Thomas E. Patterson has some important criticisms to make about journalism and the way journalists affect presidential campaigns. Unfortunately, he is so obsessed with journalists that he casts them as the only important actors in politics and in the process exaggerates their sins (yes, that's possible). Candidates are reduced to the role of passive victims, and political consultants -- whose impact on politics has mushroomed -- hardly appear here at all. And he only barely deals with the fact that voters, candidates, and others outside journalism have actually begun to deal with some of the problems he is rightly worried about.

Patterson's underlying thesis is straightforward and largely sensible. The rise of the system of presidential primaries after 1968 fundamentally changed the way presidential candidates are selected. In the past, the selection process was built around the national convention, which was in the hands of professional politicians. Pols dominated the system, so political values dominated the nominating process.

Ostensibly, the replacement of the politicians with direct primaries was designed to put the task of nominating candidates into the hands of the voters. But things were not that simple. Someone had to mediate between the voters and the candidates. The mediating role was taken on by the press.

The problem, Patterson argues, is that the press does not operate on the basis of political values but by journalistic values. Journalism, he says, emphasizes storytelling and conflict, creating an appetite for what's new today, the slips and errors of the politicians, the "game" or "horse-race" aspects of elections, and the strategic moves of candidates. Political values are different. A politically functional system, he says, would emphasize the issues that are central to the voters, consensus-building aimed at giving a candidate a chance to govern, and the continuities (as opposed to the slips and twists and turns) of a candidate's overall message.

"My argument is that the problem of the modern campaign lies beyond the press, in the electoral system, which asks the media to fill a role it cannot play," he writes.

There is a lot of truth here, and some of these points have been made forcefully by journalists themselves (including my Washington Post colleague Paul Taylor). In particular, Patterson is right to emphasize that for all the attention journalists pay to broken promises, the fact is that victorious candidates tend to govern much as they promised to during their campaigns. Patterson cites political scientist Gerald Pomper's important finding that party platforms are actually a rather good guide to how politicians will govern.

If Patterson had either stopped here, or broadened his critique to raise questions about other aspects of the political system -- for example, the role of polling and political advertising -- this would be a much better book. The problem is that he is so fixed on journalists that he forgets his point that journalistic values are different from political values. As a result, he not only criticizes journalists for being excessively negative and focused on matters of little concern to voters; he also criticizes them for doing their job.

His opening example is typical. He cites a piece by CBS's Eric Engberg criticizing Clinton for being so slow to take a stand during the campaign on the final negotiated version of the North American Free Trade Agreement. "Time out!" says Engberg. "Clinton has a reputation as a committed policy wonk who soaks up details like a sponge, but on an issue which will likely cost him votes no matter what side he takes, the onetime Rhodes scholar is a conveniently slow learner."

Now it's quite true such "reality check" pieces can be misleading. They rarely give a candidate a chance to defend himself or herself from the charges being made and they look a lot like negative ads. But in this case, Engberg had it right, as any honest Clinton adviser would readily admit. NAFTA was a terrible issue for Clinton because it divided his constituency. It did take him an eternity to take a stand. But Patterson doesn't go into the politics of the issue. He simply dismisses Engberg's comments as "fatuous." He takes a similar approach throughout the book, blaming the press for the things candidates themselves do for their own political purposes.

This is part of a larger difficulty with Patterson's argument. He writes as if the press were the only player that counts and therefore he talks little about how the paid thirty-second spot and the fundraising required to get it on the air have shaped so much of the political dialogue. He ignores a fact that ought to be disturbing to the press: that a large percentage of the accurate information voters get about a campaign comes not from the press, but from paid advertising.

There's another problem: the facts Patterson himself cites often belie his argument. It can be argued that the press drove Gary Hart out of the 1988 campaign with revelations about his persona life; but such revelations did not drive Clinton out in 1992. Patterson criticizes the press's large emphasis on the early nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, but he eventually acknowledges that the press goes to these states because that's where the candidates go; and he only grudgingly notes that winners of these contests are not helped as much by their victories as legend would have it. Gary Hart won the 1984 New Hampshire primary. Richard Gephardt and Bob Dole won the 1988 Iowa caucuses. Paul Tsongas won the 1992 New Hampshire primary. None won the nomination.

Finally, Patterson discusses but does not do justice to how much the campaign process changed in 1992, because the changes don't fit his thesis. The rise of the "talk show" campaign and the long debate schedule, actually welcomed by many reporters, gave voters a chance to hear more than the sound bites selected by journalists themselves. This is a better book about 1988 than about 1992.

Patterson's solution to the problems he describes is a shorter campaign, with groups of primaries bunched together in the spring. The trouble is that this would, if anything, exaggerate the influence of the media -- particularly the paid spot -- and, if the southern primaries are any lesson, give the candidates and voters even less contact with each other than they have now.

But this suggestion is certainly debatable and I do hope that reporters ignore what Patterson exaggerates and pay attention to the criticisms he makes that are fair and thus disturbing. Journalists like to think that we serve not only our own imperatives, but also the needs of democracy. But we usually do the first better than the second. Patterson is right about that, and journalists need to think about what that means.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe