Paul Duke
Senior Commentator for Public Broadcasting
Press Coverage of the 2000 Presidential Election
November 29, 2000 

Paul Duke: We are here this morning to discuss the late unlamented presidential campaign and I have with me two of my colleagues who are well known to American journalism and have been a credit to the business over the years. We are just going to give you some of our observations to start out. Both of my colleagues are long time stars of the Washington journalism scene. Jack Nelson won a Pulitzer Prize and for many years Jack was a White House reporter with the Los Angeles Times and then he graduated to being the Bureau Chief for the LA Times and some years ago he won a Pulitzer Prize. Carl Leubsdorf started out with the Associated Press. He was one of their chief political reporters for many years and then Carl also graduated to the ranks of being a news supervisor as the Bureau Chief of the Dallas Morning News. And I think they are both experts in their fields.

Well I guess, let me just through this out to you. Tom Brokaw made this statement that expressed the thoughts which some members of the press have about the coverage of the campaign, and I think there is a lot of self-examination going on now in the press about some of the things that occurred during the campaign. And I thought Tom Brokaw may have put it best when he said, "We don’t just have egg on our faces, we have an omelet all over our clothes." So what thoughts do you have, Jack and Carl, about the campaign and the way it was covered.

Carl Leubsdorf: Well I think one thing we learned…Thanks for the introduction, Paul. I am delighted to be here with you and Jack and am somewhat stunned by the size of the audience. It should make for an interesting discussion.

Paul Duke: Just another dull day in Charlottesville. That’s the reason they came. They had to come in out of the cold.

Carl Leubsdorf: There is nothing going on in Leon County Circuit Court today of interest. I mean, I think this election is going to be remembered more for the apre ski as it were, than what happened before November 7^th. I think it’s because it has blown the lid off of one of the dirty little secrets of American politics and that’s how messed up our electoral system is and how many jurisdictions… This could have happened in many places, what’s happening in Florida, because it’s a problem how they count the votes. We had a Louisiana congressman in our office a couple of weeks ago and he was telling us how they do it in Louisiana. He said they had an election down there and it was very close and his candidate was behind. So a couple of them got together with the aides and they said, "well what are we going to do about it?" They said, "We’ll go to the cemetery." So they went down to the cemetery with a bunch of absentee ballot requests and they were going through the cemetery writing down the names of people on these absentee ballot requests, which were then going to be cast. They got about halfway through and one aide said, "We’ve got enough now." The other aide said, "We can’t stop now. We’ll disenfranchise the rest of them."

I think that one thing we learned about the press…and we’ll get to some of the specifics in a while…is that I think after each campaign, frankly, we do a lot of self-examination. No sooner do we deal with one problem than we find that there is another problem. It is sort of like in the political system when we try to correct one flaw and then we have another flaw. I have covered for many years the efforts of the Democratic party to create a sane nominating process, which has gone through at least five commissions and various changes, back to the days when the politicians just got together and picked a candidate. Every time they changed the system, they created a new problem. I think that’s where the press is -- every time we fix one thing, we find another thing that is a problem.
I think after 1988 and especially in ’92 a little bit, there was the feeling that we were all doing too many horse race stories; not enough about the issues; not enough what voters thought; didn’t focus on the real things. So we tried to fix some of that but then a new problem popped up.

If I would just mention just three things about this campaign that I thought were a problem. One is, there still is an inordinate emphasis, and it’s much more so on television than in newspapers but it’s true in some newspapers, on polling. The fact is that if you looked at all the polls, and no one reads more polls than I do. I read tracking polls. I read all of them. But if you stand back from it, you realize that from about mid-September till election day, this election was a dead heat. Virtually every poll was within the margin of error. Whether George Bush was two points down or four points up, it really didn’t change very much. A little bit. And there were some other polls, some CNN-USA Today polls that went up and down like a jackrabbit, but the election didn’t change that much. Yet if you go back, you will find just an enormous number of stories that will stress not only that someone was ahead in a poll, but explain why there had been this massive shift of two percent in the electorate. We all think that Al Gore did badly in the first debate and perhaps in the debates as a whole and that it cost him the election. And there was a movement in the polls right after the first debate, but even that movement was very, very small given margins of error. So I think the emphasis on polling was a big problem.

