Media Experts Answered Questions on Election Coverage

TOM EDSALL: Yeah, I do. There was -- as Tom pointed out -- a real sort of hard-core group, and there was some pride to be a member of that group.

Now, I was struck, on one campaign, we were traveling on a bus, in a little minivan, a group of reporters. And one of the reporters said, "You know, this is the first time I've ever done this, and I never want to do it again, how many of the rest of you want to?" And, virtually, the whole group did not want to. And, to be honest, I was appalled. I spent my life wanting to do that, and struggling to get near campaigns.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why do you think that happened? Do you have a theory?

TOM EDSALL: Well, one is that a lot of people now, the idea of family, many of the reporters are married -- this is both men and women and this group, though --

JEFFREY BROWN: Right.

TOM EDSALL: It wasn't just women concerned about parenting their children or whatever. It was both the guys and women who felt they didn't want to be away from home.

I'll tell you, there has been the same problem, though, in terms of foreign coverage. At The Washington Post, they've had a hard time filling the hardship beats, the tough places where there's a potential of any violence and -- or travel. There's just an increasing reluctance to invest your life in reporting, in the same sense that people used to.

TOM ROSENSTIEL: I think one other factor that adds to that -- I agree with everything that Tom was just saying in terms of the expectations of reporters about their family life -- but another thing that I hear from political reporters, and that I see, is that the level of press manipulation and management has evolved to the point that reporters don't have the kind of access to the candidate and to the top people in campaigns -- this is not a small fraternity, the press is viewed, to some extent, as an enemy, a conduit to be manipulated.

JEFFREY BROWN: You mean, by the campaign, the spinners, et cetera?

TOM ROSENSTIEL: By the campaign. And, you know, you're sort of behind a rope line, being managed to a much greater extent than was true a generation-and-a-half ago, when Jack Germond would sit down with a campaign manager alone in a bar late at night for drinks, and would swap stories as friends. And also, were learning from each other, with a sense of mutual respect.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, you know, a number of people wrote about, asking about the coverage of particular candidates, and particularly, Barack Obama.

And so maybe this is -- maybe what you're talking about here, I wonder if it's related to how the campaigns have, I don't know, have reached out to the press, and tried to get the kind of coverage they want.

Mark Richard from Columbus, Ohio says, "Journalists like McCain, personally, but they revere Obama, from afar, as a white, liberal, fantasy candidate. Just look at the embarrassingly gushy coverage of the Kennedy 'passing of the torch' to the audacity of hope, because the dream will never die," -- all of that was in quotes, excuse me -- "there was an obvious bias."

And then others, similarly, Alison Wells from California, "I feel the mainstream media is pushing Obama down our throats."

Who wants to pick up on that?

TOM EDSALL: I think that, in fact, both of those people are saying things that are true, but the truth is a little more complex than what they are describing.

JEFFREY BROWN: In what way?

TOM EDSALL: In that, the press is enamored of Obama. If you go to an Obama rally, you can see reporters, when you're in the sort of gaggle of press, you can see their eyes light up as he comes in, and there's a -- he's captured their spirit. And you do not see that at a Hillary rally, where there's a much more, kind of suppressive quality.

But that said -- and that all then gets reflected in their coverage. But part of that, the reality is that Barack Obama's campaign does, in fact, have some excitement about it. And the press might be a little overwhelmed by it and too caught up in it. But, it has an excitement that the Hillary campaign does not have.

And the Clinton people -- ever since taking over the White House in 1993 -- they have had terrible relations with the press, and to a certain extent, the bad press that they get grows out of the adverse view that they have of reporters, and the way they see them as basically hostile, evil people. So there are two sides of this.

JEFFREY BROWN: We had a letter here, let me just jump in, from Darrell, it doesn't say where from, but, "The media is piling on Hillary now that she's losing, but last year, I remember coverage that basically said she was going to be the nominee. All I can see now is flashbacks of the 2000 election, when everyone called Florida before all of the votes were in, it seems as if the press has gotten a little quick to make calls that they can not really do."

So, let me, that sort of raises another issue of the kind of narrative of this campaign changing regularly, as well as what you, Tom Edsall, were just talking about, where there might be particular interest in one campaign over another.

TOM ROSENSTIEL: I think there are -- there are a variety of biases or influences that impact coverage, and to some extent one wants reporters to overcome these things, and impose professional discipline, and to some extent, these inform your professional discipline.

One of them is, you know, whether you like somebody, whether they're a nice person and they treat you well, the care and feeding of the press.

And, actually, you know, McCain has benefited from that -- he's cultivated reporters for a long, long time, and he's very good at it, he answers questions in a way that it makes reporters think that he's actually trying to answer the question.

Obama is at more of a distance from reporters, and they don't have longstanding relationships with him.

Another view, as Tom suggested, is the empiricism, what are they seeing in front of them? And they are seeing an exciting thing in front of them, and it's an appropriate part of their professional discipline to sort of try and calculate, what does that mean, and how is that going to transfer into votes.

Another one is the cue that you take from the campaign people themselves. As you feel you're being spun all the time, you try -- you're looking for "what do they really think?" not, "what are they telling me?"

And I think, to some extent, the Obama people have gotten very excited, particularly close to election night, have begun to believe some of the hype, and we've seen that reflected in inflated expectations in New Hampshire, perhaps on Super Tuesday for Obama -- that also may reflect enthusiasm on the part of reporters quietly rooting for Obama.

