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politics
For a New Century, New Approaches
by Brent Cunningham
Brent Cunningham is an assistant editor at CJR.
Read enough about Gore’s campaign blunders? Heard all you care to about Bush’s irresponsible past? Or Bradley’s hoop days? Or Buchanan’s revisionist history? You’ll hear more. But not all press coverage of the new century’s first presidential race is in the pattern of the last forty years. The world is changing, and campaign coverage is too.
Minnesota, for example, is a journalistic laboratory in the wake of Jesse Ventura’s stunning victory last year, unanticipated by the press and most everyone else. And the much-maligned civic journalism experiment has evolved to the point where its critics and cheerleaders — both angst-ridden over how to make campaign coverage relevant — are talking about the same things, albeit in different languages.
The early start to Campaign 2000 had editors and reporters wrestling with more urgency than ever over the issue of timing vs. public interest. The Washington Post, for example, capped a flurry of coverage last summer with a seven-part series on George W. Bush in late July. Afterwards, political editor Maralee Schwartz scaled back coverage until after Labor Day, because “the readers aren’t that engaged and it’s expensive to cover a campaign.” At the St. Petersburg Times, assistant managing editor Chris Lavin spent much of the summer “stonewalling” his political reporters who were clamoring to hit the trail. “I think you can almost anger readers by dumping this on them too early,” Lavin says. “The electorate has a much more sophisticated view of when it’s time.”
Two new nonstop cable news channels and a slew of increasingly sophisticated political Web sites have matured since 1996, putting a glut of information at our fingertips. But in this instant media universe, the notion of the clean scoop is gone as stories are chased around the clock. Speed can trump substance. The pressure is greater than ever to, as the Post’s Schwartz says, “not be left in the dust on the big story.”
In many ways the press’s approach to Campaign 2000 remains mired in a twentieth century rut. With Election Day a year away much of the media are already trapped in the pack, looking in all the familiar places for the next Big Story. Back in June, an estimated 300 reporters were on hand for Bush’s non-announcement announcement. In August, 600 covered the Iowa straw poll, an undemocratic sideshow that has never in its twenty-year history predicted a presidential victor. “The central problem with pack journalism,” says Chris Waddle, who edits The Anniston Star, “is that no one ever answers the question ‘Why should we care?’ Because the nature of the pack assumes you know.”
Now the media forces are digging in at Iowa and New Hampshire, churning out profiles and dogging the front-runners, eagerly awaiting the next misstep. Character issues are being probed, polls are being tracked, strategy is being analyzed, and the weekend talk shows are full of the usual predictions and egos. Even the obligatory book recap of the campaign — first done definitively by Theodore White in 1960 — is again on the assignment sheet over at Newsweek.
All this despite ample evidence of a politically disengaged nation: only 15 percent of the public was paying close attention to the race in September, according to the latest Pew Research Center poll; and the steady drop in voter turnout hit 49 percent in 1996, the lowest in seventy-two years.
Will the pack prevail, or will some new ideas take hold? Will the media find ways to engage readers and viewers or continue to lose them? “Politicians are wandering around puzzling over the fact that they are increasingly irrelevant to the people they want to serve,” says Priscilla Painton, Time’s assistant managing editor for national news. “Journalists are facing the same question.” Here’s a closer look at efforts to escape the rut, and some of the forces complicating those efforts.
The New Civic Journalists
In 1996, after a coalition of North Carolina’s major news organizations — print and broadcast — finished a civic journalism project called “Your Voice, Your Vote,” the national media heavies lined up to bash it. Organizers had described it as an attempt to use polling and focus groups to move beyond traditional horse-race coverage and connect with issues that interested readers and viewers. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe all took issue, claiming that poll-driven coverage pandered to readers and amounted to an abdication of the press’s professional responsibility.
This year, though, there has been a sort of quiet meeting of the minds. Civic journalism’s advocates acknowledge the excesses of some of the movement’s early notions — voter-driven coverage good, horse-race coverage bad, for example — and are trying to strike a balance. At the same time, reporters and editors nationwide, many of whom recoil at the civic journalism label, are experimenting with civic-journalism-like ways of making their campaign coverage meaningful to tuned-out readers and viewers. “We want to remain relevant,” says Los Angeles Times national editor Scott Kraft. “That means fewer stories that appeal to political junkies only and more that are really interesting to a broad range of readers.” The result is that, whether they label the effort civic journalism or not, many reporters and editors are trying similar ideas.
