Remember Michael Dukakis and the tank?
The two made for a big story in September 1988. Trying to show that he was no softie when it came to national defense, the Democratic presidential candidate got in a tank, strapped on a helmet and took a ride, hoping for “good visuals.”
Dukakis got his visuals, all right, though not exactly the kind he wanted. Though he’d been a soldier as a young man, the 54-year-old governor did not cut a dashing figure in his helmet and its thick strap.
Not to put too fine a point on it, he looked like a geek.
And his geekiness became the story. That, plus the obvious, and somewhat pathetic, political motivation behind the tank ride.
There was no doubt that the ride was a political ploy. Falling in the polls, in part because swing voters questioned his commitment to military strength, Dukakis visited the tank plant near Detroit to illustrate that commitment.
And it was that campaign strategy that led the evening news casts-the strategy and the jokes about how he looked like a geek.
Actually, the tank ride was not entirely without substance. Dukakis was trying to demonstrate that, unlike George Bush, he was committed to building the M-1 tank and other advanced conventional weapons systems, but hardly anyone remembers that, and for good reason: Hardly anyone was ever told that.
With a few exceptions in the print press, news coverage of the event and the mini-controversy it ignited were entirely devoted to Dukakis’ image-making and strategy.
It was a perfect example of what communications scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson calls the “poll-driven, strategy-saturated structure through which the press views politics.”
As recently as 1988, almost everything candidates did was “filtered” before it got to the voters, filtered by political reporters on television, radio, in newspapers and magazines. The exceptions were commercials, which were presented in print or over the air exactly as the candidates and their handlers wanted.
Commercials have been important, but not decisive. In 1988, for instance, Bush had overtaken Dukakis in the polls before a single commercial was broadcast.
In 1992, everything changed. Technological and social changes gave candidates an alternative to presenting themselves through the filter of the professional, and sometimes cynical, political press. The relatively small percentage of voters who watch C-Span on their cable systems can now hear political speeches and press conferences, many of them repeated frequently, right in their own living rooms.
These voters can make their own interpretations of the candidate’s real motivations. They don’t need the professional insiders. With C-Span, which is already presenting political gatherings in advance of the 1996 elections, almost anyone can become an insider.
But candidates in 1992 did more than just go to political events that a few voters could watch in full. The candidates also transformed entertainment events into political events by appearing on the television programs of Larry King, Arsenio Hall and even on rock-music-oriented MTV.
Ross Perot was the first one to use what came to be known as “alternative media.” But Bill Clinton and George Bush soon followed. Nor did the election put a stop to it. The day after unveiling his “re-inventing government” campaign, Vice President Al Gore went on David Letterman’s late-night comedy show, complete with his own version of one of Letterman’s trademark gimmicks-a “top ten” list.
The confusion between news and entertainment is not confined to politics. Last summer, for instance, Chicago’s three network-owned television stations sent a total of nine correspondents to the Virginia and Carolina coasts to cover Hurricane Emily, even though there has never been a hurricane in Chicago and probably never will be.
But during Hurricane Andrew a year earlier, TV news ratings were boffo. People like to watch hurricanes, and getting people to watch is what TV programmers do.
Increasingly, news is driven by entertainment values. Los Angeles stations were set to do live reports from New Hampshire just before the 1992 presidential primary, said Jolene Kiolbassa, a political science professor at the University of Southern California. “But then there was a half-hour car chase in L.A., police chasing some suspects along the freeway, and they could do live coverage of it, so they just dropped the political reports.”
The primary coverage was bumped not because the chase was more important, but because it was more exciting.
It isn’t hard to find something more exciting than politics. As Rutgers political scientist Benjamin Barber concedes, “Democracy is not fun.”
Increasingly, television is important in politics less because its newscasts inform the voter or because television commercials sway voters, but because campaigns actually take place on television.
Candidates may still make speeches at Detroit’s Cadillac Square or Chicago’s Medinah Temple, but the sites now are mostly settings that provide a backdrop for television. The real map of national campaigns is organized not around congressional districts but around media markets.
Campaign crises are television events, too. After Gennifer Flowers claimed early in 1992 that she and Bill Clinton had had an affair, Clinton and his wife appeared on “60 Minutes” to deny the allegation and portray themselves as a happy couple.
The other important events of the 1992 campaign were Perot’s announcement of his availability as a candidate on a Larry King show and the three candidate debates, in which Perot made a partial comeback from the low standing his July withdrawal had caused, and in which Bush failed to give voters any reason to re-elect him. Yes, the professional “filterers” did their post-debate analyses. But voters didn’t really need them. They’d seen the actual event.
Not surprisingly, many of those in the mainstream media, those professional insiders who had been doing the filtering all those years, found disadvantages in this new reality. Arsenio Hall, they noted, didn’t ask tough follow-up questions.
He didn’t. But he did let the candidate talk, which increasingly television news does not.
According to studies done by Kiki Addato, the author of “Picture Perfect,” the words of each presidential candidate took up an average of 42.3 seconds on the evening newscasts in 1968. In 1988, the average was 9.8 seconds, and last year, despite assurances from the networks that they would be more substantive and less flashy, the length of an average “sound bite” fell even farther, to 8.4 seconds.
So it’s little wonder that people running for office look for other ways to get their message to the voters. It’s hard to say anything substantive in 42.3 seconds, much less 8.4.
