Campaign Reform   

A random collection of journalists and journalism- watchers offers suggestions for improving the quadrennial rite of covering the run for the presidency.

I T IS ONE OF journalism's most sacred responsibilities: helping voters decide which candidate seems likely to do the best job as president of the United States. But it is a duty that hasn't always been carried out with distinction over the last several decades.
How are the media doing this time around? And, more significant, what should they do down the stretch to help American citizens gain a clearer understanding of both the aspirants and the issues? Are matters of substance getting the attention they deserve, or is there still too much of the much-criticized "horse race" coverage? Here are some suggestions and insights from a wide variety of journalism perpetrators and watchers:

Tucker Carlson ,
Staff writer, The Weekly Standard, and Washington correspondent, Talk magazine
"Avoid becoming a stenographer.... Avoid writing the story of the day.... Simply recording talking points...[is] not much of a service." In an effort to appear scrupulously fair, Carlson says, reporters are afraid to express an opinion about a candidate's performance. "If a guy is a terrible candidate, let your readers know that." And cut back on man-on-the-street interviews. "Sometimes it's helpful, but not when writing about policy [or] campaign finance reform.... The average person doesn't have a view, doesn't have something to offer.... It makes everybody cynical when you pretend everyone's opinion is equally valuable. Some newspapers pretend that it is."

Jim Naureckas ,
Editor, Extra!, the bimonthly journal of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
"One wish [is] for journalists to move away from the horse race framework and toward one of what policies would a candidate enact, and how would that impact on the American public.... A small piece of the pie goes to what the campaign is about--the governance of the United States." Naureckas says that when a commentator says the public is uninformed, it "reflects poorly on media.... It is their job to tell people what is going on." When the press does cover the issues, he continues, the issues are the ones the candidates raise. Naureckas said in July that he "can't recall seeing a story talking about what Bush's and Gore's position on Colombia is...any number of issues like that...that will have an immediate effect on our country and future--because candidates don't choose to bring them up." If you get "most political reporters alone," he says, "they would not express too much respect for the candidates, [which] comes through in the coverage.... The media ought to be providing the basic information people need to make choices.... They are providing a gloss over the election."

Walter Cronkite ,
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"The large city newspapers--New York and Washington--they are doing quite a good job...spending a lot of time and space this year on issues and personalities of candidates." But in television, Cronkite says, "we are missing the boat seriously.... Evening news [programs] are totally inadequate." Issues are not covered; "days go by without mention." He says with so many newsmagazine shows, the networks "could be doing serious programs." Newspapers, he says, particularly the New York Times, are writing more about the candidates' backgrounds. "There is an improvement there over previous years." In the fall, he says, "TV may take a greater interest." Cronkite also hopes TV goes "a little deeper to analyze debates more thoroughly.... [Normally] a day later, the debate has been practically forgotten."

David S. Broder ,
Reporter and columnist, the Washington Post
"One useful thing is that the public cares more about what comes out of an election than who comes out of an election...certainly more than about the tactics the campaigns are using." Broder says the media should "focus on what difference it may make in their lives if a candidate or party wins.... They are more likely to be interested in what we are writing. "The voters are the most important players in the election.... Walk a precinct in Pittsburgh.... If you listen to [voters], they will tell you how the country's doing."

Gwen Ifill ,
Moderator, PBS' "Washington Week in Review"
"We're in a period of very rapid change in our industry.... [There are] so many different ways to get information--the Internet, C-SPAN, cable networks--a lot of the old-fashioned ways of coverage [have become] outdated.... Networks don't give as much time because there are other outlets.... People can't just sit back and say, 'This is all the news I need to know.' Viewers need to be proactive.... "More people hear about campaign information from Jay Leno than from me.... [We] found that out during Lewinsky." Ifill says she sees newspapers paying much more attention to issue stories, such as George W. Bush's record on education and Al Gore's on the environment. And some news organizations are able to do that better than others "because we have the luxury of time."