We had an interesting issue in this campaign that I have not seen in any other campaign before in that the press core covering the two candidates gave more favorable coverage to the Republican candidate than to the Democratic candidate. We have heard over the years many criticisms from the Republicans: that the press is anti-Republican; and that we are all a bunch of eastern liberals; and that we bias the coverage; and we set the tone; and we raise issues that favor the Democrats; and we favor the Democratic candidates. Former President Bush certainly thinks so. He has been critical of the eastern press for a long time and he’s an easterner. But in this campaign, partly because of the candidates themselves and the way they treated the press and dealt with the press, and partly because of the nature of the two press cores covering them, I think you can make the case that George Bush got much more favorable treatment and much less critical treatment than Al Gore. And it’s continuing, frankly, to this day. If you look at television today or look at a lot of the coverage, you’ll see Al Gore is portrayed as a grasping desperate man who would do anything to get elected. And George Bush…I’m not exactly sure how he is being portrayed…maybe as someone with good breeding. But basically, no one thinks that he’s grasping and trying to do everything possible to get his side to win.

The third is election night and Paul’s quote from Tom Brokaw really referred to it. It happened election night when not once but twice, erroneous calls on one state really had an impact. The first was when the networks and the Associated Press, which was the modicum of caution for most of the evening as it usually is, said that Al Gore had carried Florida. There were several problems with it, the least of which being that he didn’t carry Florida perhaps. But the other problem is that they made the call before all the polls were closed in the state. It was only about 10 or 11 minutes before the polls closed in western Florida, but nevertheless they called it before then. They apparently had some erroneous information in their data which came from the Voter News Service, which is the only outfit now that does major exit polling for these organizations. So they were all dependent on the same information which had bad data. They quickly realized they had made a mistake and backed off it.

The second problem came at 2:00 a.m. when, starting with FOX, all of the networks again called the election this time for George Bush, who was ahead by about 100,000 votes in Florida at the time. Why they did it is something that we don’t know. There is no evidence that there was bad data. Maybe they got tired because it was 2:00 in the morning. And I think that when one of them did it, they all did it and unfortunately they took a bunch of us down with them because those of us who don’t have the means to do our independent judgements on these things totally are very dependent on other news organizations doing it. My rule of thumb always used to be that if one network called it you’d wait it a while, but if two did it you were probably pretty good, and if they all did it you could take it to the bank as Dan Rather said. Well in this case, five networks did it and you couldn’t take it anywhere as it turned out. It happened at 2:30 in the morning when we are all on our final deadline. I have in my office a newspaper, which is the final edition of the Dallas Morning News, that proclaims that George Bush is elected, having carried Florida. The good news is that not too many of our readers saw that paper because we stopped the presses when we realized what was happening and managed to intercept virtually all of the papers before they ever left the Dallas Morning News building. Other people were less lucky. But anyway I think this night has had an impact not only on the whole press but on what has happened since because George Bush thought he was elected and he got a concession call from Al Gore. And I think that has probably shaped a lot of what has happened, especially in the Bush camp, since then.

Let me stop with that because we can come back to any of these issues.

Paul Duke: Well, Carl, you referred to the great state of Louisiana. What was it that Senator Russell Long once said, that when he died he wanted to be buried back in Louisiana so he could continue being active in politics. Jack, I think picking up on Carl, it strikes me that the press did get it wrong in certain conclusions and in certain prognostications. For example, we were told during the campaign that Blacks were pretty unenthusiastic about Al Gore and weren’t like to go to the polls in significant numbers. We were told that the union vote was pretty split and that it wouldn’t be as supportive of the Democratic cause as it has been in the past. And we were also told that Al Gore might win in the electoral college but he certainly wouldn’t get the popular vote. And in all of those the press was things by and large off the mark, or at least elements of the press.

Jack Nelson: Well I think what has happened, and Carl mentioned the fact that for the first time a Republican candidate really did get more positive coverage. There is no question about that. There were lots of studies that were done that showed that. I think that what happened was that the press generally bought and has continued to buy the Republican spin on what’s going on. Part of that, I have to say, is Al Gore’s fault. Al Gore, and I knew him when he was a reporter in the early 1970’s in Washington, D.C., and I am astounded that a reporter would have such poor press relations. But I can understand why he has such poor press relations – he has very little to do with the press. As a matter of fact Paul called me up to be on a Washington Week in Review program last year and he said, "I would like you to discuss Al Gore and his candidacy." I said, "Okay, I’ll see if I can get in touch with him. I called Frank Hunger, his brother-in-law, and said, "I need to talk to the Vice President because I am going to be on Washington Week in Review and I’d like to say something about what he says in his own words about the economy and what he is going to run on."

