Bad Press or Media Sins?

Jonathan Chait wrote earlier this fall: There, I've said it. I hate George W. Bush. Anyone who tells the truth can't be all wrong. Is W a serial fabricator? Or, is Karl Rove—the Siegfried or Roy of the White House staff—a serial fabricator? Stanley Kubrick was considering a new film project before his death; The Story of George W. Bush: Full Metal Dinner Jacket. Bias, story lines, objectivity, image consciousness, money & politics are the deadly sins of today's news media. If this be (fair & balanced) nonsense, so be it!

[x New Republic]
HOW POLITICAL JOURNALISTS GET THE STORY WRONG.
Bad Press
by Jonathan Chait

There's nothing quite like a serial fabricator to get the attention of journalistic scolds. Even if a movie about my former friend and colleague Stephen Glass weren't coming out this week, the big minds of journalism might still be talking about Jayson Blair, The New York Times reporter unmasked as a fabricator earlier this year. And, if they weren't talking about Glass or Blair, they might be talking about The Boston Globe's Mike Barnicle and The Washington Post's Janet Cooke, whose journalistic frauds brought shame upon their own respective institutions. "Unfortunately, we can go on and on with such examples," E.R. Shipp wrote in The Washington Post this spring, after rehearsing the now-familiar litany of media malfeasance. "All of these journalists got ahead by appearing to play the game better than the rest--but only, it turns out, by violating the rules of the game."

Famous journalistic malefactors are a perfectly worthy topic for introspection, since they undermine the credibility of all reporters. It's also perfectly worthy--in fact, utterly necessary--for institutions to change policies and procedures to thwart future scandals, as the Times did this week when it hired its first-ever "public editor," who will act as an internal journalistic watchdog and reader advocate. But, while horrifying and compelling, fabricators tell us little about the overwhelming majority of reporters who don't make up characters, invent quotes, or pretend to be places they never were. Most journalists really do report the facts--or at least make a good-faith effort to do so.

Unfortunately, these good-faith efforts don't always produce good journalism. And nowhere is this more true than in Washington. Thanks to a handful of bad habits, some good intentions gone awry, and a new breed of politicians adept at exploiting these vulnerabilities, today's political reporters routinely provide the public with misleading, sometimes wholly inaccurate coverage of public policy and the officials who make it. Everything from the future of Social Security to the war on terrorism depends on accurate political reporting. Yet this epidemic of bad political coverage has sparked little soul-searching within the national news establishment itself--perhaps because the trouble isn't that journalists are getting the facts wrong, it's that they're getting the story wrong.

BIAS

The most common (and familiar) complaint against political reporters is also the most misunderstood: that the press has an inherently liberal bias. The accusation goes back at least 30 years to Richard Nixon, who believed (not entirely without reason) that the elite press was out to get him. Since then, the right has created its own set of media outlets to counter the perceived tilt left. Last year, Bernard Goldberg's book Bias, an extended diatribe on this very subject, rose to the top of The New York Times best-seller list and was seen tucked under President Bush's arm as he walked across the White House lawn. The tenet that the media are unfairly liberal remains a defining belief of contemporary American conservatism. Just this month, for example, when newspapers were carrying articles about Arnold Schwarzenegger's groping of women, Rush Limbaugh's addiction to painkillers, and the Bush administration's apparent outing of a CIA agent, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz summed up conservatives' reaction thusly: "For the Right, Bad News Day Or Media Bias?; Conservatives See More Than Coincidence in Recent Scoops."

It's undeniably true that reporters' personal views tend to be liberal. A 1996 poll, for instance, showed 89 percent of Washington reporters voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. What's not so clear is how these biases affect coverage. Most journalists insist their commitment to evenhandedness--a gospel spread by the likes of Washington Post editor Len Downie, who refused even to vote because it affirmed partisan feelings--makes their personal philosophies irrelevant. Conservatives, in turn, scoff at this notion, saying that liberals could never put aside their own predilections so easily.

