too powerful and manipulative. Today’s modern press believes it has become an additional check to the system by monitoring and scrutinizing all three branches of government simultaneously.
Some believe our national media makes a conscious effort to report stories fairly and in a balanced manner. Others argue media tends to lean left when it comes to political coverage, especially in a presidential election. Perhaps the media isn’t entirely biased in one direction or another, but there is evidence that suggests network and cable coverage of a major presidential election is prone to take sides.
Institutions have been established for the sole purpose of monitoring and evaluating the content of national news. A few of these media watch dogs worth noting include the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the Brookings Institute, Accuracy in Media, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
The Negativity Factor
A major question arises each presidential election … is campaign coverage fair? The Center for Media and Public Affairs has a staff devoted to watching network news and tabulates information on everything from how much time is devoted to a political topic to how many political jokes are made about each candidate. They have devised a way to test TV fairness. They take all the statements about both candidates that are made on the evening news by journalists, voters and political pundits and categorize them as positive or negative. They add the positives and negatives together and create a fairness statistic.
Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institute submits a weekly column to USA Today analyzing the data tallied by CMPA. In his Oct. 29 column, he reported that Gore’s coverage is 67 percent negative and 33 percent positive (this is actually up from a dismal 81 percent negative rating in week six of the campaign) and Bush is right at 50 percent currently. The one notable exception to this trend of negative reporting is PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer which tends to report, on average, 60-65 percent positive and 30-35 percent negative for each candidate respectively.
CMPA President Robert Lichter believes that election coverage doesn’t necessarily reward candidates for their ideologies or for their achievements, but rather it tends to reward the candidates for their campaigning skills. This was especially true in 1996 when President Clinton received an immense amount of negative reporting during his presidency but received a surprising number of positive stories during his bid for re-election. Gore received some of his sharpest negativity ratings in the weeks following the Presidential debates as reporters hounded him on his personal mannerisms during the debates.
Not only do the networks tend to report negatively toward the candidates but they also tend to focus more on the closeness of the race than on the issues of the race.
Journalists have become so obsessed with polls recently that they choose to spend more time discussing how close the race is and less time reporting on what the candidates are really talking about. Polls have proven to be grossly misleading this year in Presidential primaries in both New Hampshire and South Carolina. Yet, due to the statistical dead heat which continues in all the major tracking polls, nearly two-thirds of the campaign stories are in some way related and based on polls. For a closer look at the weekly Hess Reports, visit www.brook.edu/gs/projects.
Evidence of Bias?
Journalists are usually guilty of following the candidate with the current momentum. This is known as pack journalism: journalists hop onto the bandwagon and speak more favorably of the candidate who seems to be leading in the eyes of American citizens. But since this year’s campaign has been a virtual dead heat for weeks, the media hasn’t really jumped on one particular bandwagon yet.
But that’s not to say they haven’t favored one candidate over the other at times. Early in October, the CMPA reported that since Labor Day, 86 percent of comments on Gore’s prospects were positive, compared with Bush’s prospects at 83 percent negative. NBC was particularly doubtful about Bush; 96 percent of comments were pessimistic about Bush’s chances while 90 percent of comments about Gore were positive. But just two weeks later the tone had changed. In the Oct. 18 study the CMPA reported that network news coverage of Al Gore went south after the first of three presidential debates. According to many of the political experts, Bush was beating expectations and was able to hold his own and was starting to gain momentum.
On Nov. 6, the Washington Post prepared Democrats to blame the press if Gore loses. Staff writer Howard Kurtz argued that if journalists had been as hard on Bush for his weaknesses as they have been on Gore for his exaggerations, Gore wouldn’t be on the defensive. Kurtz supported his claim by quoting three separate commentators on the left. Washington Monthly editor Charlie Peters: “If Bush wins this could be the first election decided by the press and the irony is that I’m sure most reporters will finally cast their own votes for Gore.” Salon’s Jake Tapper called it “soft bigotry of lowered expectations.” And finally, The Nation’s Eric Alterman said, “The media have given George Bush a pass on pretty much everything that matters in a president.” To read the article in its entirety visit www.washingtonpost.com. The Media Morsels at the end of the article are of particular interest.
George W’s DWI
Interesting contrasts can also be made on an even more recent topic. On Nov. 2, two very important announcements were made. One, Ross Perot officially endorsed Bush for President; and two, a 1976 drunken while intoxicated arrest of Bush surfaced. A reporter from a Fox affiliate in Portland, Maine broke the story after receiving information from Tom Connolly, a Democratic delegate to the national convention in Los Angeles and unsuccessful candidate for Maine’s Governorship.
The networks and cable news channels devoted much of their time Thursday night and Friday on the topic. ABC News took considerable time evaluating how the story broke. Fox spent time speaking with Portland affiliate reporter Erin Feahlau who broke the story. CNN spent its time evaluating Bush’s accusations against the Democratic Party of dirty tricks. NBC looked at whether this new twist would actually hurt Bush or maybe hurt Gore worse. And finally, CBS didn’t spend as much time on the breaking story as it spent on what the candidates were doing in their final days of campaigning. Only CNN spent some time discussing Perot’s endorsement since it was on CNN’s very own Larry King Live that Perot made the announcement. Perot captured nearly 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992 and eight percent in 1996 as an outside candidate and founder of the Reform party.
On Saturday, FoxNews and MSNBC online polls were reporting that over 80 percent of those who logged on to vote thought the DUI incident was not relevant to the presidential race. Major newspapers also presented the story differently. National print publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today placed the story inside the paper, as far as 23 pages inside. Whereas smaller more localized papers such as the Dallas Morning News and The Arizona Daily Star along with tabloids like the New York Post put the story on the front page.
FYI
In an Oct. 30 news release, the CMPA found that reporters get seven times as much speaking time as presidential candidates this year in election news coverage. In taking up more speaking time, the presidential soundbite has declined dramatically since 1968. According to the Hess Report issued on Sept. 22, candidates’ soundbites have gone from 43.1 seconds to an all-time low of seven seconds this fall. This year, if voters really wanted to hear the candidates deliver their messages, they needed to tune into the Late Show with David Letterman, Oprah and Jay Leno. Bush spoke for a total of 13 minutes during his Oct. 19 appearance on Letterman’s show, compared to only nine minutes on all three network news shows for the entire month of October.
In addition to all the news coverage that the CMPA monitors, it also evaluates the monologues and opening segments of the Tonight Show, Late Show with David Letterman, Latenight with Conan O’Brien and Politically Incorrect. If jokes were an indication of who might win or lose an election, Bush would hands down win the race. Since Labor Day, Bush has been the topic of 227 jokes, as opposed to Gore being mentioned 156 times. Bill Clinton comes in third with 107 political jokes targeted at him. For a more complete look at who gets made fun of, visit the Center for Media and Public Affairs website at www.cmpa.com.