So Gore calls me up and I said, "Mr. Vice President I guess Frank told you what I wanted to talk to you about." And he said, "Yes, this will have to be off the record." I said, "Mr. Vice President, I am going to be on Washington Week in Review and I would like to be able to tell the viewers that you had told me this about..." "Well I can’t talk to you on the record. If you want to talk to me for a few minutes, I’ll discuss things with you and then if you want to quote me on something you can ask me about it," [Al Gore stated.]

Well I finally after about 15 minutes got a pretty good quote out of him and he agreed to let me do it, but it just shows you how really ultra-conservative he is in dealing with the press and how stand-offish he has been. So a lot of it really has been his fault. Having said that here is no question about it that the press has generally accepted whatever the spin was from the Republican camp on Al Gore…the fact that he exaggerated everything, that you couldn’t trust him. Whatever the exaggerations were, and there were a few exaggerations, most of them were relatively trivial matters. Some of the exaggerations that they talked about actually were not exaggerations but they were repeated endlessly. Almost to this day they have been repeated. So I think that has been one of the big problems of the coverage.

Another part of the coverage that was really bad Carl mentioned and of course that was the early calls. But I thinkthat the press in this campaign has not distinguished itself very well. There is no question about that.

Carl Leubsdorf: I wanted to respond to one thing you said. When you mentioned the different groups and the perception, I think a lot of that was poll driven. People looked at polls and they said, as they did when they talked about the Black poll, for a long time the Gore percentage of the Black vote in polls was like in the sixties and instead of getting 80% on election day he got 90% of the Black vote. And it was a big Black vote. I think the same thing happened actually in reverse with the Jewish vote. There were a lot of stories that Gore was going to do better with the Jewish vote because of Lieberman, and he didn’t.

Paul Duke: Doesn’t this illustrate another problem which some of us feel has become endemic with the press today and that is that much of the coverage is too poll-driven? Instead of going out and talking to real people, real voters, too much of the press is implying to rely upon polls and focus groups and this can lead to some distorted conclusions about the campaign. I’d like to get back to the matter of bias in the coverage, which you both referred to, that there was a tilt towards George Bush in this campaign. Because all of us who have been to Washington in recent years have heard this litany of complaints from a lot of conservatives and many Republicans that the press tilts too much towards liberalism and is sometimes just too pro-Democratic. I have always regarded those charges as mostly hogwash. But this time we are beginning to hear from some Democrats who are suggesting that in this campaign, at least, there was a conservative tilt in the press…

Carl Leubsdorf: I don’t think it was ideological.

Paul Duke: …that the press went too far the other way. Well if it wasn’t ideological, do you think it was because of what Jack was talking about, that Al Gore wasn’t the most warm and fuzzy candidate in the world and that a lot of reporters actually liked George Bush, who related to people better than Al Gore did, and so there was a kind of connection to him that there wasn’t to Al Gore?

Carl Leubsdorf: Yes I think it was much more on a personal basis. I think that with Bush that was certainly true. A lot of the people that were covering Governor Bush had covered him in Texas and had liked him there. Some of them that I have talked to had great skepticism about his abilities and they didn’t really think he was ever going to be elected President but they liked him as a person. And it was interesting because Governor Bush lost the New Hampshire primary in part because he didn’t take advantage of his strongest suit, which is his personality, his nature, that he is a very pleasant, engaging fellow. Right after the New Hampshire primary, especially after he won the nomination, he really set out to use that in dealing day to day with the reporters who covered him, whereas Gore, as Jack said, did just the opposite.

The other thing that happened and it was sort another unique circumstance is that three of the reporters who covered Vice President Gore earliest on for major news organizations (for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Associated Press) for some reason developed a very anti-Gore attitude. Part of it was, I think they were trying to show how tough they were and they weren’t going to be another one of those liberal handmaidens for a Democratic candidate.

Paul Duke: It was three women reporters.

Carl Leubsdorf: Three women reporters -- Cece Connelley of the Post, Sandra Sobroy of the AP, and Kit Sealy of the New York Times.

