Time to get real
The Florida-recount story proved the public has a taste for substance. But will
the media follow through?
by Dan Kennedy
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GET THE BASTARDS:
in 2001 we should see reporters practice the sort of journalism first glamorized when Jason Robards portrayed Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in the 1976 film All the President's Men.
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The 1990s -- Which, after all, didn't officially end until 11:59:59 p.m. this
past Sunday -- were a decade of media one-downmanship. From All O.J. All the
Time to the secrets in JonBenét's basement, from the death of Princess
Diana to the staining of Monica Lewinsky's dress, it was an era when the
scandalous and/or the tawdry ruled the airwaves. More substantive matters were
consigned to the dark corners, rarely to be seen or discussed.
But as a new year (and decade and century and millennium) dawns, I'm actually
optimistic. The reason: the post-election fiasco in Florida.
Yes, on one level it was outrageous. George W. Bush, loser of the national
election by more than half a million votes, essentially stole the presidency by
using every tactic at his disposal to prevent tens of thousands of legitimately
cast ballots from being examined. And the media let him get away with it by
portraying his maneuvers as morally equivalent to Al Gore's bid to have all the
votes counted -- a bid, I'll admit, that was tainted by Gore's own opportunism,
but that never reached the breathtaking depths of Bush's naked grab for power
(see "How a Passive Media Helped Bush Win," This Just In, News and Features,
December 14).
What gives me hope, however, is not the outcome, and certainly not the media's
inadequate performance. Rather, it's the way the public's attention was riveted
by something truly important.
Think back to two emblematic moments: the oral arguments before the US Supreme
Court that took place on December 1 and 11. On each day, the networks broadcast
audiotapes of the just-concluded 90-minute sessions, the only visuals being
still photos of the participants, punctuated by that endlessly repeated file
footage of the justices gathering for their team photo. The arguments were
highly technical, often arcane, filled -- as Bush would put it -- with
legalistic language. And the public ate it up.
"It may embolden members of the media to once again conclude that the public's
attention span is more than a 20-second sound bite," says Democratic political
consultant Michael Goldman.
The story was particularly well suited to media that cater to news junkies.
According to the Washington Post, for instance, the combined viewership
of CNN, MSNBC, and the Fox News Channel averaged 3.2 million on November
8, 9, and 10, the early, most dramatic days of the post-campaign. By contrast,
the average combined audience during the year's third quarter -- when there
was, if you'll recall, a presidential campaign under way -- was just 631,000.
The New York Times reported that the Web sites CNN.com and MSNBC.com
each attracted between 12 million and 15 million individual users in November
-- up from fewer than 10 million in October, the final run-up to the
election.
Of course, far more Americans get their news from the Big Three broadcast
networks than from cable outlets or the Internet. But even there, the Florida
story was dominant. According to the Tyndall Report, a newsletter that
tracks coverage on ABC, NBC, and CBS, the networks devoted nearly all their
evening newscasts to the Florida recount during the six weeks between Election
Day and Gore's final concession -- a far more extensive commitment than they
ever made during the campaign itself, when they blew off virtually all the
primary-season debates (the only exception being a Bill Bradley-Al Gore
encounter on Meet the Press) and could barely stir themselves to cover
the two national conventions.
"I've long thought that the media generally, and television in particular,
underestimates the public," says University of Virginia government professor
Larry Sabato, a long-time media observer. "Real events matter. Never in my life
have so many people stopped me at the grocery store to talk about politics.
We've got the potential for a renaissance in civic interest."
SO WHAT is to be done with this renewed interest in politics? Can it be
sustained? Or will we soon move on to the next sex-and-celebrity-drenched media
moment? The early signs are not all positive. CNN, the most sober of the
all-news outlets, is dumbing down, dumping a lot of its hard-news coverage in
favor of a cheap talk-show approach starring the likes of loudmouthed legal
analyst Greta Van Susteren. Nor can we be sure that news organizations will
stick with substance now that the once-in-a-lifetime drama of the Florida
recount is behind us.
"I think that only works if there's substance to cover," says Emily Rooney,
host of the WGBH-TV public-affairs program Greater Boston and a former
local and national news director. (Disclosure: I'm a semi-regular panelist on
Greater Boston's Friday "Beat the Press" edition.) Within days of Bush's
being declared the president-elect, Rooney notes, MSNBC was broadcasting
wall-to-wall coverage of -- yes! -- the christening of Madonna's baby.
Television is allergic to sustained political coverage, Rooney says, because
focus groups tell news executives that they don't like politics. "Politics has
gone way, way down to the bottom in recent years, and news directors take this
very seriously," she says. Yet Rooney suspects that if the questioning were
more detailed -- if, for instance, viewers were asked whether they want more
coverage of how their elected officials are dealing with specific issues such
as taxes and health care -- then the response would be decidedly more
favorable. "Unfortunately," she adds, "it would make the questionnaire a lot
longer."