Bill O'Reilly ,
Anchor, "The O'Reilly Factor," Fox News
"First, journalists have to stop socializing with the people they are covering. For some reason, many journalists now want to be liked by the politicians. If you are trying to seek approval from the politicians you cover, that is the end of political coverage.... That's the biggest problem in American journalism today, bar none." O'Reilly asserts that "the networks have given up," ceding political coverage to cable. "Also," he says, "if you are looking for political coverage on a local level, forget it.... The stations are so busy chasing fires and murders that unless you are reading a local newspaper...you're not going to know what the hell is going on."

Rich Oppel , President, American Society of Newspaper Editors, and editor, Austin American-Statesman
"Every year we go into convulsions about how lousy coverage of the campaign was. In fact, I think newspapers are doing a pretty good job of covering the presidential contest. This is not the most scintillating campaign that I've witnessed in 35 years, and so we are limited reportorially by the content of the discussion. But I've seen good strong reporting by major newspapers, and not-so-large newspapers, on the backgrounds of the candidates, their financial support, their political records, their appointees and colleagues, and into major issues, such as the death penalty, surrounding them." As for the Internet, Oppel says: "One clear thing that is emerging in all of this is that the American citizen should invest his trust in newspapers and not the Web at this point. There's no sorting out of the credible from the incredible on the Web, unless you rely on newspaper-related Web sites. The Web is filled with garbage, and a consumer should deal with it at his peril."

Cinny Kennard ,
Executive project director, Reliable Resources for Broadcast Political Coverage, University of Southern California
"We really discovered that there are hundreds of TV stations out there that want to do political coverage, and they're not being given the resources to do it." Reporters, she adds, are "being told that the audience doesn't want to watch politics; [that coverage] doesn't get ratings...doesn't generate profit.... Who says the audience doesn't want politics? The viewers are smart; they want good-quality information." The prevailing assumption that the public doesn't care about government news, Kennard says, is "most troubling to me, as a journalist for 20 years."

Susan Page ,
White House bureau chief, USA Today
"I think journalists need to focus on what voters care about--health care, Social Security, et cetera. There needs to be less coverage of the horse race and what's going on inside the campaign. Also, make sure candidates get their say. If you are running a story about a major issue, run a sidebar with excerpts from interviews with or speeches by the candidates. Finally, cover the two things in the campaign that are always ignored: accuracy of political ads and money."

Bill Maher ,
Host, ABC's "Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher"
"The press used to take themselves less seriously, and the country more. There was a compact between the press and the people that the press wouldn't gross them out, they wouldn't compete to get to the bottom of our id because there were more dollars there--they put their responsibility ahead of money. They were already rich, so they more valued the esteem they got for doing the job they were doing, which was basically using judgment about what was important and what wasn't, and not being bribed into the low road. We've gone from a press that felt the subject of FDR's legs was too private to be written or talked about, to one that has no problem telling us about the First Penis. "But the political class has led the way. Ken Starr had to be covered. How would the New York Times in, say, 1940 have covered a Starr report? What language would have been acceptable to people in a family newspaper to describe what was going on? The answer is none; people would have known the president cheated somehow and lied about it under oath--but that's all. Past that was off-limits, and the truth is, everything past that makes no difference at all. The details are strictly for our own amusement."

Barbara Cochran ,
President, Radio-Television News Directors Association
"A lot of political coverage seems to be aimed at a small circle of political junkies.... The key is to make the coverage relevant. To report on differences in proposed policy, find real people and examine the impact on them.... Ad watches and...Web site watches help the audience sort fact from hype. Tape a conversation among six or seven people, then edit it to highlight their views. The audience identifies with people like themselves, not the pundits."

S. Robert Lichter ,
President, Center for Media and Public Affairs
"Basically, journalists need to be less concerned about their peers and more concerned about the public." There's a premium, Lichter says, "on being witty and getting inside dope" at the expense of substance. He also finds writing that "demonstrates journalists' intellectual superiority." What journalists should do, he says, is "get up every day and...make everyone understand how this election relates to their lives, how it affects their lives." Campaign coverage on the network evening news shows has "dropped sharply," Lichter says. "Network news executives said, 'They can go to cable and to the Internet.'... So clearly we are in transition.... It used to be that the networks were the whole ball game."

