On the can-pain trail

By: Joe Strupp Although newspapers are still considered the best source for daily political campaign coverage, especially at the local level, they also seem to make the same mistakes over and over during each election cycle. Often, they even admit them ? how many times have editors lamented the ""horse race"" syndrome? ? but little seems to change from year to year.

At a time when broadcast outlets have morphed into sound-bite havens and talking-head festivals ? and magazines and Internet outlets offer only limited views or information on a race ? newspapers generally follow the mission of providing a complete look at

candidates and issues. But they also fall into the same traps.

Whether it's latching on to some meaningless new rumor (because it's juicy) or failing to fully examine an important issue (because it's complex), newspapers need to review their coverage plans, with a more critical eye than ever, before another cycle passes and the inevitable mea culpas begin.

In an effort to help, E&P offers an assessment ? following dozens of interviews with journalists and political operatives ? of the 10 biggest mistakes newspapers make in election coverage.

If anyone has witnessed the pitfalls of obsessing over voter polls, it's veteran political consultant James Carville. Before he gained fame by helping guide Bill Clinton to victory in 1992, Carville took the failing 1987 candidacy of Wallace Wilkinson in Kentucky's gubernatorial race from less than 1% in the local surveys to a landslide victory.

In the Wilkinson race, Carville says local newspapers looked only at the surveys and early lead of Wilkinson's opponents and never saw his candidate coming. ""They kept reporting that he was behind and focused on polls and the leaders,"" Carville tells E&P. ""They missed the big story.""

Polls give daily papers an easy, formulaic, exclusive chunk of information that most voters will likely read. But in reality, such samplings offer little real news, especially months before the election. Campaign veterans contend that polls have become over-used by newspapers that should put their efforts into breaking something new or giving voters a real insight into what the race is about.

""It is easy to report polls, and to report them wrong,"" says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a California-based political commentator. ""You ought to want reporting on what the polling means.""

In addition, polls can be interpreted in so many different ways, newspapers fail to properly explain what the samplings represent. How questions were phrased usually does not appear in a newspaper, even though it impacts the results.

Even with a national sample, ""they are just random noise,"" says William Schneider, a longtime political commentator for CNN and a polling expert. ""They tend to bounce around a lot. Today Kerry is one point above, tomorrow Bush is one point above. They are recording every little blip as a major shift and, often, it is just random.""

Newspapers may feel the pressure to run a story on a poll just because they paid for it, observers say. Even if a poll offers essentially unchanged public opinion, papers will blast it on Page One. Says Jack Germond, the retired political columnist for The Sun in Baltimore: ""Newspapers shouldn't be in the polling business, because they feel like they have to use the results.""

Mike Jacobs, publisher and editor of the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald, points to a 1994 city council election in his town for proof that newspapers that fail to talk to voters risk not knowing the news. ""The paper was convinced that finances and taxes were the big issues because that's what candidates thought,"" Jacobs recalls. ""But after interviewing voters, it turned out it was potholes in the street. The city engineer and the council did not know.""

After giving too much attention to polls, newspapers often ignore the voters themselves. With the Internet and a multitude of other electronic connections, today's journalists don't have to leave their desks to get enough information for a story, but they are less in touch with real voters. This is especially crippling at smaller papers covering local city council and school board races.

""There is less old-fashioned shoe-leather because it is easier not to do it,"" Jeffe says. ""You end up talking on the phone to the same people, and the people you know.""

David Broder, the longtime columnist for The Washington Post, agrees. ""The voters are the most important thing in an election,"" he says, ""and we treat them mostly as objects."" He urges reporters to ""walk the precincts."" His slogan for the 2004 campaign: ""Watch the damn voters.""

Failing to talk face to face with readers robs a newspaper not only of individual opinions, but the chance to get good, real-life stories about what an election means to someone. ""A whole generation of political reporters was infected by Theodore White, who went deep inside the campaign [apparatus],"" says Broder, referring to the author of the groundbreaking ""Making of The President"" books of the 1960s. ""That is a mistake.""

Columnist Cal Thomas points to voter interviews as a way to ""go out and look for another angle."" That way ""you have a flavor for what is going on,"" he adds. ""The grunt work never changes." In today's Internet, 24-hour news, and niche-products world, there's an abundance of information. But what election data means to voters, and to the upcoming elections, is often distributed by the drop. We probably know more about John Kerry's six homes than we do about how much his health care plan will cost or how George Bush plans to attack the deficit.

""What does it mean? That is what we want in a newspaper,"" CNN's Schneider contends. ""The newspaper is supposed to do more than television. It used to be for reporting the news, but it ain't no more.""

Cliff Schechtman, eight-year editor of the Cape Cod Times in Hyannis, Mass., said few newspapers ? especially in covering local elections ? provide voters with needed context. ""We go where the smoke and fire is, but not the cause,"" he says. ""We also say what [funds] a candidate raised, but we don't compare it or explain where it came from.""