Perhaps it's unrealistic to expect a medium as ephemeral as television to do
anything other than turn to the next hot subject. Fortunately, TV is not what
drives the journalistic conversation. To an extent that's not always
appreciated in this post-literate era, the culture of journalism remains
largely a print culture. Yes, far more people watch the network newscasts than
read the New York Times or the Washington Post, but the newscasts
themselves are shaped largely by the agendas that the national papers choose to
pursue.
And there are signs that, at least as far as the press is concerned, the
Florida story isn't over yet. Not even close. The Times, the
Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Miami Herald, using
Florida's freedom-of-information laws, are all doing their own counts of the
rejected punch-card ballots. Their efforts won't necessarily reveal the
identity of the real winner: such an exercise is necessarily subjective,
depending on such things as whether or not they count dimpled chad. But by
going ahead and doing what Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris refused
to allow, the papers will shed considerable light on exactly what went wrong,
and how to prevent it from happening again.
And those are hardly the only issues the press has been following up. The
Orlando Sentinel, for instance, has been looking at paper ballots that
were rejected by optical-scanning machines because they contained two votes for
president -- and has found that a considerable number were actually botched
votes for Gore. Now, if anyone had thought to recount these so-called overvote
ballots, they might have put Gore over the top. (Mickey Kaus, of Slate
and KausFiles.com, speculates that the reason the Sentinel found more
overvotes for Gore than Bush -- even in a Republican county won by Bush -- was
that Gore attracted more inexperienced voters who marked the space for Gore,
then marked the write-in space and wrote "Gore" just to be sure.)
Even more important, controversy continues to simmer over whether the
African-American vote was held down through intimidation, the use of
error-filled lists of felons (who cannot vote under Florida law), and the
presence of shoddy vote-counting equipment in majority-black precincts (see
"Don't Quote Me," News and Features, December 22). The Times, the
Post, and Salon have already produced some excellent reporting on
such ballot-box discrimination. But the final word has yet to be written.
JASON ROBARDS, who died on December 26, was symbolic of the media's tug-of-war
between substance and image. One of his greatest roles was as Washington
Post editor Ben Bradlee in All the President's Men, the 1976 movie
that inspired thousands of young people to enter journalism school. But that's
just the point: Robards wasn't a courageous editor; he played one. It
was Hollywood's idea of journalism, not journalism itself, that was celebrated.
Yes, Bradlee, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein brought down a president, and
yes, they would have been household names even if the movie had never been
produced. But the movie made Watergate exponentially more appealing to aspiring
reporters.
The journalism depicted in that mythic piece of moviemaking could never live up
to reality, so it's unsurprising that the journalism many of these young people
came to practice was one of cynicism more than substance. The media were
largely passive in covering Iran-contra, the great scandal of the 1980s
(broken, if you'll recall, by a small magazine in Syria). In the '90s,
political coverage -- what was left of it, anyway -- consisted mainly of
horse-race election prognostication, the Lewinsky scandal, and pointless
blathering on such topics as whether Gore was too much of a liar and Bush too
stupid to be president.
Consider the media role-reversal that has taken place since the 1970s, when
journalists were considered heroes and politicians such as Richard Nixon were
(rightly) seen as the scum of the earth. Today, polls show that the vast
majority of the public loathes the media -- and one of the most popular shows
on television is The West Wing, which portrays the president and his
staff as sympathetic, hard-working, fully realized human beings. As Matthew
Miller wrote in Brill's Content last March, the show "presents a truer,
more human picture of the people behind the headlines than most of today's
Washington journalists."
We are about to embark on a remarkable few years. A president who lost the
popular vote, and probably would have lost the Electoral College too if his
minions hadn't stolen Florida, enters office pushing down our throats such
right-wing crazies as attorney-general designate John Ashcroft (who once
praised a pro-Confederate magazine that interviewed him) and interior-secretary
nominee Gale Norton (a protégée of anti-environmental extremist
James Watt). Bush also continues to talk up nutty ideas such as his
$1.3 trillion tax cut, most of which would go to the wealthy. This isn't
just bad policy -- it's not even what the country voted for.
The lesson for the media is not to suck up to the incoming administration as
though it consisted of Josiah Bartlet and company. Rather, it is to take their
job seriously -- to keep reporting important stories, and not to substitute
cynicism for serious-mindedness.
"There was a gleam in his eye that said, `Got the bastards!' " wrote the
Washington Post's Lloyd Rose, praising Robards's portrayal of Bradlee.
In the years since, the noble sentiment behind "got the bastards" has devolved
into "gotcha" -- the mindless, meaningless entrapment of politicians in small
inconsistencies and hypocrisies.
Now it's the dawn of 2001. And there are bastards to be gotten once again.