When I was assigned to cover my first presidential campaign for ABC News in 1976 I was cautioned by my bosses, “Don’t get obsessed with the horse race.”
Editor’s note: This op-ed by former ABC News reporter Barrie Dunsmore first appeared in the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus.
Theodore H. White’s compelling political documentary-style book, “The Making of the President: 1960,” changed how the news media covers American politics – and so changed America. As a foreign correspondent in China for Time magazine during World War II and later as a freelancer in Europe, White brought an intense intellectual curiosity and fascination with things foreign and steeped himself in those overseas cultures so that he could best explain current events to his readers. He would apply many of those same skills to the ground-breaking book he would write about the American presidential election campaign of 1960.
In this book White offered history as narrative. He portrayed the candidates as engaged in heroic struggle. He gave us the inside story of the campaign — not just the backroom deals but all the nitty-gritty details from how polling is a crucial tool, to the use of telephone banks to establish contact with masses of voters. This was all new to most readers. Nineteen-sixty was also the year of the first-ever presidential television debates and White was among the first to see their significance, as he was to suggest how the way a candidate looked and sounded could be more important than what he actually said.
The book was a huge success and won the Pulitzer Prize of 1962. But more significantly, it became the template for subsequent political reporting — and that has turned out to be a decidedly mixed blessing. For one thing, White’s technique could not be replicated, even by White himself who did similar books on the next three presidential elections which had far less impact. In 1960 White was actually able to be a kind of fly on the wall who wrote what he heard and saw. It wasn’t possible to do that again, as White himself later noted. “(In 1960) I’d get into a room and disappear into the woodwork. Now the rooms are so crowded with reporters getting behind-the-scenes stories that nobody can (actually) get behind-the-scenes stories.”
But that hasn’t stopped his imitators. In the half century since White’s book was published, major news organizations and their top political reporters continue to try to emulate his approach to covering presidential election campaigns. The problem is that such coverage inevitably favors style over substance — and increasingly the focus is almost exclusively on the race itself.
This is not a new problem. When I was assigned to cover my first presidential campaign for ABC News in 1976 I was cautioned by my bosses, “Don’t get obsessed with the horse race.” In those days the race was important, but it wasn’t the only thing. In fact, I had been assigned to cover Sen. Henry (Scoop) Jackson’s campaign, because he was outspoken on foreign policy and I had just spent the previous decade as a foreign correspondent. I spent five months almost glued to Jackson until he was knocked out of the race by Jimmy Carter. I found the campaign enormously engaging. But I didn’t have a personal stake in whether Jackson won or lost. Sam Donaldson was covering Carter and everyone assumed if Carter won, Sam would go the White House with him (which he did.) But in my case, there were no such assumptions. After the campaign, whatever happened I was happy to be going to the State Department to continue covering foreign policy.
I mention these details because back then, critics often suggested that reporters covering presidential candidates got too close to them and were “invested” in their candidate’s success. In fact, Teddy White became too close to JFK, as did most of the reporters who covered him. But my gripe with today’s news media is not their bias for or against a given party or candidate (although that demonstrably exists). My concern is their almost total preoccupation with the race itself. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say 90 percent of what reporters and pundits say is about who’s up and who’s down and the latest inside scoop of why.
What does a candidate stand for? Oh, I know, we’re told Texas congressman Ron Paul is a libertarian, former Sen. Rick Santorum is social conservative. Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are both social and fiscal conservatives and three out of four Republicans think former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney is a flip-flopper and may be a closet moderate. But what good are such labels to people seriously trying to decide the best person to run the country? There are some good policy analyses in the New York Times, the Washington Post, in some local papers and on PBS and NPR. But let’s face it, most Americans do not get their news from those sources. Most of what they “know” they get from the mass media — the Internet, the networks, the cable news channels and talk radio – where the horse race, not the policy, gets all the attention.
Here’s why that matters.
•Would all those young people who ardently follow Ron Paul because they like what he says about keeping out of wars (so do I) be so enthusiastic if they truly understood Paul’s extreme libertarian views? Do they know what it would mean to eliminate the Federal Reserve; that he would essentially end most government programs (Medicare, Social Security); that he would eliminate virtually all regulations (drug and food safety rules, airline safety and clean air and water regulations); that he wants to reverse such legislation as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965?
•Would Rick Santorum have “surged” to his near win in Iowa, if his new supporters who had just ditched Gingrich, knew that in his heart of hearts Santorum would like to ban not just gay marriage, but all abortions — and birth control?
•Or would Mitt Romney have so much support among “moderates” if they really understood the consequences of his unequivocal pledge to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? Do they really want another war with another Muslim country?
To all of the above, I believe the answer is no.