Cal Thomas likens analysis to ""boring"" background information to eating a healthy dinner. ""One of the roles of journalists is to resemble their mothers,"" Thomas says, urging them to tell readers to ""eat all of your vegetables and you'll be glad you did. There is a lot of important stuff there. We need to tell [readers] what they need to know.""

But others, such as Jacobs, warn editors not to mistake editorializing for analysis. ""I think a lot of analysis is telling voters what they ought to think,"" he says. ""You need only to contribute to the discussion, not tell them how to vote.""

Schneider offers this bit of free analysis for the 2004 presidential race: Don't obsess about ""undecided"" or ""swing"" voters because ""there aren't any."" He drew a laugh at April's American Society of Newspaper Editors conference when Broder asked him about the number of undecided voters in the Bush/Kerry matchup. Schneider waved a sheet of paper and said, ""I have a list of names right here ..."

Since the local school board race or county commission election is often not a barn-burner, reporters feel less compelled to approach candidates' personal histories with a fine-toothed comb.

""You have to talk to as many people who have associations with the candidate as possible,"" Germond declares about small-town races. If the candidate was on the library board, talk to the people he or she has served with. ""That kind of thing is more interesting and helpful,"" he says.

But Germond also warns local reporters not to expect the most politically astute candidates in hometown elections. ""You are not going to get [former House speaker] Sam Rayburn running for city council,"" he says. ""You are getting the local haberdasher who is not a seasoned politician.""

Even so, that does not mean smaller dailies shouldn't report as much about a local candidate's past as possible. ""The word on the street is quite strong,"" says Tom Kearney, executive editor of The Keene (N.H.) Sentinel, pointing out that much of the background information can come from talking to people who know a candidate. ""You don't have to dig very hard to see who the people are.""

Kearney recalls one school board election eight years ago that came back to haunt voters when a candidate who won turned out to be a member of the far-right John Birch Society, a fact that had not been reported during the campaign (and only later led to her failure to win re-election). ""It was something that happens,"" he says. ""You have to push people to find out.""

Cape Cod's Schechtman blamed part of local newspapers' tame approach on ""smaller staffs, higher story counts, and some editors who are not sophisticated."Veteran campaign watchers and chroniclers warn that stereotypes too often mold into fact if journalists and editors are not careful, doing them and readers real harm. Kerry paints Bush as ""duplicitous"" and Bush labels Kerry ""untrustworthy,"" says Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. ""Then, anything that conforms to that narrative gets oversized [press] attention.""

Columnist Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune agrees, citing past examples that branded Al Gore and Dan Quayle with labels that dogged them for years. ""Gore was the liar"" for allegedly exaggerating what he'd done ""and Quayle was stupid,"" Page says, ""as if no one else ever misspelled a word. I think we are all guilty of playing into these images.""

For smaller papers, the challenge may be easier to overcome because they, presumably, know some of the local candidates fairly well, says Barry Locher, editor of The State Journal-Register in Springfield, Ill. ""It is irresponsible not to do the story that explains who these people are,"" he says. ""It is something we don't do often enough."" He cited the last Springfield mayoral race in 2002, in which mud was slung all over the lot, including one candidate accusing the other of reckless driving in what was essentially a ""minor traffic incident.""

Without explanation from the newspaper about each allegation, ""the public mind can run amok,"" Locher says. ""There was a lot of rinky-dink stuff and we made a point of analyzing all of it."

One place where candidates have often been elected based on image and name over substance and policy is California. The Golden State has given its voters former actors Ronald Reagan, George Murphy, Sonny Bono and, most recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another former governor, Jerry Brown ? who served two terms and currently is mayor of Oakland ? gained early attention through his name, as son of former two-term Gov. Edmund G. ""Pat"" Brown.

Even the fictional 1972 film The Candidate, which pictured Robert Redford as a governor's son who maneuvers his way into the U.S. Senate with name recognition and good looks, took place in California. The film's famous last line from Redford, ""What do we do now?"" may ring too true for some.

Dan Walters, who has covered state politics in Sacramento since the younger Brown's 1975 inauguration, points to the failure of newspapers to assess a candidate's ability to do the job over the ability to win the job. ""The fundamental error is that they have specialized campaign reporters who do nothing but cover campaigns and do not cover government,"" says Walters, who writes for The Sacramento Bee and dozens of other California dailies. ""The coverage, therefore, rarely relates to the actual job of governing. Everything is seen through the view of who is winning and losing.""

Cape Cod's Schechtman echoes that view. ""We look too much at a candidate's past and not to the future,"" he says. ""If you are talking about a statewide office, like governor, how will the legislative make-up make the job difficult or easier?""

Or, sometimes, what does the candidates' knowledge say about their ability to do the job? Jacobs of Grand Forks remembers a local district judge's race in 2000 in which his paper's editorial board grilled the prospective judges about the First Amendment, asking each at one point what rights the famous document protected. ""There were a surprising number of candidates who couldn't tell us,"" he says. ""Those who gave the worst answers didn't win.""

