George Bush spent most of last year's campaign complaining that the news media were out to get him, and a new book argues that he was right.
But it was nothing personal.According to "Out of Order," by Thomas Patterson of Syracuse University, the media cover all presidential candidates with the gentleness of the Los Angeles police subduing Rodney King. Reporters don't assume candidates are guilty until proved innocent; they assume candidates are guilty, period.
And unlike other accused felons, candidates get less and less chance to speak in their own defense.
Something, writes Patterson, has gone sharply off in American political coverage. Political reporters, says Patterson, now sound more like more like crime writers - or like prosecutors. Their assumption is that the candidates are shifty and dishonest, and that only the media can make this clear to the American people.
To research his argument, Patterson went over newspaper, television and newsmagazine coverage of presidential races from 1960 to 1992. (Even before he gets agreement, he gets a lot of sympathy.) His conclusion is that there are either much worse people running for president or that campaigns are now an official part of hunting season.
So, says Patterson, Bush was right that most of the stories about him - 69 percent - were negative, consisting predominantly of bad news about his administration or candidacy or negative quotes from other people. But Bush shouldn't feel special; 63 percent of the stories about Clinton were negative, as were 54 percent of the reports on Ross Perot.
And the presidential candidates were relatively admired by the media. The Democratic Party had 80 percent negative stories, the Republican Party received 87 percent, the federal government 90 percent, and Congress 93 percent.
There are no statistics on media coverage of the Washington Monument, but it probably doesn't do too well, either.
Moreover, notes Patterson, media attitudes are getting steadily more hostile. In 1992, more than 60 percent of stories about the candidates were negative; in 1968, the rate was 65 percent positive. (In the innocent days of 1960, more than 75 percent were positive.) Bush, Clinton and Perot may not have been Washington, Adams and Jefferson, but it's hard to imagine that they were objectively so much worse than Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace.
Where do reporters get all this bad news about the candidates? Mostly, says Patterson, from themselves. The candidates are increasingly squeezed out of the story.
According to a well-known statistic reported last year, the average candidate quote in a TV news story had dropped from 42 seconds in 1968 to nine seconds in 1992. Networks vowed that they would do better, but during the first part of the campaign, the average candidate quote actually got two seconds shorter. After the conventions - and a brief CBS promise of quotes 30 seconds long - the candidates were again heard for almost a full 10 seconds.
This is just about long enough for the sound bites that reporters complain are all candidates ever say.
TV isn't the only shortener here; the average candidate quote on the front page of The New York Times has gone from 14 lines to six lines. This is actually good news; in the 1988 campaign the number was down to four lines. The tone of stories is increasingly set not by what a politician says, but by the journalist's outlook.
"The candidate's words," says Patterson, "are now usually buried in a narrative devoted primarily to expounding the journalist's view."
And that view, consistently, is that the candidates are dangerous, lying plotters who have miraculously escaped indictment and that voters desperately wish someone else were running. Voters, although shaped by this reporting, also see through it, which is why their favorite campaign events are debates - which reporters attack bitterly.
This media attitude persists, of course, in the reporting on whoever gets elected. As Christopher Hanson narrates in this month's Columbia Journalism Review, reporters sharpened on the new campaign trail were loosed on the no-news story of Clinton's summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard. The situation produced "pieces strongly implying that the way the president vacationed revealed flaws in the man and his record." As in, nobody who putts like that can understand health care.
"There's a real difference between skepticism and cynicism," columnist Molly Ivins said recently. "It's important that journalists make that distinction."
Skepticism - doubting what politicians say and making them prove it - is part of the job. Cynicism - just assuming that they're all lying - is clearly different.
Skepticism is more work.
Cynicism is more fun.
ufnotes,15p5
David Sarasohn is associate editor at The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.