Summer 1995
Some Editors are Saying “No”
By Ed Fouhy
Yet another dimension is a series of three documentaries on citizenship produced by Wisconsin Public Television to be broadcast nationwide in prime time during the election year as part of the PBS Project Democracy.
Roger Ailes, the television executive who was one of the political handlers behind both the Reagan and Bush election victories, likes to talk about his orchestra-pit theory of American political journalism. It goes like this: a presidential candidate can give the most important speech of his career on a topic that is the number-one priority of the voters but if he falls into the orchestra pit on his way off stage, all the networks and newspapers will report the stumble and ignore the speech.
Maybe so. What editor or producer worth his press pass could possibly ignore a picture of a candidate falling into the orchestra pit? But are journalists so cynical that they wouldn’t report a presidential candidate’s most important speech? Ailes and his fellow handlers think so and that’s why they tried in every possible way to get around the press in the ’92 campaign. They opted instead for the gentler treatment available from the stars of the “new media.” Ross Perot and Larry King were together more than Siskel and Ebert. Bill Clinton – who can forget? – showed up on the Arsenio Hall show to wail on his saxophone. MTV became an important stop for the candidates.
Ready for a replay in ’96?
Some editors are saying no. They are planning a citizen-oriented approach to presidential campaign coverage; they are determined to find what’s on the public agenda. They want to define coverage from the standpoint of readers and viewers, not candidates – before the swarm of killer TV ads descends.
It’s an approach Davis “Buzz” Merritt of The Wichita Eagle and Rich Oppel, then editor of The Charlotte Observer, pioneered as far back as 1990, with help from The Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Their coverage broke out of the old inside-baseball approach to political journalism, the “who’s up who’s down” stories that so fascinate the insiders but leave the public puzzled and alienated.
Now with the help of a new grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism is undertaking a major initiative to help news organizations improve their campaign coverage. The approach will build on a foundation of partnerships formed to cover statewide races in 1994 when NPR stations worked with newspapers and television stations in such cities as San Francisco (The Chronicle, KQED-FM and KRON-TV) and Boston (The Globe, WBUR-FM and WBZ-TV).
The experience was an eye opener for people like Stacy Owen, KRON’s “Voice of the Voter” producer. “Our partnership was power. We empowered the citizens we serve and they, in turn, empowered us,” she told a gathering of journalists at a recent Pew Center workshop.
In 1996 NPR will use Pew funding to expand from five to at least 10 cities where their stations will use the voices of citizens to inform and guide coverage. New Hampshire and Iowa, small states with big clout in the early weeks of the campaign, will be the site of major newspaper-broadcast partnerships. Media alliances in delegate-rich Florida and California will also get Pew Center support.
The condensed primary season has caused candidates to place a far greater emphasis on the role of money than the more leisurely primary schedules of the past, making it likely that the citizen’s agenda will be ignored while single-issue groups dominate. The Center’s initiative will focus on the early primaries; it is these elections that retain some aspects of the “retail” politics still practiced in New Hampshire and Iowa and offer the best entry point for citizens’ concerns.
Center funding will pay for focus groups and polling in greater depth than newsroom budgets would otherwise allow. Salaries of community coordinators, non-journalists who handle the demanding logistics of forums, debates and discussions, will also be paid by the Center under contracts with editors.
Two dimensions of the project are specifically designed to help journalists deal with the blizzard of polling data that falls on hapless readers and viewers every election year.
The huge public response to the presidential debates in 1992, which reached the largest TV audiences ever for any non-sports broadcast, showed that people will listen to the candidates, particularly when they address concerns of ordinary citizens. The results of the mid-term elections last year have drawn a sharp distinction between the two political parties and have set the stage for a campaign that offers the best opportunity in decades for citizens to make real choices.
Every presidential election campaign brings its own surprises that’s why covering a presidential campaign is difficult at best. Political handlers long ago learned how to manipulate journalists but if we are to reclaim the place journalism once held as the center of American public life, as the indispensable providers of information so voters can make informed decisions, it’s time to realize the old ways just don’t seem to work anymore.
A fresh approach to political coverage that starts from the standpoint of the voters is clearly needed. Candidates who fall into orchestra pits can still expect to wind up on the network news and the front page but the Pew Center’s effort will help to put some substance