Paul Duke: And they were referred to as the Spice Girls.

Carl Leubsdorf: Or as the Witches of Eastwick as it were. And in fact it became a matter of great concern at the Washington Post, so much so that during the fall campaign, Cece Connelley was no longer the principal reporter for the Post covering Gore. She covered him some but they made a decision to broaden her areas of coverage rather than be the person on the plane most of the time. I think that they were the ones responsible, two of them were responsible for one of the incidents where Gore was accused of misspeaking on the Love Canal matter. The question was whether he had discovered the problem at Love Canal, whether it was contamination and a lot of people had to move and it was a big environmental to-do. He had said something to the effect that he had the first hearing on it or that he learned about it early. He never said that he was the one who discovered it. It was misreported by both the Post and the Times when it happened. They had compared their notes and had both used the same quote. It was discovered when some of the students who were at the event in Concord, New Hampshire told the Concord Monitor what had really happened. And the Concord Monitor reported the more accurate quote on the incident but it was one of the things that happened. But it was the case where several reporters on a campaign really set the tone at least in the early period, exacerbated by the fact that Al Gore seemed to go out of his way to antagonize the press.

Jack Nelson: I also think, Paul, though that the fact that the right wing organizations and many of the right wing politicians continued to hammer away at the press as being biased did have an impact. It think it had an impact on the media.

Paul Duke: You mean a reverse impact?

Jack Nelson: Right, exactly.

Paul Duke: One of the things which many Democrats complain about is that in October there was a period of about two weeks, two and a half weeks, in which the press dwelled heavily on Al Gore’s exaggerations and embellishments. There was a stream of charges and Gore himself added to it with some of his mistakes in the debates. And there were a lot of stories written suggesting that Al Gore just was someone who didn’t always tell the truth and you couldn’t always trust him. And they contend that that was just overdrawn. While George Bush made misstatements as well, they didn’t get the play in the press that Gore’s did. There was this concentrated period in here. And it was interesting to me that late in the campaign, both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran stories saying that from the very beginning the Bush campaign had devised a deliberate strategy to tear down Al Gore and to plant in the voters minds that he was someone that was untrustworthy and was inclined not to tell the truth.

Carl Leubsdorf: And it worked. But one reason that it worked… yes they did that and I think they wanted to make him look as Clinton-esque as possible, and succeeded, although we know that there is an enormous difference between the two of them. One reason I think it worked is because they were pretty good at it and the Gore campaign was not very good at it, starting with Vice President Gore. I remember in the second debate in Winston-Salem where there were a lot of foreign policy questions, and one of the things that Governor Bush said in that was that he was going to take our troops back from overseas because we were overextended; and Jim Lehrer asked him about specific situations. He mentioned that we should rely much more on the Europeans in Bosnia and in Kosovo. Well, the Europeans are about 80-85% of the troops in Bosnia and Kosovo. Vice President Gore didn’t say a word. He didn’t say, "Well in fact we’ve already done that."

Mr. Bush also mentioned about Haiti, where I think there were about 14 Americans left on peace keeping duty there. Again, Gore didn’t say a thing and his people afterward didn’t say a thing. I went up to a Democratic senator afterwards and said, "Why didn’t he say something when the subject of Bosnia was brought up?" The guy just shrugged his shoulders.

I contrast that with the fact that in the first debate where the issue (if you can call it that raised to that level) of whether when Vice President Gore went to look at wildfires he was with James Lee Witt, the head of FEMA, or whether he was with another official. One other thing, he said he went with James Lee Witt, the head of FEMA, to look at wildfires. And in fact, Witt wasn’t with him on that trip, he was with him on another trip. I can tell you that one minute after that debate ended Carl Robe was over at the Dallas Morning News workstation, telling our correspondent who was covering Bush, pointing this out to him. So they worked very quick in the way that the Clinton people in 1992 were quick, the Bush people were very quick. That doesn’t excuse the press any, but when a candidate doesn’t defend themselves it creates a problem.

Jack Nelson: The other thing was that Gore and his campaign, unlike Bush I think, was totally humorless. I mean, could you ever imagine Gore, for example, saying what Moe Eudol said after he lost the presidential election he ran for in 1976 -- "I wanted to run for the presidency in the worst way and I did." No. He would never say that.

