HKS Shorenstein Center

On October 12, 1988, four weeks before the presidential election, Peter Jennings, the anchor of ABC's "World News Tonight," looked solemnly into the studio camera-and through it to millions of living rooms across the nation-to announce that this night's broadcast was about to do something that "has not been done before." Having grabbed the audience's attention with the promise that something unprecedented was about to happen, Jennings went on to reveal... the results of the latest ABC/Washington Post presidential poll. As the press secretary for the campaign of Michael Dukakis, watching the newscast from the hotel suite in Los Angeles where we, the campaign workers, were preparing for the final debate the next evening, I understandably had more than a passing interest in what one of the major networks was reporting. But I think it's fair to say that even those Americans who were more interested in the World Series than the presidential election would have agreed with my initial reaction to Jennings' hyperbolic buildup to his newscast: Devoting campaign coverage to an opinion poll was hardly unprecedented; on the contrary, throughout the long campaign of 1988 it seemed that poll reporting was campaign reporting. Polls were everywhere. You couldn't escape them. Every time you turned on a television set, listened to a radio or opened a newspaper, someone had a poll telling you, in effect, that you had already voted. Everyone in the media business-from the tiny radio station in Iowa that asked people to flush their toilets when they heard the name of their favorite candidate land thus measured support by the amount of water flow at the public works plant, with an undetermined "margin of error" caused by residents who were simply answering the call of nature at the wrong moment to such giants as CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and major metropolitan papers-was in the poll business in 1988. In focusing on yet another poll, ABC's report that night in October, then, was not something that "had not been done before." (CBS, for instance, was reporting the results of its own poll the same evening.! Quite the opposite, it was more of the same, part of a growing pattern of a surfeit of polls in campaign coverage. But it was noteworthy in one respect: it took the media's obsession with political polls to a new level. For the first twelve-and-a-half minutes more than half the entire broadcast when you add the commercial breaks-the only "news" was the poll. It showed that George Bush was leading Dukakis 51 percent to 45 percent in the popular vote, but in a state-by-state breakdown Bush had "firm" leads in 21 states (to Dukakis' 3) and "leaning" leads in 15 more (to four for Dukakis). A map of the United States was prominently shown, displaying Bush's states in shades of red and Dukakis' in blue-the same visual image we have become accustomed to seeing on election nights. There were reporting segments exploring various aspects of the poll, explanations of how the electoral college works, analyses from political experts on what Bush had done right and Dukakis had done wrong up to this point, and then reactions from workers of the two campaigns on what they thought about the poll results. I am not a pollster or even an expert on polling, and this is not a story to complain about the accuracy of polls, but it is worth noting that in various campaign postmortems a number of respected pollsters have questioned this particular poll's methodology and accuracy. I raise the incident instead to make a larger point about campaign coverage, because I think it is a telling example of one of four trends in campaign reporting moving in the wrong direction. The principal problem with ABC's coverage of its poll that night was the excessive attention the network gave to it: more than half that night's news. Think for a second. What other event in the world would get half of a broadcast devoted exclusively to it? The death of U.S. Marines from a terrorist bomb in Beirut? Elections in the Soviet Union? A new cure for cancer? If Bush had admitted he had personally delivered arms profits to the contras or Dukakis had revealed he was secretly planning a major increase in the income tax, would that have gotten as much time? Maybe so. But in this case, nothing had actually happened-except that a network had gone to considerable expense to conduct its own opinion poll and like every other news outlet during the campaign, differing only in the extreme degree of its presentation, decided that this was the most important news it had to offer.

Was George Bush a wimp! Did Bob Dole have a dark side! Was Gary Hart a man of integrity! Whatever its other distinguishing marks, the presidential campaign of 1988 stands out as a contest in which these kinds of questions were in the forefront of press coverage and public discussion, seeming sometimes even to eclipse debate about the candidates' stands on substantive political issues. In 1988, the politics of character was ascendant. With John Tower, Barney Frank, and others, character questions remain in the forefront of the news. Many people have the vague sense that the rise of the politics of character is intimately connected with the critical and increasingly important role of the press in the American political system and especially in the campaign and election processes. But the precise nature of the relationship remains unclear. What role does the press play in the politics of character! What role ought it to play! Is the focus on character good for the quality of our political life! These are the questions I shall attempt to answer here. But before they can be tackled, we need to understand why the politics of character has come to assume such prominence, and what it is that we really want to know when we want to know about a politician's character.

