Continuation of Hoodwinked!   

1980-84 It was clearly the impossible dream. But the press and the public bought it not once, but twice, from Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan's contention that he could simultaneously cut income taxes, drastically increase defense spending and balance the federal budget.

The chimera, as we now know so well, laid the groundwork for today's debt crisis. In retrospect, the failure of the press to focus on the gathering storm seems remarkable. Reagan talked fiscal responsibility while spending wildly, yet the mounting deficit never became a major national issue.

When Reagan took office in 1981 the budget deficit was $78.9 billion. When he was reelected it was $185.4 billion. But that staggering growth never stopped him from touting his dedication to fiscal restraint. In his 1985 inaugural address he declared that "an almost unbroken 50 years of deficit spending has finally brought us to a time of reckoning. We've come to a turning point..."

In an exhaustive post-election examination in the National Journal of the media's performance in 1980, Dom Bonafede, a journalism professor at American University, found that the media often trivialized fundamental questions.

He cited a Washington Post story on November 3, 1980, the eve of the election, which said, "On most points of domestic policy, Carter and Reagan are already more alike than different." In fact, Bonafede said, "there were distinct differences between them on virtually every domestic issue, including welfare, abortion, school busing, school prayers, the Equal Rights Amendment, aid to education, national health insurance and defense spending."

But the press never laid a glove on Reagan; the legend still lives. Reagan proved as much as anyone in modern politics that image can overwhelm intellect, that the public and the press, when manipulated with style and brilliance, are perfectly willing, sometimes even eager, to suspend rational judgment.

During the campaign Reagan's rivals challenged the notion that he could pull off his unlikely trifecta. As early as January 5, 1980, in a debate in Iowa, the candidates were asked how Reagan's plan could possibly be achieved. Independent candidate John Anderson responded, "You do it with mirrors, because it can't be done." Reagan's chief Republican rival at the time, George Bush, also saw the impossibility, coining the phrase "voodoo economics." We now know that both were right, but the message was never presented loudly or clearly by the media. Imagery triumphed.

Bonafede says that the media failed to focus on the fundamental questions: Did Reagan's approach make sense? Could it work? I asked Bonafede recently, "Were the central elements of Reagan's program a nonissue in the press?" He replied: "I think that's true."

1988 In their book "Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars?" political writers Jack Germond and Jules Witcover described the 1988 race between George Bush and Michael Dukakis as "a campaign of distortion, character assassination and division." What came to symbolize that campaign was a convicted murderer named Willie Horton.

When Michael Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, Willie Horton was granted a weekend furlough from which he did not return. A year later he resurfaced in Maryland where he kidnapped a family, raped the wife and stabbed the husband. The law establishing the furlough program was enacted under a Republican governor, Frank Sargent. Dukakis, under pressure from a newspaper campaign, had repealed it.

But when the late Lee Atwater, Bush's national campaign manager, learned about the Horton case, he and Bush's media consultant, Roger Ailes, decided to use it to label Dukakis as soft on crime. They tested their theory in a focus group in Paramus, New Jersey, and found that it resonated with potential voters. "If I can make Willie Horton a household name," Atwater is reported to have said after the session, "we'll win the election."

Bush began talking of the Horton case on the campaign trail. Ailes also produced a now- legendary television commercial showing prisoners, most of them black, leaving jail. A narrator intoned that Dukakis' "revolving door prison policy gave weekend furloughs to first-degree murderers not eligible for parole." It was a blatant and unfair appeal to fear, with heavy racist overtones.

The Willie Horton gambit, however, was only part of the strategy orchestrated by Atwater and Ailes. They portrayed a Dukakis veto of a bill to require the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms as an unpatriotic act. They set up a Bush appearance in a flag factory. They produced a TV commercial depicting scum and dead fish in Boston Harbor, using footage taken elsewhere.

After the election, Jack Corrigan, a Dukakis adviser, observed, "We were surprised that they paid no penalty for running this kind of campaign." On the contrary, Bush's negatives declined while disapproval of Dukakis rose.

The media magnified the deliberate Republican distortion. Rather than exposing the GOP chicanery, the press granted it free air time. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a media expert at the University of Pennsylvania, has pointed out that Willie Horton's face got more exposure on network news programs than it did in the political ads.

In his book "See How They Run," former Washington Post political writer Paul Taylor reported that Horton became the "most powerful symbol" of the entire campaign. At a post-election seminar at Harvard University, Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich pointed out that Bush mentioned Horton's name regularly in his speeches. "Each time he did," she said, "or at least often when he did, it would lead to a network story. We would have a little network recap and a bunch of newspaper stories that would show a picture of Willie Horton."