Carl Leubsdorf: But one thing that showed… Vice President Gore, I’ve always felt, who is an honorable, decent, intelligent man, has terrible political instincts.  He reacts badly and slowly, but the famous line about the legal authority…that was one of them. Clinton reacts very well and Bush showed in this that he reacts pretty quickly. When something comes at him, he can come back. Gore is just terrible at it.

Paul Duke: I think you are exactly right, Carl. I think a lot of Al Gore’s troubles really went back to the position he took on the Elian Gonzalez case. I think his stand on that really infuriated a lot of Democrats and the people in the White House were just nonplussed on the position he took on that.

But let’s go to the flip side here, because the people in the Bush camp also had their complaints and they contend that originally the press dwelled much too much on the whole issue of whether George Bush had ever taken cocaine and as to his mental acuity, that the press tried to portray him as a friendly dunce. Was there anything to that?

Carl Leubsdorf: Well there was certainly a lot of coverage of the issue of whether he had taken cocaine. But I think with that and I think we discovered this when the thing about the DUI conviction came up late in the campaign. The Bush people, just as Gore contributed to his problems by the way he responds, the Bush people contributed to his problems in the way this was handled by refusing to come clean with the whole story. I mean, we all know from covering politics all these years, if there is some dirty little secret about a major politician almost inevitably it is going to come out. I remembered discussing this issue back even before Governor Bush decided to run. I think I wrote a column about it listing the various considerations he had and one of them was ‘is there anything in his background?’ And I said the only thing you can ever be sure of is if there is anything there, it is going to come out. And the way they handled that contributed to the story. In fact, if they had put out in 1998 or 1999 the fact that he had a DUI conviction 25 years earlier, he could have gone to a school, talked to some kids about the dangers of driving drunk, and said, "Hey when I was younger, I did these things." It never would have been a problem the way it was in the end and even then he was reluctant to come out and admit it himself.

Jack Nelson: But Carl, I’m not sure you are exactly right on that because he did get away without saying what his youthful indiscretions were. He got away without saying whether he used cocaine and maybe it wasn’t relevant but at least he refused to answer the question and the press did not stay on him about it.

Paul Duke: But where would it have gone, Jack?

Jack Nelson: I don’t know.

Paul Duke: Because there was no way of actually proving it unless you came up with an independent source.

Jack Nelson: That’s what I say. He got away with it. He didn’t come clean on that. You said he came clean but he didn’t come clean on that.

Carl Leubsdorf: But he did on the other. It came out. And maybe there was nothing there. I assume there was something there but I don’t know that.

Paul Duke: The other thing was that the Republicans also suggest that the press did a lot of silly stories about George Bush and his gaps. Having covered a lot of campaigns as we have, we know that all candidates make gaps and they think that too much was made of some of the things that George Bush said.

Carl Leubsdorf: Well if you go to the slate website, you can find something called the "Complete Bushisms", which are a series of quotes from governor Bush, some of which will make your hair stand on edge. He got caught on… you know at the end when he made that statement "Imagine if Gore thinks Social Security is a federal program." It’s interesting…I think the voters picked up on a lot of that. You mentioned something about focus groups and let me defend focus groups a little bit. For the last three or four elections I have done my own sort of focus groups with another reporter from another organization. We go out to the Chicago suburbs and we go to Cleveland, where there are a lot of ethnic Catholics, and basically put together some groups of voters with the help of some people there to try to sort of gauge what people think. It’s not to measure the numbers but to get some sense of how the candidates are coming across. And I can tell you, one of the things that came across was the number of people, especially Republicans, who had doubts about this guy and had doubts about whether Governor Bush was up to it. Now most Republican polls will show voted in fact for Bush, 90% did. But the sense that he was lacking something, I think, was out there and a lot of voters, in fact, had picked up on it.

Paul Duke: Well I think we are just about out of time but I will leave you with a couple of quotations. One is from the great columnist, Walter Litman, who said, "The Constitutions guarantees a free press, not a responsible press and not even a fair press." And finally from Senator Sam Irvin, who is one of my personal heroes. He was the maestro of the Senate Watergate hearings many years ago. He was a great Constitutional scholar and a great supporter of the First amendment. One of the things he said I have always remembered and it was that, "The First Amendment to the Constitution was designed not to protect the press, but the public, to assure the widest possible flow of information."

Thank you very much. It’s been a joy and a pleasure for us to be here.