Dollarocracy (34 page)

If we begin with the idea that the election coverage in the partisan era tended to be rich and engaging because the broader political journalism was rich and engaging, and that the political journalism of the professional era is rather staid, decontextualized, and establishment-oriented by comparison, we should not expect to have especially useful election campaign journalism today. Put another way, if political journalism does a relatively unsatisfactory job of covering public policy issues and drawing people into civic life, we should not expect campaign journalism to be any different. And it isn't. Most of the
main trends and great weaknesses in campaign coverage Americans lament today became dominant only in the last four or five decades.

Most accounts of the postwar era, specifically the 1950s and 1960s, characterize news media coverage as being very much in the professional mode: descriptive and deferential toward officeholders and politicians. That changed as broadcast media began to redefine campaign coverage.
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By the late 1960s and the 1970s, professional journalism enjoyed its Golden Age, when it had its largest budgets, most autonomy from owners and commercial pressures, and greatest prestige in the twentieth century. The news media also became increasingly important as a factor in determining electoral success. The news media filled some of the void as New Deal party loyalty dissipated and parties became less important as organizing tools in American politics. The number of “independent voters” grew, and straight-ticket party-line voting became less dominant. The importance of news media became especially clear with the emergence of television. As we note in
Chapter 4
, already by 1960 political campaigns were concerned with getting the best possible TV exposure, and initially the emphasis was on news coverage. Print media remained important, in part because the campaign beat reporters had considerable influence on TV coverage. The tenor of the campaign coverage then underwent a metamorphosis. Patterson's research demonstrated that the framework of election stories in the
New York Times
went from 92 percent descriptive/8 percent interpretive in 1960 to 20 percent descriptive/80 percent interpretive by 1988.
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Timothy Crouse captured the emerging role of the news media in his classic account of the working press during the 1972 campaign,
The Boys on the Bus:
“Now the press screened the candidates, usurping the party's old function. By reporting a man's political strengths, they made him a front runner; by mentioning his weaknesses and liabilities, they cut him down. Teddy White, even in his wildest flights of megalomania, had never allowed himself this kind of power. The press was no longer simply guessing who might run and who might win; the press was in some ways determining these things.”
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Former Democratic senator from Alaska Mike Gravel, whose career in Washington began around this time, described the news media “echo chamber” as the decisive element for political success, especially for the White House. “Before most Americans start paying attention to the presidential race, the echo chamber has already promoted certain candidates over others and given
them tremendous advantages that prove extremely difficult for other candidates to overcome.”
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One of the best barometers for understanding which candidates the media deemed legitimate before the first vote had been cast was what Jeff Cohen dubbed “the money primary,” meaning who had the biggest war chest.
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Because of the news media's newfound importance, since the 1970s a sizable industry of academic scholarship has emerged that examines news media coverage of political campaigns. Much of the research, especially the most highly regarded research upon which our analysis depends, is critical of the problems with political coverage. As a rule, this work aspires to delineate weaknesses and convince editors, producers, and reporters to change their modus operandi and do a better job of serving voters and the political system.
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We tend to agree with those observers, like Patterson and Marvin Kalb, who recognized two decades ago that the news media were being put in a hopeless position. “With the demise of political parties,” Kalb said, “the press has moved into a commanding position as arbitrator of American presidential politics—a position for which it is not prepared, emotionally, professionally, or constitutionally.”
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A subset of this research addresses one of the primary complaints of both Democrats and Republicans: the notion that campaign coverage has a consistent bias toward one major political party or the other. One meta-analysis of fifty-nine studies of partisan bias toward one of the major political parties in all political journalism found insignificant levels of bias, at most, in the major news media.
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Specifically with regard to news coverage of election campaigns, we can report that over the years this has not been the major problem—though many political partisans are obsessed with what they regard as their candidate's mistreatment by the news media, and doubtlessly there have been clear instances when it occurred, sometimes with ill-effect.
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In the end, though, this is one area where professional journalism has been somewhat successful.
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But that does not mean there are not all sorts of deleterious tendencies and biases built into how news media cover electoral campaigns, arguably with significant effects. One clear bias is for incumbents. In congressional races incumbents receive far more coverage than challengers, and incumbents win around 90 percent of the time.
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The other side of the coin is that the system
is very much stacked against third-party candidates, and always has been. Ralph Nader, with a record of public service arguably unrivalled in modern American history, was ignored or considered a nuisance by the news media during his 2000 presidential campaign as the Green Party candidate. Back in 1980 when renowned environmentalist Barry Commoner ran as the Citizens Party candidate for president, he was so exasperated by the unwillingness of the news media to cover his campaign that he resorted to using the word “bullshit” in a radio ad to get any sort of press attention.
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Even dissidents running within the primaries of the major parties, such as Ohio congressman and two-time Democratic presidential contender Dennis Kucinich, are often treated by the news media as if they were carrying communicable diseases. On the eve of the critical 2008 primary in New Hampshire, where Kucinich had been campaigning for months, hired staff, opened campaign offices, and enjoyed the support of state legislators and prominent activists, the candidate was informed that he would not be included in the last big debate among the Democratic contenders—even though he was the only candidate raising issues of presidential accountability, budget priorities, and trade policy that polls confirmed were most in tune with the sentiments of likely voters.
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One of us well recalls a conversation with a lead CNN political correspondent in late 1999, when he was already planning how to get rid of marginal candidates like Alan Keyes so that he and the news media could concentrate on the “serious” candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. And we both recall the 2004 media assault on former Vermont governor Howard Dean's antiwar, antiestablishment campaign for the Democratic presidential nod, which culminated in magazine articles speculating on whether a veteran governor of an American state, and a past chairman of the National Governors Association, was too “extreme” or even “crazy” to be president. Notably, this speculation began before the so-called scream speech following the Iowa caucuses, which was so inappropriately and inaccurately covered that CNN would eventually apologize for wrongly portraying Dean as a nut.
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This phenomenon was particularly evident in the news media treatment of Ron Paul in his campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Paul had usually finished among the top three or four candidates in polling, and sometimes in the top two, but he was routinely ignored or treated in a patronizing manner compared to all the other candidates, even those with less
funding and fewer prospects for attaining Republican National Convention delegates. What was Paul's crime? He was outside the elite consensus on militarism, the drug war, and foreign policy. As one British political journalist wrote, “Paul has held his beliefs for years and does not change them to suit a focus group. He has principles and stands by them. This makes Paul admirable even when you disagree with him (as I mostly do). It also makes Paul the one thing that American media and political elites of all stripes can't stand: a genuine outsider. . . . To cast him as a fringe weirdo says far more about the biases and idiocy of the media and his political rivals than it does about Paul.”
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Americans are so accustomed to this media vetting that it seems natural and appropriate. It is simply a catch-22 that goes with democracy: as one newspaper acknowledged, “It's hard to win without media attention, but it's hard to get attention if no one thinks you can win.”
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Why waste time on candidates who do “not have a chance”? But why exactly do they not have a chance? And why is it that in the modern era the only clear way to get attention as a third-party candidate, or a “marginal” major party candidate, for president is to have a very fat bank account, like Ross Perot, greased up to purchase tens of millions of dollars of TV ads?

