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Gore media coverage--Playing hardball
Columbia Journalism Review, Sep/Oct 2000 by Hall, Jane
You don't have to be a yellow-dog Democrat to wonder just what's been going on with the coverage of Al Gore ever since he declared for the presidency. The appointment of Senator Joseph Lieberman changed the pattern momentarily. But consider a few examples:
* "Add Love Canal to the list of verbal missteps by Vice President Al Gore," a Washington Post reporter, Ceci Connolly, wrote in a December 2 article. "The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie Love Story and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste site when he said at a high-school forum Tuesday in New Hampshire, `I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal.'"
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* "Everything was humming along fine for Vice President Al Gore, until little Elian Gonzalez strayed into the picture" Katharine Q. Seelye began an April 16 New York Times story, adding that Gore, "prompted by no one," had thrust himself into the politically charged debate after "seeming to contradict himself."
* "Gore's handlers are plotting yet another rollout of their candidate," Howard Fineman wrote in Newsweek and reiterated on MSNBC's The News with Brian Williams. "By my count we're on about the fifth or sixth Al Gore (including `Bible Belt Al' . . . and `Environmental Al')."
The underlying message of all of these stories was clear: Al Gore is a lying politician who will do anything to get elected - a theme happily echoed by the Bush-Cheney campaign.
Gore's motives are frequently questioned, frequently framed in the most negative light - even in the lead of straight-news stories from some of the most respected and influential news organizations. When Gore made an economic proposal for tax relief, The Washington Post said in the lead that Gore "muscled in on the debate" as the Republican-controlled Senate approved its multibillion-dollar tax plan; when he made a speech on the role of government during his race for the nomination against Senator Bill Bradley, the Posts report began like this: "Were it not for the black cowboy boots and the Palm Pilot strapped to his belt, the man doing the talking could have been Bill Bradley."
In contrast, Bush's proposals are not only treated straight, as they should be, in straight-news stories: he's often been given the benefit of the doubt on subjects where he could be vulnerable.
A new study by the Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism underscores this. Examining 2,400 newspaper, TV, and Internet stories in five different weeks between February and June, researchers found that a whopping 76 percent of the coverage included one of two themes: that Gore lies and exaggerates or is marred by scandal. The most common theme about Bush, the study found, is that he is a "different kind of Republican."
The survey (which included editorials and news stories) focused on The Washington Posh The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta JournalConstitution, The Indianapolis Star, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Seattle Times. It also included the evening newscasts of the major broadcast networks and talk shows such as Hardball, which alone accounted for 17 percent of the negative characterizations about scandal.
My own anecdotal survey focused on more than 100 news stories in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Associated Press, along with other newspapers and features in Time and Newsweek. I also looked at a small sampling of cable talk shows and some network evening newscasts. Many cable talk shows were, as the Pew study found, extremely negative in their characterization of Gore. The evening newscasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC, on the other hand, appeared to play it straighter.
Over all, the Pew researchers wrote, "The press has been far more likely to convey that Bush is a different kind of Republican - `a compassionate conservative,' a reformer, bipartisan - than to discuss AI Gore's themes of experience, knowledge, or readiness for the office."
Comparing the sourcing on stories, the Pew researchers found something that also was evident in my own research: "Journalists' assertions about Bush's character were more than twice as likely than Gore's to be unsupported by any evidence. In other words, they were pure opinion, rather than journalistic analysis."
The substance of what Gore has been saying in speeches around the country often has been wrapped in reporters' cynical language that effectively casts doubt about his motives before he even opens his mouth. The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly, for example, need not have characterized Gore's statement to a group of healthcare workers - "It is in fact intolerable in the midst of unprecedented prosperity that we have so many Americans who do not have health insurance" - as "moaning." And, rather than mocking Gore for wearing a Palm Pilot and characterizing him as a Bill Bradley imitator, she could have led with the substance of what Gore said that day. That's the way numerous publications have treated George W. Bush's proposals on education, crime, and other topics. They play it straight, paraphrasing and quoting his remarks. They don't raise flags about his motives right off the bat.
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