STUMP: media and politics

A Little Handwringing for Dean

"You don't have to listen to (the media)," Howard Dean told a Wisconsin audience today.

That wounded tone you hear in his words may be justified.

Three weeks after Howard Dean's poorer-than-expected showing in Iowa and his -- let's call it exuberant -- post-caucus speech to supporters, some TV news leaders say they went a bit overboard on the "scream."

Also, the Center for Media and Public Affairs has found that network evening news coverage was much more down on Dean than any of the other candidates, before and after Iowa. While John Edwards and John Kerry received coverage that was 100 percent and 96 percent favorable (respectively) in the month leading up to the Iowa caucuses, Howard Dean's coverage was only 58 percent favorable. (That's before the "I Have a Scream" speech. After, his favorable coverage dipped to 39 percent.)

CJR's Campaign Desk has spent a lot of digital ink on the media's treatment of Howard Dean. "If Campaign Desk were Howard Dean," contributor Zachary Roth wrote in January, "we'd be tempted to take President Bush's cue and ignore the papers altogether."

Rick Salutin put it more bluntly in Canada's Globe and Mail, in an article entitled, "The Media Disappeared Howard Dean."

But I'd argue that although they may have roughed him up quite a bit, they haven't disappeared him at all. As I write this, "Howard Dean" still draws more Google News results than "John Kerry," who currently has more delegates than all the other candidates put together. Media Tenor International found that even after Iowa, Dean was still the frontrunner in the race for media coverage.

If current conventional wisdom holds up, and Dean exits the race, what role will the media have played in his downfall?

Web Wins Big in Politics Coverage

Much is being made of the Pew Research Center's survey of how people are getting their political news. The big headline seems to be that more people than ever, more liberals especially, find the news biased.

Just as significant, I think, is the finding that more people are abandoning traditional news sources and getting their political coverage from the Internet and cable tv. And Web users are better-informed about the campaigns than those who get most of their news from other sources.

Young people especially are leaving local and network news in droves. More and more of them are regularly getting their news over the Internet (from 9 percent in 2000 to 21 percent in this survey) and from comedy shows like the Daily Show (also 9 percent in 2000 to 21 percent here). But while the Web-informed are among those most educated about campaign events, comedy-show-watchers are among the least:

While late night and comedy shows may not impart much campaign information, the other growing resource for campaign information among younger people – the Internet – proves to be one of the most powerful tools available. Even when the fact that Internet users tend to be more educated and engaged is taken into account, young people who say they regularly learn about candidates and the campaign online are much better informed about the campaign than those who do not go online for such news.

By the way, endorsements, the generators of much media hoopla, don't matter all that much to folks.

Conventional Wisdom

Dennis Myers, a Nevada columnist, writes:

The ascendancy of Howard Dean has illustrated many of the peculiar traits of the national press corps and the political system.

The Washington Post in July said Dean "is seen as the most liberal of the major Democratic candidates." Notice here the weasel words "is seen as." This sentence represents a campaign press corps (with the Post's own reporters in the forefront) portraying Dean as liberal and then describing the effect of its portrayal.

Well, it was The New York Times, not The Washington Post, that wrote this sentence, and Myers' selective quoting ignores the context (the thrust of the article is that Dean isn't actually all that liberal), but Myers poses a valid question about the echo chamber of politics coverage nonetheless:

How often does the press invent conventional wisdom, then fall back on it?

For example, in 2000, the media stereotype of President Bush had him pegged as unintelligent, despite early polls indicating that respondents saw Bush as more intelligent than Al Gore. Whenever he defied this "soft bigotry of low expectations," it was news. (I'll cite Bob Novak for this, asserting that all Bush had to do to pull off a successful debate performance against Gore was talk about foreign policy for 42 minutes without a hitch.)

When we're dealing with vague intangibles like the perception of a candidate, when is it fair or helpful to cite conventional wisdom?

Ethics of Political Coverage

"The best time to deal with an ethical issue is before it becomes a problem." — Bob Steele

Steele's presentation to our merry band of political journalists stressed the importance of establishing a set of values to consider in dealing with ethical potholes. Steele also led a few conversations about ethics, giving us a model for how to ask these questions in our own newsrooms. We're not attempting to write rules, Steele said, but to establish protocols for talking about these issues.