More than a century before television came on the scene, Alexis de Toqueville wrote in Democracy in America, "The press...constitutes a singular power, so strangely composed of mingled good and evil that liberty could not live without it, and public order can hardly be maintained against it." That is a remarkably perceptive description of the role that television plays in presidential politics today.

The concept of a "School for Scandal" in the context of today's politics raises intriguing questions. What kinds of teaching and what kinds of learning might be at issue? Who are the instructors when it comes to scandal? And what would it take to begin unlearning some of the lessons they purvey?

For more than a decade, pieces of a nationwide scandal had surfaced from the vast and sprawling system that produces America's nuclear weapons; as health, safety, and environmental stories at the 17 facilities in 12 states. For years, accounts appeared in the regional and local newspapers, among them The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Seattle Times, The Spokane Spokesman-Review, The Portland Oregonian, The !Salt Lake City] Desert News, The Rocky Mountain News, The Denver Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Columbia (South Carolina) State and Record, The Charlotte {North Carolina} Observer, and the Washington Star. And occasionally, feature articles were printed in specialized publications such as Science magazine, New Scientist, Technology Review, and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Reporters on the "defense" and "science" beats for national publications also noted the production system's vital role in maintaining the U.S. strategic nuclear deterrent. But with few exceptions, the weapons-making system itself was never considered an important national news story. This weapons-making system's costs were buried in the Energy Department's budget; its policies concerned a metallurgy and chemistry whose details were secret; its governance was obscured by military censors; and its dangers were only seen or sensed by workers and residents in remote areas -many of whom depended on these facilities for their livelihood. Then, in October 1988, the problems that had developed in secret over decades suddenly gained the full attention of the national press: as frontpage features in the country's leading newspapers, as cover stories in the weekly news magazines, and as leading items on the commercial television news programs. How and why this long-acknowledged but ignored topic became a "national" story when it did demonstrates the ways in which public-policy issues are shaped and strengthened by politicians and the press. In the case at hand, the nuclear weapons production story developed through a combination of factors: surprising leaks to the press from a federal agency split by policy feuds, persistent congressional staff investigations and initiatives, related concerns about safety in civilian nuclear power plants, and a respected national newspaper's ambitious "crusade." This research paper examines how the story broke, and explores what new role the press plays in the future of U,S, nuclear-weapons policy. More broadly, this paper raises questions about how news is made in the murky world where science, politics, and national security collide.

To be sure, image-conscious coverage was not the only kind of political reporting to appear on network newscasts in 1988. Some notable "fact correction" pieces, especially following the presidential debates, offered admirable exceptions. But the turn of television news to "theater criticism" set the tone of the 1988 coverage, and defined a new and complex relation between politics and the press. This new relation, between image-conscious coverage and media-driven campaigns, raises with special urgency the deepest danger for politics in a television age. This is the danger of the loss of objectivity-not in the sense of bias, but in the literal sense of losing contact with the truth. It is the danger that the politicians and the press become caught up in a cycle that leaves the substance of politics behind, that takes appearance for reality, perception for fact, the artificial for the actual, the image for the event.

Only a short time after a member of the East German Politburo (SED) had announced dramatic changes in travel regulations and after West German television had interpreted them on the evening news, East Berliners began to flock to the Wall. After having been denied free movement for decades most of them were still skeptical whether on this 9th of November, 1989, they would finally be allowed to cross the border into the other part of the city. Their doubts were confirmed when the border guards stopped them with their all too well known bureaucratic intransigence.

On May l8th, 1989,Chinese television viewers witnessed a scene that no one could have imagined seeing on state-run television one month earlier. The news broadcast showed the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, and the Prime Minister Li Peng, accompanied by other "leading comrades,"Qiao Shi, Hu Qili and Rui Xingwen, visiting defiant students at a Beijing hospital. The students were being treated after fainting as a result of their hunger strike at Tiananmen Square.