Once again, the media fell for a phony issue. The Bush managers understood well the weaknesses of the media, their unblinking willingness to search for interesting angles, however bogus. Bush and his cohorts were playing the race card, and the media tagged right along.

It is true that Michael Dukakis failed to mount a vigorous response to the Horton onslaught. But that is no excuse for the media to permit themselves to be suckered. The media had a responsibility to expose the facts and the cynicism of the Bush campaign. They should have presented an intense critical examination of the Horton ads and explained the unsavory strategy. Instead, they acted as a megaphone.

1992 As the 1992 election approached, there was a pervasive sense among journalists that something had gone terribly wrong in their coverage of the previous presidential campaign. It was widely agreed that George Bush had run a deceptive campaign and that the media had done little to expose it.

The mainstream press collectively, if uncertainly, made an effort to change its approach. And it made some progress.

Nevertheless, it failed in what most journalists would agree should be its central objective--the presentation of an intelligent, meaningful and understandable picture of the personalities and basic issues in the campaign.

One widely shared conviction was that the press over the years had allowed campaign managers, advertising wizards and consultants to dominate discussion of the national agenda through phony events staged largely for the TV evening news programs. Election campaigns had been reduced to battles for sound bites.

The most ambitious effort to change came from ABC. Shortly after Labor Day Peter Jennings announced a radical new approach. "We'll give you the day's headlines," he said, "but we'll only devote more time to a candidate's daily routine if it is more than routine. There will be less attention to staged appearances and sound bites designed exclusively for television."

Within days CBS announced a policy of expanding its political sound bites from 7.3 seconds to 30 seconds, though it soon retreated to 20 seconds, and sometimes a little less. NBC more or less stood pat.

In an examination of ABC's performance in his book "Strange Bedfellows," Tom Rosenstiel, at the time a Los Angeles Times media writer, concluded that "for a year, the American press had taken responsibility for its coverage, even if it did so grudgingly. It had conceded that what it published and broadcast had consequences, that the act of observation altered the event--a step toward intellectual honesty."

One lesson from the Willie Horton debacle did stick: Something had to be done to tell voters about deceptive ads. The networks and major newspapers began running "ad watches" to point out what was true, and what wasn't, in political advertising. That alone was a major improvement.

Perhaps the media's greatest single shortcoming in 1992 was their failure to pin down Bill Clinton on his plans for dealing with the economy. Clinton made the economy the centerpiece of his drive, blaming Bush for its lackluster performance. But Clinton never produced a detailed economic plan of his own, a point almost totally overlooked by the press.

"I think the failure to push Clinton on his budget stuff was a much greater failure than anything we did about Bush," says the Washington Post's David Broder, arguably the nation's premier political writer. Reporters became enamored of Clinton, he says, and thought Clinton would be more interesting than Bush. "There was," he adds, "a suspension of critical judgment about the economic plan."

Of course, not everyone agrees that presidential campaign coverage consistently falls short of the mark. Stephen Hess, a longtime student of the media at Washington's Brookings Institution, believes that on the whole, the press has performed admirably in presidential campaigns over the last 36 years. "I think the press could do a lot better," he says, "but I am sympathetic with what they have to put up with... There are some awfully good reporters out there."

Many in the media who had key roles in covering the 1992 campaign seem satisfied with their performance. According to a survey of more than 250 members of the press by the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press (now the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press), "eight in 10 journalists rated press coverage of Campaign '92 as excellent or good. Fewer than one out of five (18 percent) judged press performance as only fair or poor. The survey also found the press thinking it did a good job on most of the major elements of the campaign coverage"--including coverage of the economy.

Some respected reporters and students of the press, however, are troubled, even though they differ widely on the degree of concern.

It's very difficult to penetrate deliberate deception, "when a candidate says one thing, when in fact he intends to do something else," Broder says. "In a broad sense, the only way you can deal with that is to try to look at character, and that is a very tricky area for us. What we're trying to do is to have a very talented reporter look at the pattern of a person's life."

Broder recalls historian Doris Kearns Goodwin telling a conference before the 1988 campaign of how she developed serious doubts about Lyndon Johnson's integrity. In researching a book on Johnson she found he had repeatedly said his grandfather had died in the battle of the Alamo, but she could find no record of that. She confronted Johnson, who conceded that his grandfather had in fact died in the battle for Texas independence at San Jacinto--but since people outside Texas wouldn't know about the battle of San Jacinto, he'd embroidered a little. Later she found out that Johnson's grandfather had died in bed.

