September/October 2000 | Contents

GORE MEDIA COVERAGE -- PLAYING HARDBALL

BY JANE HALL

You don't have to be a yellow-dog Democrat to wonder just what's been going on with the coverage of Al Gore ever since he declared for the presidency. The appointment of Senator Joseph Lieberman changed the pattern momentarily. But consider a few examples:

* "Add Love Canal to the list of verbal missteps by Vice President Al Gore," a Washington Post reporter, Ceci Connolly, wrote in a December 2 article. "The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie Love Story and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste site when he said at a high-school forum Tuesday in New Hampshire, 'I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal.'"

* "Everything was humming along fine for Vice President Al Gore, until little Elián González strayed into the picture," Katharine Q. Seelye began an April 16 New York Times story, adding that Gore, "prompted by no one," had thrust himself into the politically charged debate after "seeming to contradict himself."

* "Gore's handlers are plotting yet another rollout of their candidate," Howard Fineman wrote in Newsweek and reiterated on MSNBC's The News with Brian Williams. "By my count we're on about the fifth or sixth Al Gore (including 'Bible Belt Al' . . . and 'Environmental Al')."

The underlying message of all of these stories was clear: Al Gore is a lying politician who will do anything to get elected -- a theme happily echoed by the Bush-Cheney campaign.

Gore's motives are frequently questioned, frequently framed in the most negative light -- even in the lead of straight-news stories from some of the most respected and influential news organizations. When Gore made an economic proposal for tax relief, The Washington Post said in the lead that Gore "muscled in on the debate" as the Republican-controlled Senate approved its multibillion-dollar tax plan; when he made a speech on the role of government during his race for the nomination against Senator Bill Bradley, the Post's report began like this: "Were it not for the black cowboy boots and the Palm Pilot strapped to his belt, the man doing the talking could have been Bill Bradley."

In contrast, Bush's proposals are not only treated straight, as they should be, in straight-news stories: he's often been given the benefit of the doubt on subjects where he could be vulnerable.

A new study by the Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism underscores this. Examining 2,400 newspaper, TV, and Internet stories in five different weeks between February and June, researchers found that a whopping 76 percent of the coverage included one of two themes: that Gore lies and exaggerates or is marred by scandal. The most common theme about Bush, the study found, is that he is a "different kind of Republican."

The survey (which included editorials and news stories) focused on The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Indianapolis Star, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Seattle Times. It also included the evening newscasts of the major broadcast networks and talk shows such as Hardball, which alone accounted for 17 percent of the negative characterizations about scandal.

My own anecdotal survey focused on more than 100 news stories in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Associated Press, along with other newspapers and features in Time and Newsweek. I also looked at a small sampling of cable talk shows and some network evening newscasts. Many cable talk shows were, as the Pew study found, extremely negative in their characterization of Gore. The evening newscasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC, on the other hand, appeared to play it straighter.

Over all, the Pew researchers wrote, "The press has been far more likely to convey that Bush is a different kind of Republican -- 'a compassionate conservative,' a reformer, bipartisan -- than to discuss Al Gore's themes of experience, knowledge, or readiness for the office."

Comparing the sourcing on stories, the Pew researchers found something that also was evident in my own research: "Journalists' assertions about Bush's character were more than twice as likely than Gore's to be unsupported by any evidence. In other words, they were pure opinion, rather than journalistic analysis."

The substance of what Gore has been saying in speeches around the country often has been wrapped in reporters' cynical language that effectively casts doubt about his motives before he even opens his mouth. The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly, for example, need not have characterized Gore's statement to a group of healthcare workers -- "It is in fact intolerable in the midst of unprecedented prosperity that we have so many Americans who do not have health insurance" -- as "moaning." And, rather than mocking Gore for wearing a Palm Pilot and characterizing him as a Bill Bradley imitator, she could have led with the substance of what Gore said that day. That's the way numerous publications have treated George W. Bush's proposals on education, crime, and other topics. They play it straight, paraphrasing and quoting his remarks. They don't raise flags about his motives right off the bat.

Other stories have similarly signaled in the lead that Gore is a phony and political opportunist. In June, an Associated Press reporter, Sandra Sobieraj, began a story about Gore's saluting preservationists this way: "Wind mussing his hair, Vice President Al Gore sped up the Columbia River Friday in a boat named 'Can Do II,' turning the administration's designation of new national monuments into a campaign event."

One of the possible reasons for the differences on reporting on Bush and Gore is both understandable -- and disturbing. After he defeated Senator John McCain for the nomination, Bush took a page from McCain's strategy of wide-open accessibility. Frank Bruni, who is covering Bush for The New York Times, wrote on April 14 that Bush "not only slaps reporters' backs but also rubs the tops of their heads and, in a few instances, pinches their cheeks. It is the tactile equivalent of the nicknames he doles out to many of them and belongs to a teasing style of interpersonal relationships that undoubtedly harks back to his fraternity days."