The likely truth is that liberal bias does affect news coverage, but not always in the ways conservatives suspect. For one thing, the elite media are not merely liberal. They're, well, elite. They share the priorities of the educated classes--liberal on social issues but not necessarily on economics. So, while reporters are more likely to portray anti-abortion or anti-gay rights activists as out of the mainstream than pro-choice or pro-gay rights activists, they dismissively characterize enormously popular programs like Medicare and Social Security as "entitlements" and portray politicians who defend them from cuts as practicing "demagoguery." (As Newsweek asserted in 2000, "The Democrats' most tried-and-true weapon was to demagogue Social Security.") Similarly, when Democrats complain about inequality, mainstream reporters and pundits frequently describe it along the lines that Tim Russert did in 2002, when he posed a question about "the whole class warfare issue that's being raised by the Democrats"--a term they would never use to describe any Republican policy, even one that very clearly advantages one class over another.

Another surprising thing about liberal bias is that it manifests itself not so much in outright hostility toward conservatism--although there's some of that--but as simple bewilderment that, in turn, fosters misleading coverage. If you're an Ivy League-educated reporter or an editor living in the Boston-Washington corridor--in other words, if you're part of that class of people who set the tone for political coverage--you probably don't know many true conservatives. Indeed, conservatism may strike you as a completely alien ideology.

Over the years, conservatives have learned to take advantage of this confusion. And nobody has done it better than George W. Bush. From the day he began running for president, Bush and his handlers grasped the superficiality of the national press corps. "I do think [the media] are biased against conservative thought," he told National Review in 1999, "and the reason is that they think conservative thinkers are not compassionate people ... that's one of the reasons I've attached a moniker to the philosophy I espouse." And Bush didn't simply call himself a "compassionate conservative"; he tried to act like one, constantly professing deep concern for the poor and surrounding himself with minorities.

From the perspective of the right, there's nothing strange about an affable conservative who cares about the poor. Nor should there be; for plenty of conservatives, the sentiment is genuine. But reporters treated such traits as evidence that Bush didn't actually support very conservative policies--something he very clearly did. Bush would, as USA Today put it, "govern from the center, rejecting the shrill conservative absolutism that turned off swing voters after Republicans won control of Congress in 1994." Of course, this was precisely what the Bush campaign hoped to do: It was trying to convey the impression that it wouldn't depart too dramatically from the popular policies of the Clinton administration. But the media was (unintentionally) complicit in Bush's ideological sleight of hand.

STORYLINES

Once the news media has settled on a perception of a political figure, it becomes nearly impossible to dislodge. One reason is that the evidentiary standards for a piece of "news" drop if that news seems to fit a preconceived pattern. In 1988, for instance, reporters decided that GOP vice-presidential nominee Dan Quayle was stupid. Quayle certainly was not a brilliant man, but plenty of politicians with equally mediocre minds do not have their intellect savaged the way Quayle did. Part of the reason Quayle couldn't shake his reputation was that any tiny gaffe he committed became national news. In 1992, famously, he instructed a student at a spelling bee to add an "e" to the end of "potato." This incident was emblazoned in the public mind as a symbol of Quayle's stupidity. Few reporters noted, however, that when he uttered the fateful phrase, Quayle was looking at an instruction card that spelled the word "potatoe."

Sometimes reporters reinforce perceptions that they themselves created, and sometimes they merely act as conduits for political attacks generated by the opposition. Earlier this year, rival campaigns attacked Democratic candidate Wesley Clark for having praised Republicans. Once that storyline had been established, anything that came remotely close to confirming it was deemed newsworthy--even if a cursory examination revealed otherwise. Last week, Time magazine breathlessly reported that Clark had praised Bush in January 2002 for his handling of the war in Afghanistan. Never mind that every major Democrat supported the war in Afghanistan and that, four months after September 11, 2001, most were trying to retain a united front with Bush on foreign policy.

One presidential election ago, it was the early attacks on Al Gore's veracity--attacks, for the most part, without basis--that turned a perfectly reasonable statement into a politically damaging mini-controversy. A month before the election, The New York Times took Gore to task because he seemed to invent a story about school crowding: "Mr. Gore stood by his decision in the debate to illustrate the problem of school crowding by speaking of a 15-year-old girl in Sarasota, Fla., who had to stand in class. In fact, school officials have said, the girl was without a desk for only one day." The truth is that Gore was citing a newspaper article about classroom crowding that was true when it was written, but the problem had been subsequently rectified by school officials. But, days later, there was the Times duly reporting on the controversy over Gore's truthfulness--"As the nominees prepare for their encounter in Winston-Salem, N.C., it is Mr. Gore who faces the most scrutiny as he tries not to say or do anything that will cement an image that he puffs up stories and is not to be trusted"--as if the "scrutiny" had somehow appeared on its own.

