CONTEXT, PLEASE.

Bad News
Where the Press Goes Wrong in the Making of the President
Robert Shogan
Ivan R. Dee, $26, 309 pp.

During a presidential election, combat takes place on several fronts. The citizenry bears witness to cut-throat competition among not only the political players seeking the White House, but also the media messengers trying to cover the race for increasingly fracturing audiences. Whatever the outcome, casualties and criticism abound at the end of each quadrennial battle, with calls for political and journalistic reform now a continuing refrain.

For Robert Shogan, veteran Los Angeles Times political correspondent and author of several books about the presidency, much of the blame for the public's (take your pick) alienation, anger, anxiety, or apathy is a consequence of journalistic performance that leaves much to be desired. From this volume's unequivocal title--Bad News: Where the Press Goes Wrong in the Making of the President--to its final paragraph, Shogan focuses on the faulty interplay between politics and communications at a time of roiling change in both realms.

Although John F. Kennedy's emphasis on image-enhancing television set the stage for a new kind of campaigning and governing, Shogan argues that 1968, not 1960, is the key to understanding what's happened in politics and journalism in recent decades. Eugene McCarthy's outsider challenge to Lyndon Johnson, Johnson's decision not to risk losing re-election, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the bloody upheaval at the Democratic Convention, and Richard Nixon's controlled use of the media--all these events (and others) destroyed previously established patterns for nominating candidates and conducting campaigns. As a consequence, a new political order came into being.

This "new order" (in Shogan's formulation) is "marked by the domination of personality and technology, the self-selection of candidates and the self-promotion of candidacies, the fragmentation of constituencies, the shifting of voter loyalties, and, most conspicuous of all, the thrust of the media to the forefront of the political scene." As nominating procedures opened up in the wake of '68 and reduced the clout of party bosses, electing the leader of the free world became a very expensive free-for-all highly dependent on news reports and paid advertisements rather than personal interaction between party workers and voters.

In brisk, lucid prose, Shogan reviews the last nine presidential campaigns, paying close attention to how the press performed in each contest. At times, Bad News reads like an experienced reporter's rant: informed exasperation at the superficiality, exaggeration, or mindlessness of that variegated collective known as the media. Shogan advocates "a more thoughtful type of journalism," providing "enough background to put events in context and clarify their importance."

Shogan names names and points to specific stories he thinks ill served the public. In criticizing the overly portentous coverage of the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and its relevance to presidential politics, he cuts to the bone: "My own paper, the Los Angeles Times, was quick to read profound significance into the returns from barely 40 percent of the electorate when my editors inserted into a story under my byline the claim that the GOP victory signaled 'a sharp turn from the message of activist government on which President Clinton campaigned in 1992.' How the editors knew this the story did not say, for the exit polls offered scant information to support such a sweeping judgment."

Shogan frames his argument by looking back at the 2000 campaign. Calling last year "probably the media's worst performance in presidential coverage since the emergence of the new political order four decades earlier," he maintains that George W. Bush received more positive reportage than Al Gore, noting: "The press paid far more attention to things Gore did wrong and made far too much of them."

Without taking sides (both candidates rendered here have strengths and weaknesses), Shogan examines how Bush and Gore were portrayed. According to this analytical assessment, Bush benefited from a less probing press, while Gore suffered from exaggerated attention to questionable traits, including his penchant for personal exaggeration. Any sense of balance or perspective got lost in the mad scramble to meet deadlines or put reports on the air. In a way, the miscues and snafus surrounding election-night coverage (broadcast, print, and Internet) brought into bold relief problems that occurred at other times during the campaign.

Seeing journalists as story-hungry yet nonpartisan enablers, "allowing the political operatives on each side to practice their deceptions and distortions," Shogan proposes that the media follow more deliberate practices in presenting candidates for national office to the public. Returning to a theme he explored in his 1999 book, The Double-Edged Sword: How Character Makes and Ruins Presidents from Washington to Clinton (Westview Press), Shogan says reporters should explain why character is important, and what (besides private proclivities) it means in evaluating how a public figure thinks and acts. He urges greater care and more explanatory discussion in the presentation of polls. Too often "precision journalism" provides an incomplete or skewed snapshot of public opinion that makes the survey report misleadingly imprecise. Finally, he asserts: "The press should cover the news, not predict it." The journalistic drive to be first is often so strong that real news--with nuance and context--loses out to speculation. The more pressure to publish scoops the more emphasis on conjecture. The result--literally and figuratively--is bad news.

Readers familiar with recent presidential politics and fluent in press criticism will not discover a great deal new or novel in Shogan's book. But Bad News clearly points fingers at specific problems in our political system and in American journalism that we, as citizens, disregard at our democratic peril.

Robert Schmuhl is professor of American studies and director of the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics & Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author, most recently, of Indecent Liberties (University of Notre Dame Press).