David Shaw: Media Matters
Campaign coverage needs to read between the lines
The media are awash in "he said/she said/we're mum" journalism, "the practice of reporters parroting competing rhetoric instead of measuring it for veracity against known facts."
That's the collective judgment of the two editors and five writers who work for CampaignDesk.org, a Columbia University-based website that's providing daily criticism of the media's coverage of the presidential campaign. CampaignDesk has been especially critical of the media's "he said/she said/we're mum" treatment of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacks on Sen. John F. Kerry.
"In the wake of the first SBVFT spot early this month," three CampaignDesk staffers wrote in late August, "cable news programs for the most part offered viewers two talking heads, one on each side of the issue, to debate the merits of the claims. Verifiable facts were rarely offered to viewers - despite the fact that military records supporting Kerry's version of events were readily available.
"Instead of acting as filters for the truth, reporters nodded and attentively transcribed both sides of the story, invariably failing to provide context, background, or any sense of which claims held up and which were misleading."
Because the cable networks gave the story so much attention, the print media were virtually forced to follow suit, and they didn't go much beyond he said/she said, either, at least initially.
"After countless unchallenged segments on the cable news shows and print articles repeating a variety of erroneous SBVFT claims, the mainstream press Š belatedly awakened from its summer dormancy and measured spurious claims against known facts," CampaignDesk said. "But it had come far too late."
CampaignDesk is the brainchild of the Rockefeller Foundation (which first proposed the concept and has provided the funding for it) and the Columbia Journalism Review, which for more than 40 years has published bimonthly critiques of the nation's news media from its base at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism in New York.
For this presidential campaign, the editors of CJR - as it's long been known within the industry - decided that instead of waiting to give their readers campaign postmortems sometime around Inauguration Day, they'd provide real-time, online analyses.
Hence, CampaignDesk.org - an attempt to "get inside the news cycle and Š straighten and deepen campaign coverage almost as it is being written and produced," rather than criticize that coverage after the fact, "too late, after the voting public had already acted on the basis of what the press had told it."
Leaving aside the increasingly dubious proposition that the public acts - votes - based exclusively or even primarily on what the press reports, the idea of continuous media criticism in the 24/7 echo chamber that defines the contemporary political campaign is an excellent idea. And from what I've seen of CampaignDesk.org, the execution has been equally good - especially in its repeated hammering at the weaknesses of he said/she said journalism.
Steve Lovelady, managing editor of CampaignDesk, says he's been appalled by the "everyday occurrence" of this approach by reporters on the campaign trail.
"Reporters seem to think they've done an adequate job just because they give both sides a chance to state their case," Lovelady says. "But if that's all you do, you may have satisfied the imagined constraints of objectivity, but often you haven't told the reader anything.
"It's the most common and infuriating flaw in the press today. Reporters just don't measure what each side said against the known facts. It shouldn't just be he said/she said. It should be he said/she said/we say - and here's why we say it."
The lesson of McCarthy
Fifty years ago, in the aftermath of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts, many in the news media belatedly lamented their failure to do just that. By simply printing McCarthy's accusations, no matter how wild and unsubstantiated, alongside the denials of those accused - without any attempt to evaluate the accusations - journalists realized they had inadvertently given life to McCarthy's ugly campaign. Many vowed to learn from that experience, and I think it's fair to say that the roots of contemporary news analysis lie at least in part in the soil of those vows.
But the steady stream of charges that the media have a liberal bias has made many journalists gun-shy when it comes to evaluating controversial, partisan charges.
"The press is so sensitive now to charges of liberal bias that it bends over backward to give the appearance of being evenhanded," Lovelady says. "Reporters can and do argue that it's not their job to ascertain veracity. But that is their job, especially when the facts are so available."
Lovelady, who spent 22 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the last five as managing editor, before he left in 1996, says the logistics of campaign coverage also contribute to the prevalence of the he said/she said formulation.
"Campaign reporters are working on the fly, facing constant deadlines, with editors screaming at them, so they're in a hurry and don't take time to track things to the ground," he says.
CampaignDesk also works on the fly.
"We've done as many as 11 items in a day and as few as two, and we probably average three to five," Lovelady says.
More criticism than praise
Not all are negative. One regular section on the site, called "Tip of the Hat," routinely posts favorable comments on campaign coverage. But criticism is far more common.
"When I was first offered this job, I was skeptical that there would be enough to do," Lovelady says, "but I was dead wrong. There's so much bad campaign coverage that it's like waiting for a New York City bus. If you miss one, don't worry - another will come along in three minutes."
CampaignDesk.org insists it's "politically nonpartisan, its only biases are toward accuracy, fairness and thoroughness." But I think its critiques would give more comfort to Kerry than President Bush, and Lovelady doesn't deny that.
"By and large, the campaign press has been tougher on Kerry than on Bush," he says by way of explanation.
To be fair, CampaignDesk did criticize the media for seeming to buy into the Kerry campaign's charge that the Swift Boat veterans were a front group for Bush.
"It may be funded and advised by several people with ties to the Republican Party Š but it is officially unaffiliated with candidate or party," CampaignDesk said late last month.
Lovelady says he received several angry calls and e-mails over that item. I'm not surprised. It seems to me CampaignDesk was guilty of exactly what it had been railing against - bending over (too far) backward to appear evenhanded. The officially unaffiliated position of the Swift Boat veterans notwithstanding, the unofficial assistance of those friendly to Bush was both undeniable and just about the only fact that made their efforts newsworthy.
I thought CampaignDesk was on much firmer ground last week in some of its analyses of coverage of the Republican National Convention. I was especially pleased to see the site criticize CNN's Bill Hemmer for failing to challenge Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, when Giuliani repeated the Republican canard that Kerry is the self-proclaimed "anti-war candidate."
As CampaignDesk pointed out, that statement is based on the "creative cropping" of comments Kerry made in an interview with Chris Matthews on "Hardball" early this year.
Matthews himself has complained that the Bush camp's use of this fragmentary quote prevents voters from judging his comment for themselves, and it was good to see CampaignDesk issue its own critique.
One of the gravest shortcomings of campaign coverage is the reluctance - the failure - of reporters to challenge partisans, even when the reporters know the partisans are contradicting known facts or distorting the record.
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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw at latimes.com. To read his previous "Media Matters" columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.