At the Los Angeles Times, one strategy is to assign some editors and reporters outside the political team to handle key elements of campaign coverage. The idea, says Kraft, is to bring a fresh, “nonpolitical” perspective to political coverage. The Dallas Morning News has its “Texans Talk: The People’s Agenda,” which uses focus groups and less formal reader interviews, to, as political editor Mark Edgar says, “let people see a bit of themselves in the paper.” The Des Moines Register is, more than ever, using focus groups and organizing candidate forums to shape its campaign coverage. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other Cox papers are “going out into the communities and seeing what resonates with real people,” says Cox News political editor Carl Rauscher. CBS News conducted a major issue poll in September, the results of which will help shape the network’s political coverage.
Time’s Priscilla Painton says the magazine’s campaign coverage is informed by letters from readers, by what the staff “brings back from their kitchen tables,” and by a desire to “define politics broadly.” She points to the lead story in the September 13 Nation section on celebrity lawyer Barry Scheck’s Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence to free the wrongly convicted. “Is it about politics?” asks Painton. “Sure. It’s about race in America. But it doesn’t take place in Washington. In the old days, we would have led that section with Trent Lott tells Bush this or that.”
At The Anniston Star, editor Waddle’s staff is using a Pew Center grant to conduct a series of forums on things like school violence and public education. “I can’t wait around for journalism to tell me what the issues are,” says Waddle. “We have to go to the people themselves. That’s how you take an election and seize it back from the national journalists and the politicians.”
The Washington Post, under the influence of columnist David Broder, was a pioneer of this voter-centric approach to campaign coverage. In November 1991 and again in November 1995, Post reporters fanned out across the country and — backed by a national poll — took the nation’s pulse a year from Election Day. A similar project is due out this month. “That’s not civic journalism,” says political editor Schwartz. “The philosophy of this paper, going back as long as I can remember, has been that we need to be a messenger between the voters and the candidates. A lot of that is Broder’s influence.”
Jan Schaffer, director of The Pew Center for Civic Journalism, applauds Broder as the “classic example” of a reporter who mines voters and produces meaningful coverage. “It’s not that he ignores the horse race, but he acknowledges that it is only part of the story.” Schaffer says the goals of projects like “Your Voice, Your Vote” and The Washington Post’s voter project are essentially the same. “The baseline goal of civic journalism has always been to create coverage that was meaningful to readers.”
The Ventura Factor
As the governor’s race was winding down last year in Minnesota, Rick Berke, the national political correspondent for The New York Times, was asked on C-SPAN about Jesse Ventura’s candidacy. “I can tell you, somewhat embarrassingly, that I was very dismissive,” Berke says now, with a year’s worth of hindsight. “I learned my lesson and now I think we are on the lookout more than ever for the unexpected.”
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Worlds
Apart Come Together
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| Lucille’s
Kitchen is a soul food restaurant in north Minneapolis, the political hub
of a poor African-American neighborhood. Crookston is a farm town of 8,500
in northwestern Minnesota, a world away from Lucille’s.
Or so it seemed. On June 11, 1998, five months before Jesse Ventura was elected governor, the two worlds connected through a new approach to campaign coverage. During a statewide forum on welfare and poverty organized by the Minneapolis Star Tribune and KTCA public television as part of their coverage of the governor’s race, the regulars at Lucille’s and the farmers in Crookston bonded through a debate over the causes of poverty. Someone at another location (the forum linked four communities around the state) blamed single-parent homes. The Lucille’s crowd challenged that as overly simplistic and the folks in Crookston agreed, saying the ravages of the farm crisis made them realize they could learn a lot from their “brothers and sisters” at Lucille’s about dealing with economic injustice. The Polycom, a marriage of the speakerphone and video camera, made the exchange possible. By allowing people to see and be seen (as well as heard), the Polycom can help bring the political debate into people’s lives. “It takes it out of the realm of the great thinkers and brings it down to the level of real people,” says Bill Hanley, executive vice president for content at Twin Cities Public Television, which operates KTCA. During the 1998 campaign, KTCA planted four of the $10,000 devices around the state, and Minnesotans found themselves talking politics and public policy long distance, but face to face, without leaving the comfort of their neighborhoods. The station experimented with interactive video techno logy during the 1996 election, but last year was the first time it was used extensively to cover a campaign. KTCA and the Star Tribune are exploring the possibility of replicating the forums on a national level for Campaign 2000. The technology is also helping reporters make some new connections. “In this business we tend to write about people in isolation,” says Larry Werner, an editor at the Star Tribune. “This technology allows us to see similarities we’ve never seen before.” by Brent Cunningham |
Berke wasn’t alone. Ventura’s victory caught the press by surprise, and the fallout is reverberating in Cam paign 2000. “I think we all need to be careful about making assumptions as to who the nominees will be,” Berke told cjr. “It looks good for Bush now, but it’s early. The voters aren’t engaged yet and you have to leave room in this thing for the voters. That’s who it’s about, after all.”