President Bush, too, has suffered from established media storylines. Only because Bush has an image of being indifferent--if not downright hostile--to the environment did it become front-page news when he postponed a regulation raising the allowable amount of arsenic in water. The merits of the arsenic regulation were highly debatable: A paper by the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute estimated that the regulation would cost an astronomical $65 million per life saved.

OBJECTIVITY

For all the talk about the importance of objectivity, reporters are surprisingly willing to express their opinions openly when it comes to matters of pure politics. In 1997, when Gore defended fund-raising calls he made from the White House by explaining the technical aspects of campaign finance laws, The New York Times reported that Gore's defense was "widely derided as self-righteous and unconvincing." Other news outlets offered similar accounts, yet it's not clear exactly who was widely deriding it, other than the Republicans, of course, and journalists themselves. Apparently, because something like Gore's performance is a matter of subjective interpretation, reporters feel relatively free to state their own views as fact.

Yet, when it comes to real matters of fact--that is, things that involve figures, dates, actual events--reporters frequently take the opposite approach. They are evenhanded to a fault, presenting every side of an argument as equally valid, even if one side uses demonstrably false information and the other doesn't. Bush has exploited this tendency ruthlessly, most memorably in 2000, when he described his tax cut as consuming a mere quarter of the projected budget surplus. "I think it's right that one-quarter of the surplus go back to the people who pay the bills," he said in September of that year. Bush's own figures showed his tax cut would reduce the estimated $4.6 trillion surplus by $1.6 billion, or about a third. But reporters failed to point this out, let alone weave it into a narrative of Bush's mendacity.

During the same period, Democrats cited analyses--using models developed by nonpartisan economists at the Treasury Department--showing that Bush's tax cut would give more than 40 percent of its benefits to the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers. Bush responded with an analysis of his own showing that his tax cut would give a mere 22 percent to the top 1 percent. But Bush's analysis--or, more precisely, his economic flunkies' analysis--arrived at this number by excluding the elimination of the estate tax and the top income tax cuts, the very elements that most benefited the rich. In other words, Bush's "analysis" was a deliberate and obvious sham. But the press treated it as legitimate. As The New York Times reported, "the richest 1 percent of taxpayers would get between 22 percent and 45 percent of the tax benefits, depending on how the calculations are done."

This bizarre approach to policy reporting effectively rewards dishonesty. What's the point of a politician telling the truth if even the elite press will simply throw up their hands and fail to distinguish between truth and falsity?

IMAGE CONSCIOUSNESS

Political coverage is also hampered by the assumption that there is some relationship between the emphasis a politician gives to an idea and its actual importance. President Clinton took great advantage of this during his second term, when he proposed a series of micro-initiatives with enormous popular appeal. Issues like school uniforms and giving cell phones to neighborhood patrols all garnered strong support in polls and helped bolster Clinton's popularity, even though they affected few people and committed only symbolic levels of government money. The media had to cover these issues when Clinton spoke about them, invariably making them seem larger and more important than they really were.

Bush has elevated this trick to new heights. He bolsters his image as a "compassionate conservative" by regularly proposing moderate-sounding initiatives. His support for higher levels of federal education spending, allowing low-income families to deduct charitable contributions from their taxes, and boosting funding for global aids efforts gobbled up widespread press coverage. When he unveiled his budget in 2001, for example, a front-page New York Times headline blared, "first bush budget proposes to raise aid for education"; his promise of more aids funding during the 2003 State of the Union won Bush headlines like "aids advocates praise bush's $15 billion proposal" from USA Today. Later, though, it turned out Bush was proposing to increase education funding by only half the 11.5 percent he'd promised. Instead of asking Congress for $3 billion in aids money, as he'd vowed to do, he actually requested just $2 billion--then fought efforts by Congressional Democrats to fulfill the original promise. And, while Bush continues to talk up the role of charity, he quietly allowed the charitable tax deduction to die so he could use the money instead for other tax cuts.

