HARRISBURG—In the days immediately following the 2004 presidential election, the national mainstream media has taken a very severe pounding on the critique front. The question is: Was the pounding justified? Regrettably, the answer must be, Yes; and the reason has less to do with the respective merits or demerits of George Bush or John Kerry as individual candidates and much, much more to do with the reporting techniques of the media itself.
For starters: Evan Thomas of Newsweek Magazine probably set the tone for what was to come when he suggested (innocently and off-handedly, I suppose) in at least one public interview that the media’s coverage of the challenger would be worth anywhere from 5 to 15 public opinion points alone to his campaign. A number of independent studies subsequently seem to have born him out.
As reported by the Washington Post’s media monitor Howard Kurtz, a Project for Excellence in Journalism survey found that 59 per cent of the stories about the President during the two-week presidential debate season were “clearly negative.” Only 25 per cent about the challenger were deemed in the study to be similarly so. Additionally, Kurtz reports in a separate account that a second review conducted by the groups Media Tenor and the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that between October 1 and October 22, the major television networks carried 23 negative evaluations of the presidential challenger as compared to 64 for the sitting President.
This study concluded, according to Mr. Kurtz, that the Democratic challenger was the beneficiary of the most favorable television coverage of any single presidential candidate in any presidential election since the Center for Media and Public Affairs first began tracking the reportorial record in 1988. Evan Thomas, apparently, clearly knew of what he spoke months earlier.
What should be even more disturbing to the news consumer is that the conclusions reached in the Project for Excellence in Journalism study came only after a third-party evaluation of the journalistic performance of some of the nation’s most prestigious news outlets: The New York Times and the Washington Post, of course; the Miami Herald and the Columbus Dispatch (for geographical and cultural balance, I assume); the morning shows and the evening news programs of the three major commercial television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC; the Jim Lehrer Newshour on National Public Television; CNN, Fox and five Internet blogs.
(Coincidentally, the Newshour was deemed the most balanced in its coverage with 59 per cent of its reports judged “neutral” and the remainder split almost evenly between positive and negative coverage of the candidates. To affirm that the trend was not solely in one direction, Fox’s coverage was judged to be favorable to the President and negative to the challenger, which probably should not surprise most discriminating viewers. The study also concluded that “not a single CNN story was both dominated by and positive for” the President.)
The journalistic landscape is riddled with other examples of reportorial tilting if not an outright bias throughout the campaign year: Celebrated CBS news anchor Dan Rather and the embarrassing entanglement over fraudulent documents purportedly relating to the President’s national guard service; the internal memorandum from ABC political director Mark Halperin warning that while the challenger “distorts, takes out of context and (makes) mistakes all the time,” the greater evil was the “stepped up, renewed efforts” of the President’s campaign …”to get away with as much as possible…by destroying (the challenger) at least partly through distortion;” the timing and the source of the CBS-New York Times joint plan to expose just two days before the balloting the case of allegedly missing explosives at an Iraqi ammunition dump; and finally, those early and still damnable Election Day exit polls commissioned at a cost of $10 million by a consortium of leading national news organizations which ultimately proved to be so partisanly skewed that British Prime Minister Tony Blair reportedly went to bed thinking he would be dealing the next day with a new President-elect of the United States.
Is it any wonder then that media observers such as Edward Wasserman, a Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, would conclude in an Op-Ed piece published, among others, in the November 7th edition of the Harrisburg Patriot-News that the “mainstream media no longer play a key role in setting the national news agenda.” As a former journalist, myself, I would agree.
But the professor and I part company on another of his conclusions: “Advocacy journalism might rankle,” he wrote, “but its legitimacy within the national discourse seems to be more firmly established now than ever.” Wrong, I say.
There was a time in this country’s not too distant past that reporters fundamentally reported the facts—a kind of “how, what, when, where and why” old-fashioned journalism that attempted to inform rather than subtly persuade the American public and trusted them to make their own decisions on important matters politic or public policy. Advocacy was relegated (and it says here, properly so) to the editorial or commentary sections of print and electronic media alike. If the mainstream media, in this one man’s view, wish to recapture the trust and stature it once held among the American people, it must get back to its roots, focus on facts more than ideology for its story line and leave the advocacy to its editorial writers and/or broadcast commentators. Or else, the ultimate and (for an informed society) most unfortunate casualty of this election cycle will be the media’s credibility with the very people it was intended to enlighten.
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Editor’s Note: Vince Carocci is a former state capitol journalist with the Associated Press and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and, from 1989-1995, served as Press Secretary to the late Pennsylvania Governor, Robert P. Casey. He lives and writes from Camp Hill, Pa.
Copyright (c) 2008 VPC, L.L.C.