This campaign season reporters are determined to listen to the voters, including the so-called disenfranchised voters. “That’s a story we want,” says Mary Martin, CBS’s senior producer for political coverage. “The people who elected Jesse Ventura are not the usual suspects. They were new voters and they are looking for a way to get engaged. At the Iowa straw poll, Elizabeth Dole asked how many in the audience were first-timers, and about half the people in the room raised their hands.” USA Today’s politics editor, Gwen Flanders, says the young voters Ventura attracted with his cybercampaign are the same ones her paper wants to win over as readers. “I don’t have an answer for you yet” about how to reach them, she says, “but it is something we are thinking about. And we are hoping for a synergy between our print version and online version to draw these readers in and get them interested.”
In Minnesota, the lessons are more sharply defined. The St. Paul Pioneer Press is rethinking its polling methods. “We used to sort for likely voters,” says senior political editor Kate Parry. “But that means we sorted out the very voters who put Jesse in office.” At the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the goal is to get a wider range of perspectives into the paper. Read: Jesse voters. “We want to be more sensitive to the issues that these groups consider important,” says national editor Roger Buoen. Strategies being considered include putting together a focus group of Ventura supporters and meeting with them periodically over the coming year to get their take on the campaign. The Star Tribune also is critiquing free, as well as paid, media coverage of the current campaign. “There is a sense that the media missed the boat on the Ventura election because we were, as usual, so focused on the major candidates,” Buoen says.
Nonstop news
By 7 p.m. on Wednesday, August 18, Paul Duggan, Austin bureau chief for The Washington Post, had filed his story on George W. Bush’s testy refusal at a press conference that afternoon to answer questions about alleged cocaine use. By 10 p.m. that evening Duggan’s colleague, Post reporter Dan Balz, was kicked back at his home in Maryland, watching Brian Williams run through the day’s headlines on MSNBC. That’s when the brave new world of twenty-four-hour news intruded. Turns out Bush had responded later, after the press conference Duggan covered, to a question about cocaine from a Dallas Morning News reporter, and given more of an answer: no cocaine, the candidate said, in the last seven years. The Post had no one traveling with Bush at the time, so if MSNBC had not picked up on the Morning News story — which first ran on the newspaper’s Web site — the Post might have been scooped. Instead, Balz alerted political editor Maralee Schwartz, found the Morning News story on the Web, tracked down Bush spokeswoman Mindy Tucker in Austin, and squeezed an eleventh-hour rewrite of Duggan’s story into Thursday’s paper. “It was all done in about fifty minutes,” Balz says.
Such is life in the age of nonstop news. Since the last presidential race, MSNBC, Fox News, and an explosion of online media have joined CNN to create a beast in need of constant feeding. “I think we will look back on this year as the wave of the future in terms of how we cover campaigns, because of the rise of twenty-four-hour news,” predicts Marty Ryan, executive producer at Fox News.
First, nothing waits. The news cycle is instantaneous and endless. Stories are updated hourly. The nightly newscast is sometimes little more than a summary of the day’s most important — and already covered — events. Even New York Times reporters are on MSNBC at night talking about stories that will appear in the paper the next day.
Second, when a story must be freshened every hour it can lead to a loss of perspective and proportion, snowballing into the Big Story. Fox News, for example, aired seventy-two hours of Iowa straw poll coverage. After going live with the carnival atmosphere in Ames all day Saturday, Fox ended with an hour long, pre-results show, coverage of the results themselves, then another hour-long post-results show. Their coverage rolled on into Sunday morning, with candidate interviews on Fox News Sunday and a look at who got a boost and who got slammed. “The danger is that the less significant gets magnified because of the vacuum that needs to be filled,” says Michael Tackett, the Chicago Tribune’s political editor. “We must have our radar on. We have to be willing to say, ‘I don’t care if they are talking about it on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC — it’s not a story yet.’”
In some ways, the Monica Lewinsky story was the press’s boot camp for Campaign 2000. It was the first national story where the power of the Internet and nonstop news held sway. “That story taught everybody a lesson in caution,” says USA Today’s Gwen Flanders. “The pressure to match, to get ahead, to respond, is greater than ever, but I think the debate over how to handle all this will be happening much more in newsrooms in this campaign than will ever be evident in print.”