By arguing in lawsuits for a First Amendment right to observe trials and inspect judicial records, the press has pushed the courts to fashion a body of law governing access to what Alexander Hamilton called the "least dangerous" branch of government. To date, however, the Supreme Court has recognized only a constitutional right to attend criminal trials and pretrial criminal proceedings. This paper explores a question that is increasingly confronting the lower courts: whether the First Amendment right of access extends to settlement agreements and related documents in civil cases. These records are not inconsequential. Modern civil litigation involves myriad issues of public importance: corporate and government misconduct, sex and race discrimination, school desegregation/dangerous products, environmental harm, prison reform, voting rights. Although information of interest to the public might surface if a particular case goes to trial, the vast majority of lawsuits today-approximately 90 percent, according to some estimates-are settled and thus resolved without a trial on the merits. In connection with such settlements, judges frequently enter orders sealing court records reflecting the terms of the settlement agreement and other documents pertaining to the lawsuit. Some of these records might be available through legal avenues other than the First Amendment: the common law right of access, statutes or court rules providing that judicial records are to be available for public inspection, or more general "freedom of information" acts. Potential problems exist with respect to each of these routes, however. Although the general principle of openness is well established at common law, numerous exceptions have emerged that permit judges to deny access to judicial records. Moreover, courts have often interpreted statutes dealing specifically with these records as merely having codified the common law and the various exceptions. Only a handful of courts have adopted rules governing access to documents in their possession, and some freedom of information statutes-including the federal act-do not apply to the judiciary. It is not surprising, therefore, that news organizations have asserted a First Amendment right of access to judicial records in general and settlement documents in particular. The legal battles are being fought in the lower courts, most of which have recognized a constitutional right to inspect some types of judicial records. Whether this right extends to all such records, including settlement documents, remains unclear.

In "Nine Sundays," the Shorenstein Barone Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy proposes that the three major networks on a rotating basis, plus CNN, c-span, Monitor and PBS, provide ninety minutes of evening or prime time every Sunday for nine weeks to a serious and substantive discussion by the two principal presidential candidates of the major issues that concern the American people. One issue at a time. For example, taxes may be the subject for one Sunday, Middle East policy or abortion for another, education, the environment, or us-soviet relations on other Sundays. Such an approach would guarantee a detailed examination of the principal issues of the '92 campaign and undercut the current tendency to reduce all political dialogue to brief sound-bites--and report it that way, as if substance were secondary. This proposal, if adopted, would radically change the content of modern-day politics.

The results of this inquiry reveal that the volume of traffic between journalism and government, or politics, is heavy throughout the country. The dilemmas facing such career changers, and the clear pattern which describes the journey from journalism into politics and back, raise several issues that the professionals and ideologues may not have considered. Changing careers is an educational experience. Reporters who spend a season or more in public life and then return to journalism acquire a more profound understanding of both professions. These revolvers can articulate precisely where politics and journalism meet, and where they diverge. The evidence in this study, gathered from around the country, suggests that reporters who get their education about politics from the inside are better equipped than those who have not had that inside experience to deliver realistic descriptions of the political process to the rest of us. But before we turn to this evidence, and the issues it raises, it is useful to take a brief historical look at the revolving door phenomenon.

The study finds growing apprehension among some press corps members that hard-won advances in reporting and press independence can be eroded by line-crossing and other flirtations with the establishment. Jim Lehrer of the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour said, "Anytime Billy Bob reporter does something like this, it leads somebody to not believe what I am doing." He thought that most Americans do not understand "why we do what we do. They think we do it for ourselves, [not] for them ... They don't understand the First Amendment." He worries that journalists think "we can do as we damned please" and never have to explain.

Glyn Davis, Commissioner for Public Sector Equity in the newly created Public Sector Management Commission of Queensland, Australia, has taken a close look at what he calls the "chaos" of America's public broadcasting system. In this paper, which he prepared while he was a visiting Fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Dr. Davis compares the United States decentralized public broadcasting system to its Australian counterpart, which was built on the British government monopoly model. Starting with a historical analysis of how the two different systems developed from their early radio days, Dr. Davis documents the various political assaults and supports for each system and evaluates which is better organized for serving the public interest. He addresses such questions as: Should public broadcasting seek to be an alternative voice to programming provided by the commercial networks-or should it be expected to provide a sense of nation/ a comprehensive range of material including the kind already provided by commercial radio and television? Which system- the loose federation or the centralized monopoly-involves the public more effectively and better resists partisan political pressures: What difference does the organization of the system make in its relationship to the audience? Dr. Davis's paper provides a valuable history and analysis for anyone interested in public policy about broadcasting and, in particular the challenges posed by public broadcasting systems.