Nor is it only electronic journalism that has taken this path. Another academic study showed that in 1992, the average length of a candidate’s quote on the front page of the New York Times was less than half the average length in 1960, adjusted for change in the newspaper’s format.
Addato’s research revealed that the candidates were shown on television much more than they were heard. While they were shown on videotape, the political correspondent was talking, giving his or her analysis.
This is neither new nor, by any traditional standard, objectionable. What was different in 1992, Addato said, was that the analysis was almost never about the candidate’s policies, almost always about how effective he was as the creator of his own image. The correspondent was less a political reporter than a theater critic.
Political reporters have always pointed out the strategy involved in any political event. It’s part of the job. When, for instance, a candidate makes a speech-with or without riding a tank-calling for more tanks and anti-tank weapons, one thing political reporters have always done is inform readers or listeners that the candidate may need to reassure people that he is devoted to military strength.
What is different now, according to Addato and other observers, is that many political reporters, especially on television, only assess political strategy and the candidate’s success or failure in selling himself, hardly dealing at all with what the candidate may be saying.
There is some basis for thinking that this kind of coverage is one reason voters may feel alienated from the political process. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the author of “Dirty Politics,” recently conducted a study which concluded that people are more likely to vote if press coverage of a campaign concentrates on how candidates would govern, and less likely to vote if the coverage has stressed strategy and tactics.
According to some observers, this behavior by the political press reflects a real bias in the institution and many of its practitioners. No, this is not the oft-mentioned bias toward liberalism. There is some of that, but it pales in comparison with the more general bias of the political press-a bias against politics.
Political journalists, said Thomas Patterson in his new book “Out of Order,” have “a deeply cynical view of politics and politicians.”
Patterson does not simply allege this as a personal judgment. He cites a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs which found that all three presidential candidates in 1992 “received far more bad press than good.”
Not that 1992 was the first time. In fact, studies have shown that at least since 1980, press coverage of all candidates has been more negative than positive.
This may account for the public’s increasing dislike of politicians. A generation ago, most Americans liked or admired the man they elected president. Lately, polls indicate that they regard him as only the lesser of two evils. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he was the least popular winner since polling began in the 1930s. He was held in somewhat higher regard when he was re-elected in 1984, but even then many who voted for him did not really admire him or agree with him.
As Patterson pointed out, one reason for the waspishness of the political press is that it has been given, by default, a task for which it is ill-suited. Ever since the procedural “reforms” of the mid-1970s, when the number of primaries expanded and so “political parties surrendered their control over the nominating process,” political reporters have been expected to “inspect the candidates’ platforms, judge their fitness for the nation’s highest office and determine their electibility-functions the parties had performed in the past,” Patterson said.
More important, though, is the general souring of the country since the days of the Vietnam War and Watergate. Because politicians lied then, it is assumed that they all lie all the time, and every change in position, every compromise, is portrayed as just another example of their dishonesty.
In fact, since 1980 at least, all three elected presidents have led the country in the direction they said they would during their campaigns, even if all three have had to compromise and alter some specific proposals. Even the most famous reversal, George Bush’s surrender of his “no new taxes” pledge, was not a lie. It was a defeat.
In general, said writer Paul Weaver, author of “News and Culture of Lying,” in the press’ view “politics is essentially a game played by individual politicians for personal advancement, gain or power.” That explains why they ask candidates about strategy and image.
It also helps explain why political journalism is so poll-driven. The poll gives the score, and in a game, what is more important than the score? And it explains why the candidate in any race who gets the worst press is the one who is losing. Despite the supposed liberal bias of reporters, Jimmy Carter got more negative stories in 1980 than Reagan. Carter was losing.
Voters, though, don’t see politics that way. To them, Patterson said, politics is “a means of choosing leaders and solving their problems.” So when they get to ask questions, on “Larry King Live” or at a town meeting, they ask about taxes, pollution and schools.
There is at least one other recent development that has affected the way politics is covered, and therefore the way it is perceived. Last fall, just before the recent economic upturn, the most respected of American political journalists, David Broder of The Washington Post, noted that “the press corps now shares the pervading public pessimism about America’s prospects.”
The reason, Broder said, is that job insecurity had come to the news business. “When our managements start looking for ways to cut costs, we find it as hard as any auto worker to believe that the president is going to provide salvation by some new scheme he unveils.”
The recent economic news has made both auto workers and reporters a bit more confident. But in both industries the same corporate cost-cutting agenda still prevails, and Americans may know less about what is going on around them because news organizations are spending less to tell them.
There may be a connection between corporate cost-cutting and sending Chicago television correspondents to cover a distant hurricane. That’s not a hard job. Almost anyone can stand on a beach with a microphone and describe a storm. It isn’t even necessary to know much about storms. So the station can hire relatively low-wage (for television correspondents) help.
Nor is it hard to stand in a hallway and shout at a presidential candidate about his past sex life or drug use. That helps explain why more television, magazine and newspaper reporters do just that, rather than try to explain the candidate’s position on the budget deficit or higher education. That requires knowing something about the budget and higher education.
The Chicago stations that covered the hurricane don’t staff the Illinois Legislature, which is less exciting but far more important to their viewers. Neither do any of the commercial television stations in San Francisco, Los Angeles or San Diego. “They used to have correspondents in Sacramento,” said author Harold Meyerson, the editor of LA Weekly. “Now they pay very little attention to state government or state politics.”
Unless, of course, there’s a scandal.
Or a hurricane.
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Next: Professionalization of political consultants.
