Strange Bedfellows: How Television and the Presidential Candidates Changed American Politics.

How the 1992 campaign turned the public onto politics and off the media.

Last year's presidential campaign seems destined to be remembered as the year Larry King, Phil Donahue, and Tabitha Soren strode across America's television screens and grabbed hold of the political process. In the shorthand by which we often label campaigns, 1992 was the Year of the New Media.

Consider the evidence that the traditional media played second fiddle to the upstarts. After mainstream organizations had passed on the story, the Star, a supermarket tabloid, set the pack running after Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers in New Hampshire last year. Then came Ross Perot, who played the new media like a virtuoso, winning hours of live television time and still avoiding serious scrutiny. Clinton used everything from town meetings to Arsenio Hall to CompuServe. This spring, the new president himself, at a black-tie dinner honoring radio and television correspondents, thumbed his nose at the traditional media and pointed out how clever he had been to ignore them. "You know why I can stiff you on the press conferences? Because Larry King liberated me from you by giving me the American people directly," Clinton said.

In the Hundred Years War between press and politicians, each campaign shapes the next, and perhaps none more so than 1988. That campaign, remembered now for the Pledge of Allegiance, Willie Horton, and "Read my lips," left the media in a sour and surly mood--not because George Bush defeated Michael Dukakis, but because politicians had assumed the upper hand in the combat. They were using smart bombs while the media were still armed with muskets. The politicians knew how to bait the media into talking about what they wanted to talk about, and little else. In newsrooms across the country, editors and reporters vowed to do things differently in 1992.

One of the news organizations that struggled with that question throughout 1992 was ABC News. But unlike most other networks and newspapers, ABC did not struggle in private. Tom Rosenstiel, the astute media critic of the Los Angeles Times, was given an inside seat to watch the evolution of network television in this transitional year. Rosenstiel's perch could not have been more ideal, and his fine book is the latest in the genre of behind-the-scenes examinations of American politics (from The Making of the President series to The Selling of the President). His searching and occasionally searing criticism of the media in the campaign year is a welcome tonic. Coming at a time when the press has given itself good reviews for attempting to refocus its campaign coverage, Rostenstiel's book is a reminder of how short we fell and some of the reasons it will be hard to do better.

Peter Jennings was one of those most influenced by the negative reviews of the press coverage of 1988. He wanted a new approach to covering politics. The same held for Paul Friedman, the executive producer of "World News Tonight." The results, however, were mixed. While ABC and the other networks forced changes in the primary season debates that resulted in more informative encounters among the candidates, ABC's evening news show did just four issue pieces on the Democrats during the primaries, and of eight stories on Paul Tsongas, none dealt with his ideas. When the Flowers story broke, "World News Tonight" reported nothing the first night, while "Nightline" devoted its entire program to the charges. While newspapers dug into Clinton's background in Arkansas (often producing more smoke than fire), ABC limped behind. "ABC was largely irrelevant amid the scrutiny of Clinton except as a vague echo," Rosenstiel writes. "World News Tonight"--like many in the mainstream press--ignored Ross Perot until the new media had made him a major factor in the race. Only then did ABC devote an hour of prime time to him.

On the other hand, ABC sought to minimize coverage of routine daily campaign events and concentrate more on substance. "Nightline" used its unique standing to push stories forward, especially on Clinton and the draft. And in a year when the voters' agenda drove the campaign, the networks used televised focus groups and interviews to bring those voices into coverage.

Network blues

But Rosenstiel's overall portrait of ABC is troubling. ABC was slow to engage (caught up in the public cynicism toward politics generally), sometimes timid in chasing the story, and occasionally impotent when it did. Like other news organizations, ABC was jerked along by events and controlled its own fate. In many ways, the network succeeded in doing some things differently and well. It held its audience, and it made some money--in television, that counts as a pretty good year. On the morning of the election, Friedman praised his troops for their work and told them, "I hope that the academics who have made a living criticizing us for the last four years will be among the unemployed tomorrow."

It is unfair to single out ABC for criticism. Had Rosenstiel watched any other network, or any major newspaper, he might have found a similar story. For all the improvements, Rosentiel says much of the coverage is still too heavily driven by poll results, which are sometimes wrongly interpreted, and open to manipulation by smart campaigns. Writing more broadly about the entire industry during Campaign '92, Rosenstiel says, "What I saw, from the other side of the camera lens, suggests the press has less power to reform politics than many imagine. Yet the press's cynicism has already done great harm. There is a reason for leavened optimism. Technology is democratizing the American political landscape. But it is also lowering the standards of American journalism."

Let's deal with both of those charges. That technology is the great leveler in American politics is indisputable--and all for the better. I realized this not by watching Larry King a hundred times last year, but as a result of a message left on my voice mail in the spring of 1992. A university professor in upstate New York had called to up-braid me for something I had written about Perot's appearance before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. I had suggested that Perot was vague in explaining how he would root out drugs in America's cities; my caller, who had watched the session on C-SPAN, said I was wrong. I went back and reviewed the transcript and came to a humbling conclusion: My report was not incorrect, but the caller had seized on another aspect of Perot's answer and screened out what I had used for my story. He was no more incorrect in his interpretation of events than I was in mine. It was clear that the world had changed for those of us who call ourselves reporters.

For years, we held the upper hand with the public. We were observers who saw events and reported them. Now, with CNN, C-SPAN, and other cable outlets, anyone with the time and interest can see the same events. Although it's impossible to measure in any scientific way, this technological democratization most likely increased interest in the campaign and boosted turnout in 1992. In that way, the new media have been healthy. But they also allow politicians to avoid genuine scrutiny of their ideas. The new media may provide more verbiage, but they do not necessarily provide more useful information. One of the great failures on the part of the media last year was their inability to hold Clinton accountable for his ideas--from the cost of his health care program to his propensity to promise new programs he couldn't pay for. More time on the Sunday interview shows and less time in front of audiences throwing softballs might have spared Clinton some of the credibility problems he has encountered since the election.

Rosenstiel's analysis makes clear that the notion of a homogeneous new media as a witting or unwitting ally of the candidates in competition with the old media is simplistic. Viewed benignly, the new media provide an enlightened forum for democracy in which the candidates meet the public in the electronic town hall. But if Bill Clinton thinks he has somehow mastered the new media, he should be reminded of what sparked the Gennifer Flowers episode. The new media are not only electronic town halls but also tabloid television, with its interest in sex and sensationalism; local television, with its high concentration on crime and scandal; and radio talk shows that may be as unreflective of the public mood as a League of Women Voters discussion, and more easily manipulated.

And the media's cynicism? To the degree that it exists, it is perhaps a function of the old media's desire not to become panners with campaigns and presidents in transmitting the spin of the day to the American people. Another reason could be the old media's search for new angles to tell stories that have been already reported in brief on CNN and the radio. At ABC, Friedman worried that by 6:30 every night, viewers would already know the headlines and therefore would want something different.

But the public sees the great journalistic beast differently. The new media have given people a way into the process, and voters see the traditional media, with their talking heads and rushes to judgment, as an intrusion. The more easily people can filter events through their own lenses, the more likely they are to suspect interpretation. The media are rarely seen as acting in the public interest. Instead they are seen as part of the problem. If anything, the media are disliked even more than politicians, a badge we should not wear in honor. Fixing that should be part of the discussion for 1996.