Alison Byrne Fields ,
Creative director and chief strategist, Rock the Vote
"Young people don't feel that they have enough basic information." What is helpful, Fields says, are charts that outline where candidates stand on the issues, as well as information on how to participate: "Where should they register to vote?.... How do they get an absentee ballot?" Fields would like to see more and better coverage of issues important to young people, going beyond the general idea that youth are apathetic. "Are candidates speaking to or with young people?" she asks. "Are they addressing [issues] from a young person's perspective?" She says she's "been pleased with the number of stories about young people and their part in the process." But she'd like to see more of that and "less attention to the bickering aspect" of the campaign.

Candy Altman ,
Group news executive, Hearst-Argyle Television
"I think there needs to be a commitment made on the part of the television station and its management that political coverage is important, and once that's done, there needs to be some creative approaches to covering campaigns." Altman suggests, "when you've got a really good local race," committing five minutes of airtime a night for the month preceding the election, as the Alliance for Better Campaigns has urged stations to do. "And really doing some creative work with that," she says. "Hear from the candidates and delve into the issues.... I think even when the candidates are reluctant to participate, there are creative ways that you can approach political coverage...[such as] using expanded pieces of sound from stump speeches and present them in ways that are interesting for viewers to watch.... Issues that are important to people--education, health, the economy--are all wrapped up in politics.... We all need to try to do a better job of focusing on that."

Marvin Kalb ,
Veteran broadcaster and executive director, Washington office, Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University
"Newspapers are doing a good job.... Network evening newscasts are attempting to do a better job than before." The worst offenders, Kalb says, are the ubiquitous political talk shows. With tight budgets and intense competition, they "live on outrageous comments" and "really do not have a burning desire to be journalistically responsible." He continues: "There was a time when networks did a rather poor job.... They are actually trying to be more substantive, trying to run political pieces."

Fred Brown ,
Chairman, the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics committee, and capital bureau chief, Denver Post
"I think we concentrate on what I call reporting for consultants. [The media] try to show that we are not being outsmarted by showing a lot of knowledge about how campaigns maneuver." But the readers, Brown says, say they don't care about the campaigning ins and outs; they want to know about issues. "We concentrate too much on the problems and not on attempts to solve the problems." The media should be "holding people accountable for how successful they are in working on or coming up with ideas on solving these problems." That aspect of coverage "seems to have improved a little in the last cycle.... "I think cable coverage has changed the whole equation," giving the public more access to candidates. "Network television has not improved its performance, and it's been rightly criticized for giving short shrift." Newspapers, Brown says, are able to be more analytical and in-depth. The networks, however, are "still stuck in the mode of, 'Politics is not very exciting, and we're not going to devote attention to it.' "

Tony Snow ,
Syndicated columnist and host, "Fox News Sunday"
"The biggest enemy of good journalism is letting yourself get trapped in the speech topic of the day. When that happens, there is not a lot of critical exercise by reporters.... The other danger is feeling a natural affinity to the candidate, such as what happened this year with John McCain. That was a very deliberate and effective seduction of the press, and I was sort of appalled that fewer journalists seemed to know what was going on.... Reporters really need to maintain a very healthy sense of skepticism." But, overall, Snow says, "I think reporters are doing a reasonably good job this year."

Bob Giles ,
Curator, Nieman Foundation, Harvard University
"One of the things that I think journalists need to think about is to make sure that journalists [who cover politics] have clear knowledge of issues in the campaign: Social Security, Medicare, economics, health care.... Journalists need to be more than just scribes.... "Candidates often talk about issues, and their discussions don't get fully reported in a way that connects issues with what the public is interested in learning.... The public is interested in the horse race, but not to the extent of ignoring critical issues.... Voters want to know, what are the consequences of electing Gore or Bush? How are they likely to behave as president?" Giles says by reporting on how candidates talk about the issues and the quality of their advisers, "people do get a pretty good feel for the consequence of investing their vote in one candidate or another." The media, he adds, have been listening to the public more and are doing a better job of covering the campaign this year.