Sunday, June 01, 2008 | News, In this Issue...
From donut to jellyroll and back again
Despite polarized news outlets, American politics recently found its missing middle. Now Scott McClellan could put an end to that.
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception.”
PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images
By Stephanie Ramage
Last week, Scott McClellan, President George W. Bush’s former spokesman, unveiled his memoir "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” much to the delight of those who had begun to feel that the presidential contest has lacked a certain vigor; that it has crept solicitously into a sort of tea-service phase where, notably, Republican Sen. John McCain and Democrat Sen. Barack Obama trade compliments and express their mutual respect.
Before he announced that he had penned his damning reminiscences, McClellan himself was hardly the recipient of such white glove treatment. He was described by some members of the press as being “flat-footed,” “ham-fisted,” “inarticulate” and “robotic,” as well as having a number of other characteristics not generally considered flattering.
A month after he resigned from his post in April 2006, Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Wolff’s profile of McClellan, “Words Fail Him,” doled out one precisely executed surgical slice after another. “Now that the daily White House briefings are instantly available online, Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s mangled sentences, flat-footed evasions, and genial befuddlement have made him the butt of a thousand blogs, as well as of an increasingly savage press corps,” Wolff wrote. “Is he a victim, a pawn, or a P.R. disaster?”
Another tasty morsel began thusly: “Beginning with the advent of the live broadcasts, under Clinton’s last press secretary, Mike McCurry, then as a staple of the cable news cycle, and now as endlessly repeated, ever available streaming video, the briefing has become the living, inarticulate, comically absurd voice of the White House. Under McClellan the briefing is not only the source of news but news itself: McClellan’s performance, its degree of ham-handedness, echoed and refracted in a thousand blogs, is a central political event.
“‘You’re talking on [the White House] Web site?’ says McClellan, a little bewildered, when I ask him about the transmutation of the briefing process in the last few years, as well as the embarrassment of having his every grunt and pause and garbled sentence rendered in freely available, near-instantaneous transcriptions. ‘When did that start?’ McClellan fuzzily asks Mike, the transcriber he insists upon having at our interview. ‘Do you have any idea?’”
McClellan is now making the rounds of every talk show on every television network. In the middle of a campaign year that so far has shown the world that Americans are sick of partisan brawling, the McClellan debacle is a reminder that internecine skirmishes can be even uglier. It’s the kind of backstabbing sideshow that gives the left a lot of ammunition for its arguments, but once the fracas dies down, McClellan will still have a hard time finding a decent job. He was one of the worst press secretaries in memory—not a moniker that carries much recognition outside the insular world of the press, but now he’s famously bad.
What’s more, now the public will learn more about the way the relationship between the press and politics works than anyone is going to feel good about. The walls have fallen off the sausage factory. The red meat, as University of Georgia journalism professor Barry Hollander likes to call it, is flying.
Beef Tartar, anyone?
“The more red meat you throw, the more the loyal partisans love it, but you alienate the moderates,” says Hollander, who completed a study in April that shows that television news audiences are divided more sharply along party lines than ever before.
That partisanship between the networks, he says, has driven political moderates—who make up the bulk of America’s populace—to tune out television news. The result, he says, has been that people who identify with the left or the right have had their positions reinforced so often by CNN and Fox that they have become more extreme in their views, while moderates are dropping out of the television news audience altogether.
That’s a problem, because previous studies have shown that people who are not regular consumers of news are less likely to vote, meaning that the voting public is more likely to be comprised of partisans who get their information from news sources that reflect their beliefs. Hollander believes that this changes how politicians appeal to voters, the news coverage of electoral politics and the kind of candidates who run for office.
“Democracy thrives when people are exposed to a lot of viewpoints,” he says. “We tend to live in neighborhoods where people agree with our viewpoints. So news would force us to be exposed to the other side.”
For his study, which was published last month in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Hollander analyzed five national telephone surveys conducted from 1998 to 2006 by the Pew Center for the People and the Press. He found that in 1998, 18 percent of Democrats and 14 percent of Republicans watched Fox News regularly. By 2006, 36 percent of Republicans watched Fox News regularly, compared to 19 percent of Democrats.
The trend for CNN over the same period shows a dramatic drop in exposure to CNN for Republicans – from 27 percent to 19 percent—while Democrats have remained fairly stable, with exposure rates of 25 percent and 29 percent in 1998 and 2006, respectively.
“Between 1998 and 2006, Democrats didn’t really change all that much, but Republicans fled just about every news source except Fox,” says Hollander. “There are lots of different kinds of conservatives, so if we look at social conservatives versus economic conservatives, those people, for religious reasons, are less willing to hear other viewpoints expressed.”
Fox’s model of appealing to conservative audiences through commentators such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity is “obvious and overt,” says Hollander, while CNN’s efforts to appeal to more liberal audiences is reflected in the stories it chooses to report. CNN has spent an inordinate amount of time covering the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, for example.
POLARIZED OUTLETS IGNORING THE MIDDLE
The exodus of moderates from politics has been no well-kept secret, but against all odds, and despite the television media configuration described by Hollander, so far this election year the moderate support base has been making a comeback. On May 10, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece co-written by its executive Washington editor, Jerry Seib, and John Harwood, chief Washington correspondent for CNBC, titled “America’s Race to the Middle, After Years of Gridlock, Campaign ’08 May Yield a New Political Center.” In it, they call “the steady decline of the political center” a principal factor in Washington’s dysfunction.
