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Déjà Vu in '92
| Article
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20340 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
2,588 Words |
| Author
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S. Robert Lichter
S. Robert Lichter directs the Center for Media and Public
Affairs. |
This was supposed to be the year the media redeemed themselves for their sins of 1988. Responding to widespread criticism, the networks promised to present balanced, substantive, and less obtrusive campaign coverage in 1992. What went wrong?
Campaign journalism has long been attacked for telling us more about who wins and how than what the winner stands for. But in 1988 journalists became character cops in addition to horse race handicappers and inside dopesters. Instead of refereeing the fight, they tried to knock out most of the contenders as the process degenerated into a series of embarrassing media driven campaign controversies. Call the roll: Gary Hart, Joe Biden, Dan Quayle, George Bush versus Dan Rather, attack ads recycled as news. The resulting public anger spared no one, but polls revealed greater disaffection towards the media than either the candidates or their handlers.
In a series of op-eds and internal memos, the networks and prestige press resolved to do better. They vowed that their 1992 coverage would be serious, evenhanded, focused on substance rather than style, and scrutinize the candidates' messages rather than their private lives. To find out how well the media are keeping these promises, the Center for Media and Public Affairs is conducting a scientific content analysis of every sound bite on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts from the first candidacy announcements in 1991 through Election Day in November 1992. A similar study we conducted of the 1988 election coverage gives us a systematic basis of comparison.
Broken resolutions
This interim report finds that campaign journalism is already guilty of the backsliding that accompanies most New Year's resolutions. In 1991 the networks began running lengthy profiles of the Democratic candidates, letting each speak on-camera for as long as 40 seconds. (In 1988 the average sound bite lasted nine seconds.) Then the race began in earnest, and the high-minded approach went out the window.
Six weeks before the New Hampshire primary, the media annointed Bill Clinton as frontrunner, with cover stories in Time and the New Republic along with stepped-up television coverage. Inside the Beltway, the conventional wisdom saw Clinton as the media's man. The New Republic's Hendrik Hertzberg remarked that Clinton's support among political journalists approached "unprecedented unanimity." In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd described the press corps as "smitten and
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