Spring 1995
Planting the Seeds for 1996
Exactly one year away from the first primary of the 1996 presidential campaign, three dozen journalists from a half-dozen states met on the Harvard campus to do something that has never been done — in the year before a presidential election.
They brainstormed on how to cooperate to create news coverage that would give citizens a key role in the presidential primaries and general election.
Sitting in a conference room at the Nieman Foundation’s Lippman House, they planted the seeds for Project ’96, an effort to introduce citizen voices into the campaign process. They talked about giving citizens an opportunity to discuss their aspirations, their values and their concerns and to share that discussion with the candidates before the sprint to the polls turned candidate interaction with voters into 30-second TV spots.
“The 1996 presidential campaign is shaping up as the worst ever,” said Ed Fouhy, executive director of the Pew Center. “The old, rather sedate marathon of primaries and caucuses, which began in Iowa in February and concluded in California in June, has been replaced by a schedule that can only be described as frenetic. . .
“All the big states will have voted by March 26, many of them on ‘Super Tuesday,’ March 12. . . There is only one way to wage a simultaneous campaign in that many states — on television. The weapon of choice will be the 30-second spot, the HIV virus of American politics.”
Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, which co-sponsored the conference with the Pew Center, said: “There cannot be [citizen] engagement unless organizations such as those represented here get involved in making it happen.”
Before the participants adjourned, media partnerships from such key states as Iowa, New Hampshire, California and Florida had roughed out tentative game plans. They ranged from cross-state forums on key topics with satellite linkups to the candidates, to simultaneous coverage of issues by media in California, to a suggestion for a “Citizen’s Contract with Government.”
While the participants all were familiar with battle plans for covering the election as a series of skirmishes among candidates, they were grappling with how to cover the campaign — which Jay Rosen, director of the Project on Public Life and the Press, suggested should be something entirely different.
The purpose of the election is to produce a winner. The purpose of a campaign is to produce a discussion, “a floating national discussion that builds as the campaign develops from state to state.” While the election is an event; the campaign is a process, “an interplay of forces, one of which is the press,” Rosen said.
His framing of the problem struck a chord. By the end of the weekend, several early ideas emerged:
- The Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury, the San Francisco Chronicle and KRON-TV suggested a California poll on the electorate’s mood and aspirations. The news organizations proposed coordinating coverage of issues so that stories would appear simultaneously around the state. “Polls can’t be the end of what you do, they have to be the beginning,” said David Lauter, who will be the political editor for the Los Angeles Times.
- The Miami Herald and its five “Voices of Florida” partners — the St. Petersburg Times, the Tallahassee Democrat, the Bradenton Herald, the Jacksonville Florida Times-Union and the News of Boca Raton — hope to muster their forces around a single issue, possibly immigration. “What if some of the biggest, most influential newspapers and television stations in Florida — and perhaps National Public Radio — joined to educate Floridians on a single subject?” said John Pancake, Miami Herald state editor. “And then started conversations throughout Florida on that subject? And then distilled questions from that discussion and pressed the candidates to answer. . . and then published and aired citizens’ critiques of the candidates’ answers? Wouldn’t that improve the quality of debate and discussion on that issue in Florida and throughout the nation?”
- Rich Oppel, Washington bureau chief for Knight-Ridder Newspapers and a civic journalism pioneer in the 1992 elections, proposed doing a major attitudes and values poll this spring and broadly sharing the information with all media. It would be “a time when we really audit the mood of America, go further than we ever have before to understand how people feel about their lives and policy and issue concerns, so that information is far deeper and richer than ever before going into a presidential election.”
- A New Hampshire coalition of newspapers, public radio and public television, which already has crafted a mission statement vowing to focus on voter issues, suggested organizing jointly with Iowa a major citizen/candidate event.
- Tom Still, associate editor of the Wisconsin State Journal, proposed a series of regional town halls on key voter issues — perhaps incorporating an idea from Pete Weitzel, who supervised the Florida project, for a “Citizens’ Contract with Government.” Voters would present their ideas to candidates, force candidates to react, then grade them on how they did in meeting the contract.
- Dave Yepsen, political writer for the Des Moines Register, suggested doing forums on issues that transcend state lines — on intergenerational inequities, for example — and ultimately having the candidates address the voters’ concerns.
In coming weeks, media partners will shape proposals. Kovach and Lou Ureneck, editor of the Portland (Maine) Press Herald, will suggest ways to develop the ideas as news stories.
The weekend’s efforts reminded Hodding Carter III, chairman of the Pew Center’s advisory board, of a story his granddaddy used to tell. When an admiring visitor once asked how he grew such a perfect lawn, the senior Carter replied: “It’s very simple.
“First you plant the seed, and you water it and roll it. And water it and roll it. And water it and roll it.
“And after 100 years, you have an English lawn.”