In Print: The Nightly News Nightmare November 2006

An excerpt from The Nightly News Nightmare: Television's Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1988-2004

Scholarly concerns over horse race news often focus on the way such news crowds out more substantive coverage. And major party candidates in general elections have rarely complained about any partisan tilt in journalists’ assessments of the horse race, since they are frequently based on polling data. During the two months leading up to Election Day [2004], the overall tone of horserace coverage favored George W. Bush, by a margin of 65 percent favorable comments to 55 percent favorable for Kerry. Polls showed that Bush received a “bounce” upward in his poll numbers after the Republican convention in early September, while Kerry’s numbers did not rise after the Democratic convention a month earlier. These signs, together with the fact that Kerry spent much of August dealing—or, as some critics charged, not dealing—with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacks on his character, helped convince many reporters that Bush would be re-elected. Before the first debate, the horse race coverage on network television effectively pitted Seabiscuit against a draft horse: Bush’s horse race coverage was 80 percent positive, as compared to only 18 percent positive (i.e., 82 percent negative) for Kerry.

Kerry revived his electoral fortunes with his performance in the first debate. Although Bush thought that holding the foreign policy debate first would help him, polls and pundits agreed that Kerry seemed confident, crisp, and effective, while Bush seemed testy, like Al Gore had in the first debate against Bush four years earlier. After that first debate, the tone of horse race coverage changed considerably: Kerry’s horse race discussions were 66 percent positive, roughly as upbeat as the 64 percent positive tone Bush received in horse race coverage after that first debate.

Overall, assessments of the candidates’ viability in Campaign 2000 were quite balanced; 47 percent of the evaluations of Bush’s chances on the network news were optimistic, as were 52 percent of assertions about Gore’s prospects. As in 2004, the cumulative balance of these assessments masks a dramatic turn in the coverage midway through the campaign. Despite polls showing a close race between the presidential candidates, the national newscasts initially portrayed Gore’s prospects for winning as far more promising than those of Bush. During September 2000, on-air assessments of Gore’s election prospects were positive by a six-to-one margin (86 percent to 14 percent), while Bush’s were negative by a ratio of five to one (83 percent versus 17 percent).

Such assessments typically took the form of reports on preference poll results, often accompanied by variants of the notion that the leader’s candidacy was surging and his opponent’s was stumbling. For example, after CBS reported on September 17, 2000 that Bush continued to trail in the polls, Bill Whitaker described his campaign as being in disarray: “After a series of blows, many of them self-inflicted, [Bush] aides acknowledge their message has been muffled.” During this period, most polls placed Gore’s lead in the single digits. However, the unprecedented number of tracking polls being reported on a daily basis, most of them funded by news organizations, insured frequent repetition of horse race judgments. To make matters worse, scholarly studies of the way the news media covered Campaign 2000 polls found that reporters often stumbled over important details of these surveys. In particular, many reporters failed to recognize the uncertainty represented in polls by the margin of error. NBC News, which used Republican operative Frank Luntz to gauge public opinion, was censured by the National Council on Public Polls “for portraying Luntz as someone who is objectively reporting on public opinion when in fact he has strong partisan leanings, especially as no Democratic counterpart was given air time.”

In addition to these serious misjudgments, the very closeness of the 2000 race led journalists to treat changes of a few percentage points as more newsworthy than they might have seemed to academics trained as public opinion specialists. In another demonstration of the mercurial media assessments that characterized the 2000 campaign, however, evaluations of Gore’s prospects dimmed and those of Bush brightened in October and November (41 percent positive versus 59 percent negative assessments of Gore, compared to 65 percent positive and only 35 percent negative for Bush). For example, Terry Moran of ABC observed on October 12, “Gore has suffered another stumble in what has become a campaign struggling to regain its stride.” This shift occurred about the same time Bush pulled ahead into a lead in most polls, but one that was as slight and tenuous as Gore’s had been. In order to make their reports fit the numbers, even numbers as fluid and dubious as those found in many Campaign 2000 surveys, reporters often concluded that a candidate with bad poll numbers cannot be doing much right and a candidate with good poll numbers cannot be doing much wrong. Slight changes in the most respectable polls led to far greater changes in the way reporters’ stories framed the election.

In other words, both 2004 and 2000 were marked by sudden shifts in the dynamics of horse race coverage during the two-month general election campaign. No such turnaround had ever occurred during the three previous general elections of 1996, 1992, and 1988. Each time, the front-runner garnered highly positive predictions of success, while his opponent(s) fared poorly, throughout the entire fall campaign. This is hardly surprising, since all three races featured a front-runner who led in the preference polls wire to wire, whereas the 2000 and 2004 races were much tighter. It is not the change in directionality of horse race judgments that is notable so much as the magnitude of the shift.

Daily reports on tracking polls reminded voters of the candidates’ standing more frequently in recent elections. The continual reiteration of these judgments in 2000 may account for the fact that large majorities of the public picked Gore as the likely winner in surveys taken in September and Bush as the winner in October and November, regardless of their own preferences for either candidate (Gallup News Service 2000). Whatever audiences may have learned about the candidates’ policies, substantial learning seems to have occurred about the candidates’ prospects, as they were presented in poll-driven election news… Network television’s focus on polls may have encouraged citizens to focus on the horse race as they sought to orient themselves within Campaign 2000. While the horse race shared the spotlight with issues in 2004, the horse race remained of equal importance with issues that year.

The Horse Race: Assessing Candidate Viability