Character vs. Policy
Press Coverage of the 2000 Presidential Elections

by EVAN CORNOG

Columbia Journalism Review, January 2001, volume 39, issue 5, page 54

To imagine how historians will view the press coverage of the 2000 presidential race, consider the images you might use to illustrate a history of the subject. I would suggest five: Al Gore kissing Tipper at the Democratic convention; George W. Bush kissing Oprah; Bush and Dick Cheney talking out of the sides of their mouths about Adam Clymer of The New York Times; Bush's DUI arrest record from Kennebunkport; and the Palm Beach County butterfly ballot. Others may have other choices, but these are mine (for now) and not one of them has any relation to serious issues facing the United States.

What they do have to do with is "character," a term used by the press to confer dignity upon the current obsession with personality. This concern with "character" has dominated coverage of the presidential race and other campaigns this year, largely because of the Clinton/ Lewinsky scandal, which made presidential "character" a central issue in the race. And although the public seemed to be far less engrossed with the Lewinsky matter than Republican leaders and journalists were, and Bill Clinton seems destined to leave office with extraordinarily high approval ratings, the concern with character and the focus on personality endures. This, of course, was a great advantage for George W. Bush, whom most Americans seem to find a much more likable person than Al Gore. One of the Bush campaign's goals was to keep public attention focused on personality, where he was perceived to have an edge, rather than on policy, where Gore's greater command of the issues gave him the advantage. Historians are likely to judge this obsession with personality one of the weaker aspects of the press coverage of the 2000 campaign.

Another likely target will be the nearly total omission of foreign-policy issues. The effect of this was, again, to favor George W. Bush, whose experience in foreign affairs is so much more limited than the vice president's. When Bush, during a debate, said he would remove American troops from Kosovo, it was a big story in Europe, but a fairly small one here (The New York Times did give it serious attention). The larger issues involved in the Atlantic alliance and the state of U.S.-European relations were left aside. The ravages of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa -- a demographic catastrophe that the U.S. government and American pharmaceutical companies could certainly do more to contain -- remained outside the orbit of campaign coverage.

The hardest part of the race to cover was the post-Election Day carnival of recounts and court cases. Here, again, the assumptions under which the game proceeded worked in favor of George W. Bush. In spite of the substantial national popular-vote margin for Gore, and the evidence that there were serious shortcomings in the way the Florida vote was counted, the pressure on Gore to withdraw was maintained insistently by Republican talking heads and conservative commentators. The press, surprised by Gore's popular-vote margin and embarrassed by the miscalls on election night, became uncharacteristically timorous, humbled by the loss of its predictive powers and (understandably) baffled by the complex mix of legal, constitutional, and political forces at work. But, however baffled reporters and editors might have been at times, round-the-clock coverage was still mandatory, and those boundless hours were filled with pundits, analysts, historians, election-law lawyers, and the "man in the street." Conspiracy theorists of all persuasions and defenders of various interests weighed in, and television news too often construed "objectivity" as giving every point of view equal weight regardless of logic or evidence.

All this is not to say that there was a concerted effort by journalists to favor Bush; simply, the news judgments made about the relative importance of personality and foreign policy, as well as about the likely outcome of the court cases, all worked in Bush's favor. Editors and news directors are as apt to point to public opinion to defend news judgments as politicians are to use polls to defend their stands on issues, and, in the increasingly profit-driven news business, this is natural. But it is also important to recognize that such decisions have real effects on how candidates are perceived.

On the other hand, there was excellent coverage of many real issues, and it is easy to find enterprising reporting that looked at the candidates' records, the issues the nation and the world face, and the dynamics of modern campaigns. Thanks to the press's careful efforts to educate the public, citizens are now alert to every vector of spin the campaigns attempt to impart to events. One example of this awareness: during the campaign I was asked to speak to an eighth-grade social-studies class at the Cathedral School near Columbia University. I was there on the day of the St. Louis debate, and a teacher at the school mentioned the death the previous day of the state's governor, Mel Carnahan, in a plane crash, and observed that some people were saying that the debate should be cancelled. He then inquired how the candidates ought to deal with this issue. I asked the eighth-graders for their views. Arms shot up, and I called on one boy. "Obviously" he began, with the certainty one has only at thirteen, "whatever the first question is, the candidate will start by saying how sorry he was to learn of the tragedy, and that he extends his sympathies to the families of the deceased and to the people of Missouri" Ten hours later, Al Gore was reading the boy's script.

