In 2000, television agreed on the first night that Al Gore won the debate. Then the spin set in. Look out for a replay. In case you were wondering whether or not to pay attention to the presidential debates over the next three weeks, CNN's blowhard-in-residence Jack Cafferty delivered the verdict in advance on Monday morning.
“The presidential debates begin Thursday,” he said. “It remains to be seen whether they're going to be worth watching. My sense is they probably won't be.”
The debates, he said, “[Have] been sanitized and choreographed and tied up in knots to the point where we're probably not going to see those wonderful spontaneous moments that we -- that we used to look forward to. My suggestion would be to put them in a room and let them have a food fight.”
That's great, Jack. Thanks for the insight.
Sadly, this is how it begins: By preemptively declaring the debates to be meaningless political theater, the television news networks are giving themselves permission to cover them not as a battle of ideas but as a spectacle.
Ditto in the print media. Writing for The Washington Post on Tuesday, media critic Howard Kurtz derided the debates as “structured parallel press conferences.” (“Not that I want to give up a chance to go to Miami,” he added.) Clearly, if he has already decided that the whole thing is pointless, Kurtz isn't headed for Florida to assess the candidates' positions on the issues. He must be looking for something else.
Here's a guess: Cafferty, Kurtz, and company will be watching Thursday night's exchange hoping that John Kerry displays some annoying personality tic or that George W. Bush makes one of his more egregious malapropisms, either of which they will replay as a laugh line for the next five weeks, all the while bemoaning the lack of substance in the candidates' discussion.
This, of course, is exactly what the mainstream media did in 2000, when it supplied exhaustive coverage of Al Gore's sighs and his tone of voice, hammering trivial points home so thoroughly that viewers who originally thought Gore had won the debates began to accept the media's alternate verdict of disaster for the vice president.
As Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler has exhaustively chronicled, the mainstream media's coverage of the 2000 presidential debates was laughably divorced from reality. In a Gallup Poll taken immediately after the first debate and sponsored by USA Today and CNN, debate viewers generally rated Gore's performance as good (51 percent) or excellent (25 percent). According to the same poll, Gore's numbers slipped after the second debate (54 percent said his performance was “good” and 18 percent said it was “excellent”) but peaked following the third (49 percent said “good” and 28 percent said “excellent”).
Asked who had won each debate, viewers gave Gore two out of three. And fact, in the poll asking viewers about the second debate, in which Bush was favored, the sample was so heavily tilted toward Republicans that in its online write-up of the results, CNN felt the need to warn its audience that the results might be skewed in Bush's favor.
By the time the elections rolled around, though, the majority of Americans, who had not actually watched the debates but were being told about them by cable television, were drawing a very different conclusion. Gore might have had more facts at his disposal than Bush did, viewers were told, but he had done serious damage to his candidacy by sighing too much, by correcting his opponent, and by being more aggressive in some of the contests than in others. The fact that Bush had been repeatedly mistaken about the content of his own campaign's policy proposals was, remarkably, ignored.
In fact, the pundits seemed able to convince even themselves that the real story line was Gore's personality.
On October 4, the day following the first debate, Chris Matthews had no doubts about who had come out on top, telling the audience on MSNBC's Hardball: “It was clear to me, and I am no fan of either of these guys entirely, and I can certainly say that about the one who I thought won last night, that's Al Gore. I thought he cleaned the other guy's clock, and I said so last night, and all four national polls agreed with that. In fact, the ones with the -- the one with the largest sample, which was CBS, found a 14-point spread of those who thought that the vice president really leveled the other guy. I don't understand why people are afraid to say so, because it's simply a judgment as to performance.”
But for Matthews and the rest of the cable talk-show cohort, performance was being judged by a completely different standard just a few days later. On October 10, the day of the second Bush-Gore contest, Matthews previewed the debate by replaying some footage from the first meeting, and what he chose to highlight wasn't the candidates' disagreements over the issues. It was Gore's facial expressions.
“Here he is, showing his demeanor,” Matthews said, introducing a video clip of the vice president. “You got to wonder about that facial manipulation. It's so, I don't know, condescending, like he's a teacher talking to the slowest first-graders.”
The 2004 debates will likely be the three events on which undecided voters focus in the few remaining weeks before the election, and with the margin between the candidates shrinking, the decisions made by those few remaining undecideds will play a large part in determining the election's outcome.
If for no other reason than this, the television news networks owe the country more serious consideration of the debates than Cafferty, Kurtz, et al. seem prepared to give them.
Rob Garver is a freelance journalist living in Springfield, Virginia, and is currently studying at Georgetown Public Policy Institute.