The seminar participants split into small groups and considered four issues: privacy, resources, race, and bias. Here are some of the questions they came up with for each issue, and some of the values they want to uphold in considering these questions:

Plan on it: No Boring Stories

Several dozen journalists are converging on Poynter this afternoon for a five-day workshop on coverage of the 2004 political campaigns. Most of the participants are charged with coming up with a plan for their newsrooms' coverage of campaigns for local, state and national office over the next 52 weeks.

As these editors and reporters described their aspirations for that coverage in their applications, a common theme emerged, best paraphrased by one of our visiting faculty, St. Petersburg Times Managing Editor Neil Brown: "No boring stories."

Nearly 20 years working for a newspaper with a small news hole (the Detroit Free Press) rendered me a newspaper reader with little patience for long and windy copy. Most of the research suggests most readers agree: they limit their reading to stories they find interesting and they continue reading only as long as the story stays interesting.

So far this morning, I've read two politics pieces I found interesting: a discussion of media bias by Stanford linguist Geoffrey Nunberg and a weblog entry by Jay Rosen on the ways the Internet is changing the way elections happen.

Sure, the attributes of interesting can be as varied as any one person's, well, interests. But interesting stories do seem to include the following, less subjective characteristics: reveals something new, presumes no particular point of view among readers, leaves me wanting more.

In an hour or so, Poynter's Chip Scanlan will outline the spine of this week's workshop: a planning process that prompts the participants to break down the next 361 days of coverage into a five-step scheme aimed at producing an outcome they'd characterize as "wildly successful."

Is coverage without boring stories something you can plan for? We're about to find out.

Newsroom Norms and the Bias they Betray

Chicago Tribune Public Editor Don Wycliff is writing about coverage of abortion, not politics, but the lessons may apply.

Discussing a couple of recent Trib headlines ("Anti-choice groups celebrate victories" and "Anti-choice victories alarm pro-choice groups," Wycliff concludes:

"In either case, the flaw was the same: The perspective of those who define the issues involved in terms of "choice" was taken as normative, and the position of those who disagree with them and define the issues differently was characterized in "choice" terms. The result was two headlines that couldn't have been more slanted if they had come directly from the public relations office of NARAL Pro-Choice America."

Wycliff adds: "Bias, it seems to me, is almost always unintentional. But that doesn't make it any less distorting or destructive. And precisely because it is unintentional, it is critical that we constantly question ourselves, challenge our assumptions and recognize just what traps we are liable to fall into, whether on deadline or at leisure.

"We might also add diversity on this issue to the types of diversity we seek and encourage in our newsrooms."

Read the full column.

Brother Against Brother

Last week I saw a political ad that I had never seen before but was all too familiar; "[insert any candidate name] is fighting for you." I thought out loud that I'm not looking for someone who will fight for me, I'm looking for someone who will work for me. But the ad is representative of the political climate today: one big fight.

CBS News has an interesting article about this political fighting titled "50-50 America Is Spewing Venom".

It’s Clinton-haters and Bush-haters. The driving impulse is mistrust; each side profoundly mistrusts, and dislikes, the other – not the policies, but the very essence. It’s personal.

Will journalism be the bridge to this divisive chasm?

Editor's Account of Arnold Story

Los Angeles Times | The New York Times

In a Sunday column, L.A. Times Editor John S. Carroll chronicles the paper's handling of its investigation of sexual misconduct charges against Arnold Schwarzenegger, addressing the various rumors that have surfaced on talk radio and elsewhere.

In a Monday article posted online Sunday evening, Jim Rutenberg of the The New York Times notes that new media outlets such as cable and the Web are providing candidates with a variety of ways of bypassing what they regard as unfair coverage by mainstream media. He also reports that a growing percentage of voters believes the media impedes public officials' ability to do their jobs:

"Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which regularly polls people on attitudes toward the news media, said that in 1985, 17 percent of people said the news media got in the way of leaders trying to do their jobs, and nearly two-thirds said that critical coverage kept leaders from misbehaving. By last year, a third said critical news coverage got in the way."

The Times Factor

The Los Angeles Times' handling of its Schwarzenegger groper story raises plenty of questions about its sourcing and timing, many of them explored in today's Wall Street Journal and earlier in the San Francisco Chronicle and USA Today.

But much of the debate appears to be rooted in ideology, the latest skirmish between those who tend to see various Big Media as mouthpieces of the Left or the Right.