In the wake of the Lewinsky story CNN tightened its system of “circuit-breakers” to ensure that sensitive stories — whether from its own correspondents or picked up from another news organization — are thoroughly vetted before they go on the air. The impact of this in Campaign 2000 was seen in the swarming coverage in August of the Bush-and-cocaine rumor. After asking Bush about the rumor on the weekend of the Iowa straw poll, CNN pulled back until he responded at a press conference the middle of the following week. “It was an issue of proof,” says Tom Hannon, CNN’s political director. “There were rumors, but no specific allegations. We decided there was nothing to report.”
Still, the twenty-four-hour news channels are driving media coverage at least to some degree. “I think it’s a little arrogant to say we are setting the media’s agenda,” says Fox News’s Ryan. But “if we are chasing something, we are chasing it at noon, at 6 p.m., at 2 a.m. And others will respond to that.”
Print is clearly responding. “It’s not like the craziness of impeachment where every news organization was driven by what was on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox at midnight,” says the Post’s Schwartz. “But if I’m at home and I see something on TV that is interesting, I will call a reporter to chase it.” And if the national papers are chasing, the regional papers are getting a piece of the action, too. Peter Bhatia, executive editor at The Oregonian, says he feels a trickle-down effect. “This stuff pops up on TV around the clock and the national media feel compelled to respond and then it trickles down to us and everyone else.”
The Chicago Tribune’s Tackett says that for him, the decision of whether to chase a Big Story is case-by-case. “Let’s say it’s an allegation about a personal matter. We might say we’re not doing anything with it because there is nothing there.” But to stick with such a decision these days, he notes, “you’ve got to have some steel in your spine.”
The Internet Effect
In 1996, some 21 million people got political news online. Today, the average monthly traffic just on CNN’s Web sites is 555 million page views, or roughly six times what it was in November 1996. Numbers alone indicate the Internet will be more of a player in Campaign 2000. But sheer volume is not the only way the Internet has emerged. The technology is deepening the research capabilities not only of journalists but also of their readers and viewers. For example, the quality of streaming video has improved significantly. Carin Dessauer, election director for CNN Interactive, says the network’s AllPolitics site will broadcast debates and other events live. C-SPAN has refined and expanded its Web site, creating a comprehensive archive on the candidates going back to 1997. “This is our Year of the ’Net as far as campaign coverage is concerned,” says Steve Scully, C-SPAN’s political editor and executive producer. With the help of Virage, a software company that developed a way to search video databases by keyword, C-SPAN has created a searchable video archive and is marketing it to other news organizations. The Associated Press is among the news organizations that will feature the archive on its Web site.
Rich Jaroslovsky, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition and president of the Online News Association, says a number of online services are offering this kind of packaged raw political material, and he expects news organizations to make use of them. “It makes the system of coverage more transparent, so that readers can look at the underlying documents and material and see how we ended up writing the story we wrote.”
The campaigns themselves have gone digital. Candidate sites are far more sophisticated than in ’96. Campaigns use them to organize, raise money, get out the vote, and get out the news. So journalists must follow. The Washington Post launched its afternoon online edition, PM Extra, in September. But even before PM Extra, Post political reporters were making good use of the paper’s Web site. Dan Balz recounts a story he wrote in July on anti-affirmative action activist Ward Connerly’s decision to endorse Bush. “We were at a fundraiser for Bush in San Francisco, and I ran into Connerly in the men’s room,” he says. “I said, ‘Don’t tell me you paid $1,000 a plate to get in here?’” Connerly told him he was backing Bush, and Balz had a story. Until then Bush had distanced himself from Connerly and the whole Proposition 209 lightning rod in California. Balz’s only problem was space. He called his paper and was told he could have only five inches for the story. “So I sent them five inches and wrote eighteen for the Web site,” he says.
The Post also just joined forces with Congressional Quarterly to create what Mark Stencel, politics editor for Washingtonpost.com, calls a “politics supersite.” “We will be publishing their stuff alongside ours on the Web site,” says Stencel. “So this allows us to have the best coverage of House, Senate, and gubernatorial races as well as the national stuff the Post does.” On the new joint site, for example, readers will be able to enter their zip code and get information on local races — from who the incumbents are to their voting records and interest-group ratings. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, along with fellow Cox newspapers, launched a new Web site — Cox Campaign 2000 — as part of the chain’s coordinated coverage effort. The site has a major interactive component, including a place for readers to publish guest essays in response to the member papers’ political commentaries. “One of the biggest differences from ’96,” says CNN’s Dessauer, “is that interactive media are taken seriously by the campaigns. The campaigns call us to make sure we have what we need.”
The Chicago Tribune’s Tackett says the abundance and quality of information available this year in cyberspace sharpen the accuracy standard. “If someone has a question about a quote or something I use from a press conference, they can go check it against the actual text posted on someone’s site,” he says. “It puts more pressure on us to get the context right.” n