Even Donald Trump—whose qualifications for public office are unknown and who became an embarrassment to Republicans as the 2012 campaign evolved—received far more intense and encouraging coverage for a few weeks in the spring of 2011 concerning his possible run for the Republican presidential nomination than consumer activist Ralph Nader received for the whole of his presidential campaigns. Consequently, Trump would show up in polls as a legitimate candidate and justify more coverage. We cannot help but wonder how Nader would have done in the 2000 polls had he received the exact same amount of press attention as Bush and Gore and been afforded equal standing in the debates. Here is a rhetorical question: Wouldn't the news media provide a far better service for our electoral system if they skewed their coverage toward all the candidates on the margins, those without the big campaign contributors? The less money a candidate had, the more coverage she would receive! That way the playing field could be leveled and there would be much more competition.
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It is a rhetorical question, because merely asking it demonstrates its absurdity in the face of the entire logic of the money-and-media election complex.
If the question is put another way—Who are the news media here to serve anyway?—the answer is obvious. When MSNBC removed Cenk Uygur from his slot hosting an early-evening program, he said he was told by MSNBC officials that the network was a part of “the establishment” and “that you need to act like it.” MSNBC disputed the claim, saying disagreements with Uygur were over “style, not substance,” and that the network had sought “to develop him into an even bigger television talent.”
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Uygur ultimately moved to another cable network, Current, while the Reverend Al Sharpton took the MSNBC gig and emerged as a major voice in the fight for justice following the shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.
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On the narrow spectrum of American discourse, MSNBC may be decried by its critics as “left wing” or even “radical.” It may be described by mainstream media outlets as safely “liberal.” But MSNBC, owned by Comcast and General Electric, fits very much within the ideological spectrum that most international observers would identify as “mainstream.” It is not a dissident voice. And neither, frankly, is Fox, which regularly scrambles on board the bandwagon to support business-friendly initiatives—such as free-trade deals—whether they are promoted by Republican or by Democratic presidents. While much is made of the ideological “extremes” on the cable spectrum, the amount of money a presidential hopeful has, the ability to purchase TV ads, the closer he or she is to power, and the more that candidate buys into the elite consensus on the economy and the U.S. role in the world remain the surest measures of whether a presidential contender is treated as a serious candidate.
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This is a change for America. It wasn't this way for much of the nation's first century. Even with electoral laws that encouraged the development and extension of a two-party system, the decentralized and highly competitive newspaper industry made it possible for dissident ideas to be heard and for movements to organize around them. The abolitionist, suffragist, Populist, labor, and socialist movements were built on the backs of their weekly and monthly newspapers, which themselves depended to a large extent upon low postage rates for distribution, if not survival. If nothing else, these movements driven by a very different press system were able to force the two main parties to move in more adventurous and enlightened directions than they otherwise would have. But by the final third of the twentieth century, that tradition was no longer even visible in America's rearview mirror.

The centerpiece of campaign coverage since the 1970s has been squarely in the zone that is fun and easy to cover, and that allows journalists to look and sound smart while avoiding difficult and controversial policy matters: the horse race. One study found that some 80 percent of early campaign coverage now dealt with fund-raising, organizational issues, and tactics—issues related to the candidates rather than the issues affecting voters.
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Since the 1990s, research shows, political horse-race/money-race coverage constituted a majority of campaign news in general elections across all media, leading policy coverage by a 2-to-1 or even 3-to-1 ratio.
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The tenor of much of this coverage seemed to be “just how good of a job is the candidate doing manipulating the news media and voters?” The horse-race and money-race obsession reinforced the bias of coverage toward incumbents: by horse-race criteria those leading in the race tended to get favorable coverage for playing the game well and those trailing had all their tactical flaws subject to review. “Horse-race coverage takes the place of substantive coverage,”
The Atlantic
's Conor Friedersdorf wrote, “and the candidate with the lead appears decisive and competent, and the trailing candidate fairly ridiculous.”
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Nor do we mean to exaggerate the quality of so-called policy coverage, as that sometimes entailed reporting of nonresearched decontextualized fatuous claims and charges of dubious value.