As fate would have it, the Russians had to make their way towards democratic liberties and press freedom twice: first within the framework of czarist Russia and then repeating the entire path within the Communist structure of the Soviet Union. In both cases, their travail produced but partial success: basically a compromise between what the authorities were willing to allow and what the subjects were demanding to obtain. Attempts launched by pro-democracy forces to accede to freedoms, culminating in the February 1917 "bourgeois democratic" revolution, resulted in the weakening of the Russian empire that had been historically held together by the strong hand of its rulers and led to the paralysis of power in the absence of democratic traditions of government. The Bolsheviks who took advantage of the situation and seized power in November I9I7 proclaimed basic liberties only to replace them later with tough controls in all spheres-political, economic, and intellectual. The democratic changes initiated by the Soviet leadership in the mid-1980s did lead to a greater freedom of expression and the acceptance of basic human rights, but they also unleashed long-suppressed nationalist, centrifugal forces that are now threatening to break up the "Soviet empire," tempting the authorities to apply force to preserve the country's unity and their own existence. The printed word has always had a special appeal for the Russians: writers and poets have enjoyed an esteem that was envied by rulers and heroes alike. Anything that appeared in print was considered truth, and the powers that be, aware of this idiosyncrasy of their subjects, sought to control the press and literature in order to control the populace. They succeeded in doing this only partially as there have always been intrepid men of letters who defied pressures from above and planted seeds of doubt in the minds of admirers through their novels, poems or newspaper articles. Very often, they did that at the expense of their own freedom and even lives. The press, as well as other institutions both in pre-revolutionary Russia and in the Soviet Union, always reflected the tug-of-war between authorities unwilling to yield powers and a public wanting to have as much freedom as they could possibly handle.

At the end of July 1990, the Italian media world was rocked by a case of censorship. The Rizzoli publishing company, one of the biggest in the country, suddenly announced it had cancelled plans to publish L'Intrigo (The Intrigue), the story of the attempted hostile takeover of the best-selling Italian dally, La Repubblica. The book was written by the well known journalist Gianpaolo Pansa, deputy editor of La Repubblica. The book was ready for the presses. The last galley proofs had been corrected, the cover was already designed, the first printing had been set for 70,000 copies, and bookstores were already making orders. Rizzoli's decision not to publish was unexpected. A company official told Pansa that the book was too polemical towards people with whom Rizzoli has business relationships. Those "people" were Silvio Berlusconi, the television tycoon who started from scratch and built one of the world's biggest commercial television empires. Berlusconi is the man who tried to take over Rizzoli's rival and the country's biggest publishing company, Mondadori. The company operates fifteen dailies, thirty-five magazines-including the two major newsweeklies- and publishes about 2,000 books a year. And the jewel in the Mondadori crown is La Repubblica the paper, founded in L976, which had revolutionized Italian journalism. Berlusconi succeeded in wresting control of Mondadori from Carlo De Benedetti-who is also the boss of Olivetti-in January 1990. For months, the power struggle grabbed headlines. But by June, following a legal battle that is still not over, De Benedetti was back in command of the publishing company. In August, after fourteen years of prolonged debate and a regulatory vacuum in which Berlusconi flourished, the Italian Parliament finally passed antitrust legislation in the broadcast media sector-a bill which more or less sanctioned the existing division of the television spoils between Berlusconi and the three state run RAI television networks. The events of the summer of 1990 marked the climax of a decade during which newspaper readership more than doubled and the Italian media underwent massive transformations from a politically-subsidized press to a lucrative business now controlled by non-media conglomerates. At the same time, a commercial television sector, dominated almost exclusively by one tycoon, developed alongside the state-run networks. This was made possible by succeeding governments failure-or unwillingness-to apply antitrust laws in the publishing sector and to the total absence of antitrust legislation in the commercial television sector. I propose to show in this paper how the attempted hostile takeover of La Repubblica brought to the attention of Italian public opinion and-belatedly-of Italian politicians the new and extraordinary development of an unparalleled media concentration with political implications that are powerful but still undefined. In Italy today a tiny elite of business barons-newsmakers in their own right, as well as the major advertisers-have become the major media owners.