“The long, fascinating spectacle of the presidential primaries has all but obscured their potential impact on American politics: Campaign 2008 may break Washington’s gridlock by reviving the long-dormant political center,” the pair wrote, pointing out that both McCain and Obama owe their success in no small part to their reputations for bipartisan problem-solving.
“Voters are pulling politicians toward the middle of the ideological spectrum by registering as independents and calling for centrist solutions,” Seib and Harwood continue. “Forty years ago, conservative Southern Democrats and liberal Northeastern Republicans filled up the middle of the political spectrum, forming a kind of human bridge between the partisan extremes.”
The two explain that today’s computer software allows politicians to pinpoint, house by house, the voting tendencies of particular neighbors, which means that political demographers from both parties “have drawn increasingly safe, ideologically homogenous congressional districts when state legislatures back home re-craft those districts after each decade’s census. Instead of voters choosing their lawmakers, Republican Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia says, lawmakers are choosing their voters.”
And they note the same media developments cited by Hollander’s study: “Media-world changes, meanwhile, have produced a 24-hour news cycle increasingly filled by niche outlets that speak only to partisans of one side or the other. That has all made it safer for members of Congress to remain highly partisan.”
The 24-hour news cycle is the home turf of Fox and CNN. Hollander also points to it outright, naming the two polarized networks and their roster of familiar faces: Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer at CNN and Sean Hannity at Fox.
“Take Sean Hannity, especially on his radio show—we all see it as biased against our point of view,” says Hollander. That’s because everyone tends to see the news as biased against their own beliefs. And those who don’t see it as particularly biased, might just see it as banal.
“If you can stomach Wolf Blitzer, you can see immediately that ‘The Situation Room’ is a game. ‘They sneezed today. What does that mean for the campaign?’” he says.
Escaping to another network might not be the answer, either—unless you’re prepared for some fairly unsightly footage.
“MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, he’s very out-there liberal,” says Hollander. “He may make a point, but the saliva is basically flying at the camera.” (“MSNBC is more liberal than CNN,” he says. “But there are only seven people who watch that.”)
In his syndicated newspaper column last week, Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor,” claimed that he invited McClellan on his show last February, was initially assured that McClellan would appear, but was then told he had changed his mind. Since then, says O’Reilly, McClellan “has booked himself on every far-left venue around.”
O’Reilly also recalls that “McClellan's former boss, Ari Fleischer, says that Scott confessed to him that the publisher, Public Affairs, made him ‘revise’ some of the book, putting in more negative stuff about Bush. If that’s true, it makes sense. Few people these days are in the mood to read anything good about the president. … Overwhelmingly, the press has made a sharp left-hand turn even as there is little traffic in the right-hand lane.”
But then O’Reilly adds an insider’s hint about the conservative media. They “do not like John McCain,” he says, “so there’s no drive to support him as there was with George W. Bush. The right may not like Barack Obama, but, without a champion, their zeal for the election is muted.”
McClellan’s book has drawn ideological lines as deep as the cuts on a chopping block. Like it or not, and no matter how hard he tries to distance himself from President Bush, John McCain is a Republican, and the beef Tartar that McClellan has served up is destined for the dinner plates of Democrats. How the media—both left and right—will use McClellan’s book in the months leading up to the general election in November depends on their audiences.
“Could McClellan actually support Barack Obama this fall?”
Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford University, says that Hollander’s findings are certainly compatible with the data—there’s polarization on the extremes, not much in the (vastly) larger middle.
“My view is the media are not the principal cause, but they play a reinforcing role. By emphasizing conflict and polarization, they give ordinary people the impression that it’s much more prevalent than it is,” he says. “Then when an Obama taps a big vein of people tired of conflict, everyone is surprised when they shouldn't have been.”
In the past, he says, the media has behaved in the way that Hollander describes it, buy keep in mind that the surveys he used were conducted only through 2006,
“But ‘tired of polarization’ is new, so lots of media coverage seems to be taking that angle—there’s emphasis on independents, McCain’s maverick image, ‘tired of Hillary's old Washington politics,’ etc.,” says Fiorina. “I think there’s been a lot of coverage of independents, swing voters, young people. We're still in the primary season, so there naturally will be a lot of emphasis on the opposites, especially because in closed primaries, they’re the only ones voting. But once we get past the nomination stage, the emphasis will shift even more to the independents and swing voters.”
McClellan’s book might reenergize the partisan media frenzy. It clearly will provide fuel for McCain’s Democratic opposition.
“It’s hard to say how much impact it will have, but I can’t imagine that it won’t have some negative impact. Anything that makes people sour even more on the war potentially hurts McCain,” says Fiorina. “We have a saying in academia that we know the direction—positive or negative—but not the magnitude—how much. This is one of those cases. Can’t help, but how much it will hurt is uncertain. A whole lot of people already believe what McClellan wrote. Nothing new as far as they're concerned.”
In a column posted May 29, John Mercurio at the National Journal Online explains that the timing of McClellan’s book is significant.
“It is being released at perhaps the worst possible moment for McCain, as he holds a series of low-profile fundraisers with Bush this week,” he writes. “More importantly, the book comes out as McCain emerges from the shadows … in a full-fledged general-election campaign after largely squandering a two-month window of Democratic infighting when he had an unobstructed bullhorn. This book helps Obama attack Bush, McCain and the Iraq war.”
Mercurio also asks, “Could McClellan actually support Barack Obama this fall? Talking to Meredith Vieira on ‘Today,’ he said he hopes his book will become part of the current presidential campaign’s dialogue, and he said Obama’s message of changing Washington is ‘very similar to the one the president ran on in 2000.’” SP