So Bill Clinton is complaining from one side and Dick Cheney from the other. Some in the press will take this to mean we’re doing fine. Allow me to inject some press criticism less easily dismissed.
In interviewing Washington-journalist-par-excellence Elizabeth Drew this week, I was struck by the power with which she counseled the audience to pay close attention to what the candidates say. And don’t think you can do it through the press, she added. Political coverage makes it increasingly difficult to get a full and fair picture. (You can watch the webcast here.)
In a March 11 article in The New York Review of Books, Drew delivers a more detailed press critique. Writing about the substantial flaws in the process of selecting the Democratic presidential nominee, she finds several of those flaws within the press.
There’s insubstantiality: The debates, she notes, “tend to be judged by the press according to showbiz standards: Who can produce the best (usually rehearsed) one-liner; who attacked whom the hardest; who is the most entertaining; who made a gaffe that can be the subject of more stories? Such abilities have little to do with governing.”
There’s unfairness: “Coming in third in Iowa on January 19 — behind John Kerry and John Edwards, while Dick Gephardt came in fourth and dropped out — was humiliating for Dean, but he was treated most unfairly by the press for his climactic speech that night. The networks and cable outlets were particularly unfair in replaying his speech hundreds of times without the very loud audience noise that forced him to raise his voice. In any case, as he explained later, he was appearing before mostly young people who had come to Iowa to help him, and he was trying to boost their spirits.”
There’s credulity: “There has also been a generally deceptive quality to John Edwards’s campaign. The populism is new. A man of considerable charm, and a persuasive speaker as well as being very clever, Edwards has managed to convince most of the political press that he has been running a ‘positive’ campaign while in fact he’s engaged in some rough attacks on his opponents.”
And, inevitably, there’s the horse-race problem: “The press and television coverage of this year’s nominating process has been more superficial and unbalanced than ever … Of course some journalists and editors try to be fair, but, for the most part, elementary journalistic standards have been largely ignored. Far too much of the coverage has taken the form of prediction rather than observation, along with a great deal of speculation backed by constantly changing polls about who is the most ‘electable’ candidate, even though this is impossible to discern so far in advance. (At the close of the 1988 Democratic Convention, Michael Dukakis was predicted to be 18 points ahead of the elder Bush. He lost by 8 percentage points.)
“The race was declared ‘over’ so many times, and so many outcomes were declared ‘inevitable,’ that it sometimes seemed as if the voters were irrelevant. Reporters and pundits kept telling us what was going to happen rather than explaining what’s happened and trying to analyze why. Early in 2003, The New York Times announced that John Kerry was the ‘front-runner.’ This turned out to have been prescient, but at the time it was written it was hard to discern how there could be a front-runner a year and a half before anyone had voted, and months before there was an opportunity to observe candidates and hear their plans.
“Before Christmas, countless pundits and reporters told us that Howard Dean had the nomination sewed up — again before anyone had voted. If Dean won Iowa and New Hampshire, we were told, ‘it’s over’; some commentators and reporters ventured further, stating that if Dean won Iowa, that would suffice. Consider, they said, the fearsome power of the unions in Iowa, who were backing Dean along with Dick Gephardt. Then Gephardt was said to be winning the nomination, and Kerry was ‘coming apart’ — all before anything real had happened. Clark, a man with admirable qualities — and at times a very good candidate — received, on the whole, negative treatment in the press. That much of the press was wrong in predicting Dean’s ‘inevitability’ apparently gave them no pause in making further predictions.
“Such journalism is not only a waste of time but can seriously distort the electoral process. Forecasts by the press that a certain candidate will win may produce contributions, volunteers, and energy (as with the early endorsement of Dean by labor unions) — and the reverse is also the case. That they mislead the public seems not to matter. The entire nominating and election processes need to be reconsidered by the political parties and the press. The voters deserve to be better served by both the politicians and by journalists; otherwise the principle of democratic nomination and election through informed choice is made a mockery.”