You also have, to some extent, a bias with I think is a problem right now, of the news cycle is so continuous that, very quickly reporters stop reporting what has happened, and begin to anticipate what will happen next. Simply because, if you're on the air for eight hours on cable, talking about the campaign, you move on to, "OK, we've exhausted this subject, let's predict the future."

That's a bias, that sort of anticipatory bias, which keeps doing the press in. And it's hard enough to figure out why things have happened, and what's happened, and no one's going to be very good at predicting what's going to happen next. That's always the press trying to --

TOM EDSALL: I don't know if I'd call it an over-reliance, but I think there's been an excessive interest in what you're describing, of predicting the outcome of elections before they happen. And it's gotten the press into big trouble in New Hampshire in the early stories about Hillary being invincible.

One -- I think what's happened, to some extent, news has become very competitive, it's now 24/7, news -- and the print press has allowed itself to get enmeshed in this same competitive atmosphere. So one people -- one thing you can try to be ahead on is predicting who's the winner. And it's clearly turned out to be a losing proposition -- especially in primaries, because people in primaries change their minds in a moment. The speed at which voter shifts can take place is just beyond anticipation by the press.

JEFFREY BROWN: You know, there's another interesting group of questions here that go back to -- what I think we were talking about earlier -- I'll call it the mechanics of reporting on a campaign.

Bob Daniel, for example, Huntington Beach, and Tom Rosenstiel, I'll ask you to address this first, "How much latitude do writers have in deciding what to cover? For example, would a staff writer for The New York Times, a paper labeled as very liberal by most conservatives, be able to write a glowing article on a conservative figure? Conversely, would a Wall Street Journal staff writer, a paper viewed as conservative, be able to write a piece on Ted Kennedy that flattered him?" In other words, does the writer or the editors set the tone of a piece, and whose responsibility is it to make sure of the facts?

TOM ROSENSTIEL: Well, I mean, that's a very -- there is no one simple answer to that. Journalists are supposed to be professionals, in the same way that a doctor or a lawyer is professional.

A lawyer may despise his or her client, may think that they're probably guilty or something like that, or may -- a doctor may be asked to do surgery on a, you know, on a mass murderer -- and they impose their professional discipline and do what they're supposed to do.

To a large extent, the same applies to journalists. You take the facts, and you write them, and you talk to people, and you call it as you see it -- not as you wish it to be. To the extent that journalists are unable to do that, then they are failing as professionals.

The system that we have in place in journalism to ensure that that is occurring is called editing. And you have editors who are there to evaluate, not only whether the names are spelled right in stories, but whether the assumptions are fair, or the reporting is thorough enough.

And the notion that we're increasingly coming to in journalism is that the reader should be able to, or the viewer should be able to also judge whether the story is fairly done, because enough of the story of the reporting is in the story, the story is transparent enough that the facts -- to a reasonable degree -- speak for themselves. You're not trusting the reporter entirely. And I think a skillful reader can see if one of the pieces is insufficiently documented.

How do you chose who covers a candidate and who doesn't? I think every day you will see stories in papers that reflect impressive things about people who journalists may or may not like. I think, to a large extent, journalists who cover politics come to admire, and distrust, the political figures they cover, simultaneously. And there is a healthy ambivalence about the candidates -- when you come to the point where you admire someone too much, that's where you probably need to begin to recuse yourself.

Or, if you come to the point where you loathe a candidate too much, that it overwhelms your ability to impose your professional discipline. That's when you've got a problem.

TOM EDSALL: One, I think there's been too much criticism of anonymous sources. I -- no good reporter could survive without them. They are crucial to finding out what's really going on and someone, especially, within a political campaign, or in this case, close to McCain, is not going to talk to you on the record about bad things taking place.

You get a sense -- and a good reporter will have sources who he or she learns to trust, learns to distrust -- develops a whole sense of when they're telling the truth, and when they may be sort of pushing the truth, a little. Or pushing the envelope.

So, you have to have anonymous sources, especially when you have a story like the McCain story, where you're making a huge -- an extraordinary allegation.

JEFFREY BROWN: When you come back to the -- what kind of discussion goes on, or thinking about where you draw the line in terms of what you're going to use?

TOM EDSALL: Well, I think the issue is not so much -- well, it does come down to what you're going to use, and I think The New York Times story was, ultimately, very poor in the sense that the clearly were innuendoing that he had an affair with this woman, but they're not willing to say that.

I think that's really beneath the dignity of The New York Times.

They should either say it, or not say it. And to -- that was the fault of that story, as opposed to the use of anonymous sources. If The New York Times was confident that he was having a sexual relationship with this woman, they should have said so.

They should not have written the kind of story they did, and especially when it first came out on the web, where what you first saw was a bright-color picture of this woman. And then you got to the story, and it was like, it was like the National Enquirer. And, I thought it was kind of appalling.

JEFFREY BROWN: Tom Rosenstiel, you want to jump in?

TOM ROSENSTIEL: Yeah, I would support, very much, what Tom is saying. I think if you imagine that story in The New York Times, and you imagine that the sources were named, it wouldn't make any difference.

We'd still have the same concerns about whether -- about the fact that these -- the story was based on the suspicions, the feelings, of these sources. And the fact that the sources were anonymous was, in some ways, not that -- it doesn't make that big a, much of a difference, in terms of whether the story holds up, or not. It's not their anonymity, it's the fact that they didn't really have facts to back up -- or at least that were given to the reader -- to back up their suspicions.