Special to Illinois Times
IOWA CITY — With less than two weeks before Iowans meet at precinct caucuses to cast the first votes of the 2004 presidential campaign, candidates are zigzagging across the state as they have been for months, rallying the troops and trying to woo the last of the undecided.
Traveling with the candidates — or at least with some of them — are dozens of reporters, ears open and pens poised. Their decisions determine what you read in the papers and what you see on TV, and what you don’t. And that, at least in part, determines the race itself.
Covering politics is a bit like covering a house fire while simultaneously pouring gasoline on the flames. Newspapers conduct their own polls and then write stories about the results. Candidates make off-the-cuff remarks to reporters in one-on-one interviews, then watch as other news outlets spend the next week underscoring the gaffes. The media focus on certain candidates and then report on how much media attention they’re getting.
Reporting decisions — what quotes to use, whom to cover — often affect a candidate’s standing. The media then write stories about the new standing and use it as a tool to make future reporting decisions. As U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., told me during a recent campaign event in Iowa City, “It seems to always be horse-race coverage, rather than what’s the race about.”
Kerry’s complaint is less with the fairness of the coverage than its depth: “[Polls] almost become self-perpetuating. Why not show Americans what somebody wants to do for health care or what their real position is on the war or what their real position is on tax breaks or something? I think those are real differences that people ought to be able to measure.”
Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich, however, is more upset about what is likely the media’s most important decision: who deserves to be covered. He may have a case.
Kucinich is almost always lumped with activist Rev. Al Sharpton and former Illinois senator Carol Moseley Braun as a “lower-tier” candidate, meaning he’s not viewed as having a real shot of winning the nomination.
“Often it’s very hard to tell how that determination has been arrived at. It’s not in terms of polls, and it’s not in terms of money,” says Kucinich campaign spokesman David Swanson, noting that many national polls show nearly all of the candidates jammed together in single digits. Unlike Braun and Sharpton, Kucinich has campaigned actively in Iowa and early primary states, and he has raised several million dollars more than the two.
Swanson says he is “disappointed, shocked, scandalized” by the lack of media coverage, and the Kucinich campaign has even made the issue a rallying point for supporters. A chart on its campaign Web site shows the number of TV mentions for both Kucinich and former Vermont governor Howard Dean, along with a corresponding spike in Dean’s poll numbers.
“Taking polls for what they are, more than anything else they’re an indication of mentions in the media,” Swanson asserts. “You have thousands of mentions of a candidate in the media, and they’re on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and they move up in the polls. No one should be surprised by that.”
Many in the media defend the selective coverage. “You have to figure out why you’re covering people,” says an associate producer for CBS’s political unit, which primarily covers the frontrunners. “You have to use your resources with respect to who has a chance of winning.”
Rick Berke, who heads the political team for the New York Times and is the paper’s national political correspondent, says, “It wasn’t even a hard decision” not to assign a full-time reporter to the Kucinich campaign. “He’s not as serious a candidate, just judging from the polls, the staff, the organization, everything. We make judgments, but that’s what we’re paid to do.”
But Swanson says that such decisions create an atmosphere where journalists try to announce the winner before any votes have been cast. “The media is telling the public, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ve got it under control.’ ”
Jeff Schneider, vice president for ABC News, argues that if any media outlet should be exempt from such criticism, it should be his. For months, ABC had reporters traveling full-time with all nine candidates; it was the only news organization to do so. The network is hosting three debates, and “The Note,” ABC’s online political newsletter, has become a Bible of sorts for those covering the race.
But even ABC drew the ire of the Kucinich campaign in mid-December. A day after an ABC News debate loaded with horse-race style questions, the network pulled its full-time reporters from the Kucinich, Braun, and Sharpton campaigns.
“It was sort of the laughable extreme of this slanted coverage in that the candidate who stood out the most in the debate had his coverage reduced the next day,” Swanson says. Kucinich had received cheers from the crowd after criticizing moderator Ted Koppel’s line of questioning. “You can claim that it had nothing to do with the debate, despite Koppel’s widely known embarrassment. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s likely retaliation.”
Schneider insists that the decision had nothing to do with the debate. In fact, he says, the decision was based on available resources and was made before the debate, although neither the campaigns nor the reporters themselves had been alerted ahead of time. It does seem highly unlikely that a network would remove a reporter from a campaign out of spite. But that doesn’t change the fact that Kucinich is still receiving almost no media attention. “It’s one thing to say that it’s sour grapes to complain about the media coverage,” says Swanson. “But why not give fair media coverage and see what happens? Why not try that experiment?”
If Kucinich has something to complain about, Dean and retired general Wesley Clark certainly do not. Dean has long been labeled “frontrunner,” and Clark’s entrance into the race was covered with a furor only dreamed about by the “lower tier.” So why them — and not Kucinich?
Spokespersons for the Dean campaign declined comment for this story. Perhaps they’re afraid of alienating the press that has been so good to them. So good, in fact, that Kucinich’s campaign often cites Dean’s love affair with the media in decrying its own lack of coverage. Basil Talbott, a former political reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, thinks the comparison is unfair.
“You don’t compare the front-runner to the also-ran,” says Talbott, who now lives and teaches in Iowa. He notes that Dean received widespread coverage only after his campaign had raised massive amounts of money and used the Internet in new ways to organize his following.
Des Moines Register columnist David Yepsen echoes Talbott. “Howard Dean has worked long and hard and has a message that resonates with people.”
Clark may be a better example of a media-created candidate, having received significant media attention even before deciding to run. Last summer, Esquire omitted Kucinich and Moseley Braun in a photo essay of the candidates, then published a several-page article in the same issue about how Clark might be the only person who could beat Bush. When Clark came to Iowa City shortly after announcing his intentions, the room was packed with national media.
Bill Buck, Clark’s spokesman, says, “The more people get to know General Clark, the more people get to like him.” That may be entirely true, but it takes for granted that people are getting to know him, largely through positive media attention.
Because of his late entry into the race, though, Clark dropped out of the Iowa caucuses, along with U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman. This greatly diminishes the likelihood that either man will win the nomination (since 1972, neither party’s eventual nominee has finished worse than third in Iowa). Ironically, even Iowa’s nominating power is a result of the media pouring gas onto another part of the fire. Larger states perpetually protest that it makes no sense for such a small and rural state to set the tone for the nation.
But it’s journalists who decide what you read in the paper and see on TV.
As long as they consider Iowa important, so will you.
The Iowa caucus will be held Monday, Jan. 19.
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2004.