It's true that when Bush breaks his promises, the press duly reports it. But Bush's words command far more attention than his deeds. Part of the reason for this is mechanical. A Bush announcement is the province of the White House press corps, whose reportage is generally deemed the most newsworthy. Legislative arcana is the turf of less prestigious congressional reporters. So, when Bush announces a new, "compassionate" initiative, the story makes a big splash on the evening news. When it dies in Congress, the story ends up in the back pages of the newspaper. As a result, if Bush wants to portray himself as prioritizing education, the media usually complies, regardless of how clearly his subsequent actions undermine the storyline.

MONEY AND POLITICS

One of the most important domestic political stories in Washington over the past decade has been the Republican Party's efforts to pry U.S. business from its role as a bipartisan influence (for good or, more often, for ill) and turn it into a full-fledged partner of the GOP. The policy goals of the Republican Party and U.S. business are now synchronized to an extent not seen since the Progressive era--in part because leading Republicans, like House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, have threatened interest groups that continue to pursue good relationships with both parties. As Nicholas Confessore wrote in a long, reported piece for The Washington Monthly this summer, Republicans now expect lobbyists to support them all the time, even on issues of ancillary concern. In return, Republicans will take unpopular positions on issues like the environment and health care that benefit those same lobbyists.

Yet this enormous shift, which impacts much of the domestic agenda, has not been woven into the narrative of political journalism. That omission, too, stems from the strange conventions of Washington reporting. It's not that journalists fail to report on business influence; it's just that such reportage tends to get segregated.

One place it lands is the lobbying beat. Earlier this month, The Washington Post ran an incisive story explaining the links between Wall Street--which has donated enormous sums to Bush's reelection campaign--and administration policies, such as cutting the dividend tax, which benefit those donors. Yet, when the dividend tax itself was being debated, such links barely rated a mention in the Post or anywhere else. It's not that the press is shilling for Wall Street fat cats. It's that money in politics is its own, distinct beat with its own, dedicated reporter (or set of reporters). And so stories about politics and policy read as if Washington were unsullied by money and advocates of ending the dividend tax pushed the idea through by force of reason alone.

Another enclave of superb, but underexposed, coverage about the relationship between lobbyists and policy is the financial press. The Wall Street Journal, for example, has covered the nexus between K Street and the GOP particularly well. And shortly after the 2002 elections, the Post business section ran a terrific piece observing that "it's payback time for the distributors and other business groups whose pent-up demands for policy changes, large and small, will soon burst into public." The reason financial reporters can be so blunt, and therefore accurate, is that they could not do their job--conveying information about which businesses are succeeding in winning legislation that will impact their bottom line--if they didn't convey the unvarnished truth. Political reporters play by a different set of rules. If a story like that ran on page one, it would have to be filtered through the lens of "evenhandedness"--"Democrats charge that Republicans are carrying water for their donors; Republicans disagree"--even if one side were demonstrably wrong. That's why the practice of unbiased reporting, as journalists understand it, can actually impede the truth.

It may seem predictable that a liberal would suggest that the deficiencies of the media coincide so often with the p.r. triumphs of George W. Bush. Yet there is a reason for this. Unlike Ronald Reagan, Bush came to office at a time when the voters preferred most Democratic positions on domestic policy. (In a spring 2000 poll asking how they would like to divvy up the budget surplus, cutting taxes finished fourth with a mere 14 percent, behind shoring up Social Security, spending on other federal programs, and paying down the national debt.) Bush has aligned himself with a small but powerful economic minority, relying on its financial muscle to compensate for its lack of a popular mandate. That Bush lacks support for his economic agenda doesn't make him wrong--to be popular is not to be virtuous. But the brutal fact is that the success of Bush's agenda depends upon the media failing to convey it to the public in a clear-eyed way. It's not the media's job to warn the public of the dangers posed by Bush--that's for his opponents to do. It is, however, the job of the media to impart the truth. Their failure has been his victory.

But this is the sort of failure few in the media wish to investigate. Journalistic self-flaggellation is easier when the culprits are a few extravagant malefactors. It's harder when the problem is the basic conventions of political journalism itself.

Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at TNR.

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