It is just this latter type of criticism of press practices that is explicitly described, and so well embodied, in this analysis of AIDS coverage prepared by Timothy Cook, Associate Professor of Political Science at Williams College and in 1989-90 a Research Fellow of the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and Visiting Associate Professor in the Lombard Chair at the fohn F. Kennedy School of Government. In this first of two of Tim's papers to be published by the Center, he draws the distinction described above far better than I have here, and then goes on to evaluate press coverage of AIDS by arguing that a large number of existing press practices and standards, even when followed faithfully, have the tendency to produce unfortunate press coverage of events like AIDS that may disproportionately place at risk only a small portion of the population, that may not be easily captured in daily breaking events/ that may present an extraordinarily high possibility of inflammatory interpretation, and that may involve areas of scientific knowledge not easily understood or conveyed by those without the requisite scientific knowledge. Tim's provocative critique of AIDS coverage would be important even if its lesson were restricted to the enormously pressing issue of AIDS itself. But as a case study in how journalistic norms and practices may systematically misreport social phenomena of a certain kind, it has an even broader message, one that should be considered by all serious students of the press and its performance.

The abortion issue currently exercising the minds and emotions of many Americans is one of the more disturbing moral and political questions of recent U.S. history. This paper addresses the interrelationship of the Catholic Church and the news media in this debate. It is the story of three Catholic bishops, their dioceses and the journalists who cover religious and moral issues in the various media. I will examine how these religious leaders frame their moral teachings for the pulpit and the press. At the same time, l will study the ways in which the media present religious and moral issues in the news. We will see that the interaction of church and media has produced a third dimension-that of theology and politics in the public sphere.

War puts the constitutional guarantee of free expression to its most severe test. For a president, war heightens immeasurably the classic First Amendment conflict between confidentiality and openness in a democracy. War exacerbates the usual free expression tensions between access and governing, £rankness and caution, the people's right to know and the need to operate a crisis government. In other words, war and war crisis conditions chill free expression in a democracy. With war, values are traded between individual freedom and group survival. The self protection of the group becomes so important that the government interferes with individual liberties. When the country as a whole is committed to a war, there will be few defenders of individual free expression, especially that expression opposed to the military conflict. In the United States, such free expression confrontations are but part of an old story of clashes involving the president as the commander-in-chief.

In one of the early applications of economic theory to politics, Anthony Downs proposed that voters behaved rationally and based their voting decisions on self-interest.1 If Party A was likely to give them more of what they wanted than Party B, then they voted for A. What was unique in Downs' approach was that he recognized that it is not so easy to find out how much better a person might be if Party A won the day instead of Party B. Downs realized that the gathering of political information could be tedious; he recognized that the time and effort spent exploring the political arena could be spent on other things. Rather than reading the political columns in the newspaper or watching Sunday morning talk shows, people could put the effort into improving their economic situation directly, say, by taking a second job. Given the competing demands on citizens' time, Downs argued that it is only natural for individuals to try to obtain information with the least effort, or at the smallest cost.

Bernard Roshco is a journalist, a scholar, a former government official and once a fellow at the Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. He came here in January, 1992, his mind filled with questions about the Bush Administration's policy towards Iraq prior to the invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990. We all remembered Ambassador April Glaspie's crucial meeting with lraqi President Saddam Hussein days before he ordered his troops imo Kuwait, bur why did the meeting have to be so crucial? Why didn't her superiors in the State Department and the White House give her clearer instructions? Why did President Bush and Secretary of State James Saker misread Hussein's motivations so badly? What was their responsibility? What role did the press play in covering the cover-up, which followed? Roshco is not one to rush to conclusions. He was Phi Beta Kappa at the City College of New York and a gifted sociologist at Columbia University, where he got his M.S. and Ph.D. For a time he worked for The National Observer before becoming editor of Public Opinion Quarterly. Since 1987, he's been a member of the board of directors of the Roper Public Opinion Center at the University of Connecticut, and from 1979- 91, he was director of the Office of Opinion Analysis and Plans in the Bureau of Public Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. He's written many scholarly articles in addition to "Newsmaking, 11 his clear analysis published by the University of Chicago Press in 1975. After reviewing the evidence-the same evidence that was available to any reporter- Roshco tried to answer the questions that were in his mind about U.S. policy towards Iraq. He succeeded masterfully. "When Policy Fails: How the Buck Was Passed When Kuwait Was Invaded" is an insightful analysis not only of scapegoating at the highest levels of the Bush Administration but also of the reporters covering the story. The scapegoating could not have worked if the reporting had been sharp, inquisitive, directed. Roshco's analysis cuts to the heart of the importance of an aggressive press in protecting the people from governmental malfeasance. With each passing day, we know more about the story. The new Clinton Administration will undoubtedly be faced with the need to make decisions relating to its predecessor's mistakes; it will also be faced with similar challenges of diplomacy and policy. How will it respond? Officials of the new administration would be wise to read this report.