Journalists are good at pointing out the effects of spin because they are subjected to it constantly. They are also, by the nature of their work, very present-minded -- they see everything from the perspective of the current moment. And in considering how historians will see the 2000 election, one must recognize that historians are just as present-minded as journalists are. That's why each generation must write its own history. Take the example of the Civil War and Reconstruction. As long as racist stereotypes continued to dominate (white) American minds, history books were filled with images of happy slaves under paternalistic masters, succeeded by irresponsible black Reconstruction legislatures under the control of northern carpetbaggers. Respected historians described Republican Reconstruction as a plan that "pandered to the ignorant negroes" and spoke of the period as one that found the "elemental passions predominant" and during which "the southern people literally were put to the torture." This interpretation dominated the popular imagination as well: in 1915, Woodrow Wilson praised D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation as "history written with lightning!" No serious person today would call that racist movie history. The civil rights movement awakened Americans -- including academics -- to injustices both present and past, and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction underwent a huge and greatly needed revision.

Similarly, we cannot tell from what perspective the election of 2000 will be viewed. Issues now in the foreground may recede; matters that we are not now aware of may surface. And the angle historians take will depend on consequences of the election that we cannot foresee. Consider, for example, the various movements for electoral reform that preceded and have accompanied the election: campaign-finance reform, abolition of the electoral college, a uniform polling time nationwide, Sunday voting, and so forth. Should an array of sweeping reforms be enacted in the coming few years, the election would be seen as the trigger for these reforms (which would no doubt be described as "long overdue"). If, as seems likely, much more limited reforms are passed, history will play down this aspect.

The same applies to the role of the press. Should Congress legislate limits on press freedom (by passing a law restricting the ability of news organizations to conduct exit polls or to predict outcomes based on such data, for example), and should that law be upheld and prove to be the first in a series of curbs on press freedom, the place of this election in American history would be large (and dark). Alternatively, if a careful examination of Florida's ballots under pending Freedom of Information requests showed that the state went for Gore by more than 20,000 votes (as a recent Miami Herald article suggested), then the "error" of the networks' early call would be cast in a different light, and the press would be praised for its dogged pursuit of the truth.

It may be that a changed perception of the Supreme Court will be the biggest consequence of the 2000 campaign, and press coverage in that instance was groundbreaking. For the first time, tapes of Supreme Court arguments were released the same day, and the live coverage of cases argued in Florida courts gave Americans almost endless opportunities to master the intricacies (and ponder the equity) of Florida election law. For those with the time to partake, these legal joustings made for compelling theater, and the attorneys involved became themselves the subjects of personality profiles.

Perhaps the hardest aspect of the coverage of the 2000 race for historians of the future to comprehend will be the relative lack of importance of the Internet in the post-November 7 events. Although one could quickly check a Web site to find out whether a court had ruled, when the rulings actually came it was television, and in particular all-news cable television, that one turned to. For all the expectations about how the Internet would emerge as a central source of information in this campaign year, the promise of Web journalism remained unfulfilled.

Journalists are not historians, and historians are not journalists, in spite of the similarities between the two pursuits. And journalists when looking at the past do not always fully appreciate the historical context of events. Many references have been made in recent weeks to the Hayes-Tilden race of 1876, a race that the Republican Hayes won, in spite of having garnered fewer popular votes than Tilden, by prevailing in party-line votes in the electoral commission appointed to decide the matter. Yet few press accounts have gone on to discuss the real story of that campaign -- the role of white terror in suppressing the black vote in the South, and the violent tactics used to secure Democratic victories there. The Hayes victory marked the abandonment of blacks in the South by the Republican party, and gave birth to the solid Democratic South that prevailed until John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson responded to the challenge of the civil rights movement, and thereby delivered the South to the Republicans. If the press today still ignores this lesson from 1876, we can hardly expect it to see clearly the lessons of 2000.

Journalists can take comfort, however, in the knowledge that although hindsight may be 20/20, the lenses through which historians see the past do not last for more than a few years. Soon a new historical interpretation comes along to write a new prescription. It has been interesting to watch the twists and turns of the campaign and the aftermath of the vote, and it will be just as interesting to watch the "true story" -- that is, the various and successive "true stories" -- of the 2000 race unfold in the decades ahead.