Talk to Wooster
Fall 2004
Missing the Story
Despite their intense focus, the media covering the presidential campaign in Ohio filed disappointing reports, high on spin, low on substance.
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Story
If there’s an Ohioan out there who didn’t get a chance to shake
the hand of at least one presidential hopeful this year, it wasn’t the
candidates’ fault. George Bush and John Kerry (along with their alter-egos,
Dick Cheney and John Edwards, spouses, and families) practically took up residence.
With them came hordes of news media, eager to capture the mood of voters in
the Buckeye State.
Campaign 2004 (at this writing, the outcome was still very much up in the air) was played out on an incredibly small stage. Initially, seventeen states were regarded as up for grabs. By mid-summer the number had shriveled to perhaps five or six, and by Labor Day, it was down to three: Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Everybody else, as a New York Times writer observed, is "abandoned out here in Chopped Liver Land." (An Ohio pundit quipped to the Times, "You could save a lot of money if we just held the presidential election in Ohio.")
Hundreds of news stories emanated from the state, as the candidates staged town meetings, photo ops, major policy addresses, and outdoor rallies (see "Cheeky Baby," page 30). Because of Ohio’s diverse political and economic demographics, the state was labeled "mini-America," a mirror of the other forty-nine. Reporters loved it. In two days they could (pick one): parachute into Chillicothe, Dayton, Millersburg, and Miami; stop by a diner, mall, church service, or union hall; talk to Ohioans about the economy, national security, family values, or education; file their story, hop a plane, and go home.
How good were those stories, and campaign coverage in general? Did the thousands of journalists on the campaign trail do their job? Did they deliver accurate and incisive reporting on the issues that were relevant to voters – and this nation?
In a word, no. Having spent much of this campaign season poring over hundreds of news accounts from around the country, I am sad to report that the coverage, like the campaigns themselves, largely ignored substance and wallowed in the meaningless.
In that regard, it was a repeat of the 2000 election, when the media obsessed over Al Gore’s penchant for earth tones and George Bush’s fondness for brush-cutting, when the latest polling data took precedence over policy positions. To prevent a recurrence, editors at Columbia University’s School of Journalism earlier this year hatched a novel experiment: offer online criticism of the media’s coverage of the 2004 campaign, to call strikes and errors as the game was ongoing. (In the past, election coverage analysis usually appeared sometime long after inauguration day.) With financial backing from the Rockefeller Foundation, the journalism school created the Web site, www.CampaignDesk.org, at Columbia, which also publishes Columbia Journalism Review, a bi-monthly print magazine of media criticism. A highly-respected editor was hired to run the show, and six of us signed on. We introduced ourselves and our mission thusly: "To get inside the news cycle and enrich campaign journalism in real time. Our goal is to straighten and deepen campaign coverage almost as it is being written and produced."