In a front-page article in The Washington Post on June 15 headlined chatter at 40,000 feet: next to bush, a first-class schmoozer, gore's in coach, the media reporter Howard Kurtz observed, "Bush makes the reporters feel that they each have a personal relationship with him." Noting Gore's stiff style and lack of access, with only a handful of press conferences in the previous three months, Kurtz offered a possible explanation for the way the two candidates have been covered: "Most reporters insist their daily coverage is not influenced by whether a candidate is friendly or distant. But these sharply divergent views of the presidential contenders from the rear of their campaign planes help explain why Bush is consistently portrayed as relaxed and confident and Gore as someone who often fails to connect with people."

When Bush picked his running mate, for example, The Washington Post, in a news-analysis piece, saw the selection of former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney as suggesting that Bush "is confident in his campaign, his electability, and in the core Republican philosophy," not, as it could also be portrayed, as a sign of weakness, inexperience, or needing someone from his father's administration to do the heavy lifting. Again, the contrast with Gore is what stands out: Gore's detailed knowledge of public affairs is often used against him. He's described as a policy wonk and a control freak.

Even as the coverage on Bush turned somewhat more skeptical with the Republican convention, Time magazine, in a cover story titled "Inside the Bush Dynasty," wrote, "By every appearance, they lack the Roosevelts' intensity or the Kennedys' unembarrassed ambition. Yet they are poised to surpass them all. Theirs is the Quiet Dynasty . . . . The Bush code is not really about power; it is about winning and achieving, doing your best, better than the other guy . . . ."

Tell that to Al Gore, who has a family legacy (a distinguished southern Senator, Al Gore, Sr.) that often gets translated into: Al Gore really grew up in a fancy Washington, D.C. hotel.

To be sure, Gore has appeared to be struggling with the way he presents himself as a candidate, and he may have handed his critics ammunition with his wardrobe makeover, the hiring of the "alpha-male" expert Naomi Wolf and, more seriously, Clintonian legalisms such as "no controlling legal authority" in explaining his possible involvement in questionable fund-raising. But some of the events that have become code words for Gore's exaggerations or evasions are much more complicated than those code words suggest. Bob Somerby -- who runs a press-critique Web site called Dailyhowler.com -- first reported several of these inconsistencies; the journalist Robert Parry also wrote about them in an article in The Washington Monthly this April. Examples:

* Although Gore has been lambasted (in news articles, editorials, and talk shows) for saying he and his wife, Tipper, were the models for the characters in Erich Segal's novel Love Story, Segal confirmed in an interview with The New York Times that, as a young man at Harvard, Gore, along with the actor Tommy Lee Jones, was indeed the model for the male character. (Segal also suggested that Gore's notion that Tipper was also a model had been picked up from a reporting error in the Nashville Tennessean.)

* Gore has been quoted directly -- in derisive comments by Republicans as well as in news stories -- as claiming that he "invented" the Internet. In fact, what he said in that interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer was, "During my service in Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." He may have been self-aggrandizing. But he didn't say he invented the Internet -- and, as several Internet experts said when the jokes came flying, Gore did play an important role while in Congress in developing the Internet.

* In the Love Canal flap, The Washington Post and The New York Times both misquoted Gore as saying at a high-school appearance in New Hampshire in November, "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal . . . I was the one that started it all." In fact, what Gore had said was, "That was the one that started it all." He made his remarks in the context of telling the high-school students about another high-school student, in Toone, Tennessee, who had alerted his congressional staff to problems with toxic waste. Both newspapers eventually ran corrections -- but not until the damage had been done.

* On the Elián flap, while many critics derided Gore for pandering to Cuban-Americans, his position from the start had been that the matter should be resolved in family court -- and he was responding to legislation that would allow the child to stay in the U.S. while the matter was resolved.

As the Democratic convention approached there were signs that Gore's press was improving. Gore's proposals for child-care and other family-friendly proposals were treated seriously and non-ironically in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other publications. And, in a strongly worded column after the Republican convention, the Post's Richard Cohen said that George W. Bush had "lied" about several claims -- including the Clinton administration's record on Social Security, his assertion (later denied by the Army) about two Army divisions being unprepared for combat, and, of course, his wildly applauded joke about Al Gore "inventing" the Internet.

Cohen wrote, "You may recoil from my use of the world 'lie.' I admit it's a bit strong -- but purposely so. It's a word journalists are loathe to use, and politicians know it." Bush and Cheney, he went on, "are getting away with rhetorical murder," and we the media critiquing Bush's speech "graded him for poise, for humor, for simplicity of language, and for his message. We neglected truth. Some of what Bush said wasn't true. In contrast, poor Al Gore has not been able to make a single exaggeration or the slightest fib without the hall monitors of the press issuing multiple demerits."

It's late in the game for Al Gore to be getting a fair shake from the media. But he has been getting better press since he hired a new media adviser, Mark Fabiani, and began doing more interviews.

"Gore's access has improved in the past few weeks, and he has developed more of a regular rapport with the press," says the Post's Ceci Connolly. "People who have traveled with both Gore and Bush have been struck by how smart and knowledgeable Gore is, on Medicare and other topics."

If I were Al Gore, I might hear such a statement and ask the media, 'Who's changed here, me or you?'

Jane Hall teaches courses in politics and the media and journalism ethics in the School of Communication at American University. She is a former media reporter for the Los Angeles Times.