Still, Walters points out that someone like Schwarzenegger, who is getting high marks for attacking California's energy and deficit problems head-on, shows that even a celebrity candidate with no political experience might be able to tackle the job. That proves, he says, that newspapers need to give as much attention to a candidate's plans in office as they do to his plans for getting into office.

Although reporting who is ahead is unavoidable, journalists say, newspapers often get fixated on the front-runner as the most credible candidate and likely winner. The name Howard Dean ? from a whisper to The Scream ? comes to mind. ""It is an easy thing to do,"" says Jeffe, ""but it keeps you away from the issues."" Journalists almost always follow the leader ? with favorable coverage in the beginning and extra-harsh examinations later on ? at the expense of offering a balanced view and giving other candidates a fair chance.

""This seems to afflict us in every area of coverage,"" says Don Wycliff, public editor at the Chicago Tribune. ""We want to know the outcome ? we have no patience.""

A quick Web search just days after the Kentucky Derby last month found a handful of stories comparing the Run for the Roses to local elections. ""As thoroughbreds head to the starting gate this weekend for the Kentucky Derby, it is only the first race of what promises to be a competitive and highly charged runoff year in Pennsylvania politics,"" the Daily Courier in Connellsville, Penn., announced in a story lead.

""It is overblown and misinterpreted, but it is easy to cover,"" James Carville says about the horse-race approach. ""I don't like my candidates to talk about the process of politics and polls because they tend to be opaque and tell the voter nothing about you. It makes it more difficult to get your message out; even if you are ahead in the polls it blocks out the message."

There have been gains in fact-checking candidates' ads in the past 10 years, but not their day-to-day stump speeches. Reporters ""always get overtaken by the message of the day,"" says Alex Jones. ""There is increased mudslinging going on, and no one should get away with it. Find the proof that someone is telling the truth, or not telling it.""

Fact-checking of commercials, perhaps first employed by The New York Times, is now widely used. (One new Web resource: www.factcheck.org from the Annenberg Public Policy Center.) Several editors, including Stan Tiner of The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., say the effort is a good way to separate the truth from the chaff. ""If you successfully point out the error,"" Tiner says, ""the ad is a lot more likely to be removed than it used to be."" But, he adds, challenging statements issued in speeches or press releases needs to be more routine, especially at smaller papers where lack of experience again plays a role. ""Smaller papers don't have someone who is an expert at covering elections, so it becomes an extra duty,"" he says.

""Carville says the most important thing to cover in a campaign is what a candidate says, or doesn't say. ""I want the newspaper to cover what is helpful to me, but their job is to inform the reader,"" he adds. ""That may be the same thing, but it may not."

Why did the national press spend so much time asking whether John Kerry threw away his Vietnam War ribbons or medals ? or both, or neither ? when looking into his plans for dealing with the Iraq war would better serve voters? Simple: that was an issue the Bush campaign created that the press dutifully followed. ""They are afraid they will miss the big event or the big story,"" says Germond. Such stories are easier to follow and, often, sexier to readers. ""Good newspapers make their own judgments about what readers need to be told,"" he declares.

But when negative campaigning and daily attacks are on the rise, and covered more by 24/7 broadcast and Internet competitors, newspapers feel pressured to get into the fray. Opposition research, which has become much more sophisticated in both parties, also adds to the distractions, observers say. ""I hate it when we get drawn into the charge du jour,"" says Schechtman of Cape Cod. ""I don't think that serves the reader. You must consider, 'why should the reader care?'""

Clarence Page says it is easier for newspapers to follow TV, ""and TV is too often manipulated by the candidates. Instead of pushing the public's agenda, we are manipulated by the candidate's agenda."" On the local level, falling prey to a candidate's spin is even more likely because younger reporters often do not know the history of local races. Says Locher of the State Journal-Register: ""The best political reporters have that in the back of their mind, and they can call foul."

If a small community paper lands an interview with a state or national politico, reporters ""rarely will go after him,"" laments Schneider of CNN. ""A national candidate knows that if he goes to a local paper, he will get good treatment. The local press is reluctant to be tough or critical. The candidates know that, and they will turn down the national newspaper to get a positive [local] spin.""

Jeffe points to the inexperience of small-town newspaper reporters for some of the problem. ""They do not have the investigative skills to deal with [that],"" she says. ""Who is mentoring on the small paper? They need to be trained how to handle it.""

Kearney, of the Keene Sentinel, says the regular presidential primary coverage in his state has taught his reporters how to be tough on local candidates. But he says small newspapers in less politically charged areas must make sure reporters are well trained in covering powerful politicians and do not get starstruck. ""It comes down to understanding what the reporter's role is,"" he explains. ""A lot of people are flattered just to be able to cover the event. You have to tell your reporters what you really want.""