"She pointed out that no matter how trivial the incident may seem, when you find somebody who lies about their personal history, it may be someone who can fake a Gulf of Tonkin," Broder says. "I remember chills running down my spine."

Marvin Kalb, director of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and a former CBS mainstay, says that television networks must accept far more responsibility for presenting candidates to the public.

"Number one, there must be longer interviews with the candidates, and more substantive interviews," he says. "Number two, these interviews have to be built into the television schedule on a regular basis."

The Center has advocated what it has called a "Nine Sundays" program, in which in-depth, hour-and-a-half interviews would be conducted during prime time on the nine Sundays before the election, on alternating networks.

"The issue of length is as important as the issue of predictability--that the American people would know that there will be those long, serious interviews," Kalb says.

Paul Taylor, the former Washington Post political writer, agrees with Kalb that the road to better campaigns must lie with television but has a different solution in mind. He would like the networks to provide five minutes of prime time for Republican and Democratic candidates every day of the week during the four or five weeks before the election.

Taylor wants to expose the politically disenchanted, the dropouts who have become disgusted with politics, to serious discussion of issues in bites small enough for them to tolerate. Taylor quit the Post in part because he feels the press is contributing to widespread disenchantment with the political system. "Our conventions," he says, "lead us to write the half-empty version rather than the half-full."

American University's Dom Bonafede doubts that much is going to change. The answer, he says, lies with television, because television so completely dominates modern American life and modern campaigns.

"If they took an issue and devoted an hour to it--welfare, or the budget, or Bosnia, any issue--yes, that would help," he says. "But by the nature of television they are not going to do it, they are not going to do anything, because they are controlled by the ratings."

Compounding the problem, he adds, is that newspapers "now tend to follow television," although the best papers do a fine job in covering issues--often devoting a full page to exploring a particular topic.

Bonafede fears the 1996 campaign may be just as tawdry as 1988, possibly even worse, given the growing tabloidization of the media. "The print press is going along with this," he predicts. "Hillary Clinton is going to be the Willie Horton of 1996."

So is there any underlying, unlearned lesson, any grand principle to be gleaned from these performances over the last 36 years? Perhaps the most obvious is that the press has not learned how to handle deliberate manipulation. It failed with Kennedy's missile gap, Johnson's duplicity on Vietnam, the "New Nixon" and Willie Horton.

The press continues to have great difficulty in examining substantive issues, particularly the meaning and the implications of campaign promises. Television simply ignores most issues that don't produce pictures.

As recently as the 1994 congressional elections the media failed to examine the implications of Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America." In general, they portrayed the contract as a cheap PR stunt. Neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times made a serious effort to examine its implications. To the networks it was a sound bite.

And in 1995 Colin Powell became a national icon, the media's candidate for president, without ever suggesting what he would do about the economy or how he would handle Medicare.

History does have its lessons. And they are there to be drawn from the last 36 years if we are wise enough to apply them.

One: Legitimate presidential candidates must be provided substantial free, or at least reasonably priced, air time on television to present their views in depth.

But it is not enough to just let them talk. They must be subjected to intense questioning before a national audience by seasoned reporters or informed political observers. This is essentially what Marvin Kalb has concluded, and he is right.

Two: The press must do a far better job in examining the character of candidates. It is tough, as David Broder has suggested, but it is not impossible.

The major failures of the last 36 years involved Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. Evidence of their character weaknesses was abundant. It was there in Lyndon Johnson's 1948 campaign for Senate. It was there in Nixon's campaigns in California. What is needed is detailed reportorial research of candidates' families, friends and enemies over their lifetimes. As Doris Kearns Goodwin noted, tiny lies tell their own story.

Three: The press must pay far more attention to the public record of candidates--what they have actually done in office. Phil Gailey is right that Jimmy Carter's record as governor of Georgia was there for all to see. It was not examined closely enough by the national press.

Moreover, Gailey adds, the press corps "did the same goddamned thing for Bill Clinton in 1992 that they had done for Jimmy Carter in 1976. All this temporizing, the compromising. All these traits were obvious in Arkansas when he was governor... Instead of lifting the sheets to look for a Gennifer Flowers, the press should have been examining his record."

Broder agrees: "There is nothing Clinton has done since he became president that wasn't foreshadowed by the way he acted as governor."

If the nation's media learn these lessons from the last 36 years, the 1996 campaign could be deeper, richer and more rewarding. The public and the cause of democracy would be better served.