Media Wars
The Election's Other Battle
Andrew Sullivan
The two sides remain entrenched, their rhetorical sallies increasing in ferocity, their claims and counter-claims ricocheting through the political landscape. Democrats and Republicans? Nope: That's so 2000. This time the war is between the new media and the old media, between established pillars of journalism and a bunch of new, ornery and sometimes reckless upstarts. It's the subtext of the 2004 campaign and it has already begun to shape the American presidential race in ways that would have been difficult to accomplish two years ago, let alone four.
There are, I think, three genuinely new power-brokers in American politics and culture in this election season. They are cable news, the blogosphere, and new advertizing/political groups called - after the legislative subsection that helped create them - "527s". Between them, these new forces have helped dilute and even, in a few cases, supplant the network news, the mainstream newspapers and even the political parties as the critical arbiters of the course of an election.
Start with cable news channels. Something truly remarkable happened this past July and August: cable news eclipsed the mainstream networks in coverage of the political conventions. On the final night of the Bush coronation, Fox News won more viewers than any other network - 7 million compared to second place NBC's 5.9 million - and more than CBS and ABC combined. And Fox is available in far fewer households than the regular networks. This simply hasn't happened before. And there was a partisan tilt to the viewing as well. The more liberal CNN cleaned up during the Democrats' confab; right-leaning Fox News surged in viewers for the Republicans' infomercial. The old model in which allegedly objective network journalists wielded enormous influence over the media coverage of politics has been exploded. American television is now much less like the BBC and more like the British print press - its biases more open, its competition more fierce, its ideological diversity more acknowledged. The political polarization of the country has also found some kind of expression in even the television channels viewers watch.
Added to this are the blogs. In the last election cycle, blogs were a tiny part of the media universe. I should know. I was one of the relatively few who were blogging at the time. But now the blogosphere has exploded - the traffic exponentially higher, the influence far greater, the leverage over news coverage more powerful. In 2000, I was thrilled to have 4,000 readers. This year, my review of one night during the Republican convention won 100,000 readers in 24 hours. In the old days, network news producers would read the New York Times, decide on a couple of stories, spin them with ample liberal bias and put out a predictable, stale broadcast every night. These days, the Times remains very important. But it still hasn't recovered from the chaotically biased editorship of Howell Raines and the fabrications of Jayson Blair. Producers for cable news shows now consult the blogs as much as the Times for tips about upcoming stories, often pilfering the upstart websites for new quotes, gaffes or scandals. Throughout the day, news managers consult the blogosphere for updates, while the mainstream media treads water. In this, the Drudge Report was the proud pioneer. But Drudge is now a big fish in an infinitely bigger and splashier pond.
And then the 527s. These nebulous groups with wide latitude to spend vast amounts of money on politicial ads have more mass clout than either blogs or cable news. Blogs and cable are influential largely because they are read by political junkies, insiders and, well, nerds. 527s, in contrast, can wield huge influence by buying advertizing in swing states. The vast majority of this money is left-liberal, and George Soros will have a lot less money in his pockets at the end of this campaign than before it. But the right has been able to use this loophole in campaign finance law to its advantage too.
Each of these developments by themselves would have made an impact. But it's clear now that they have also catalyzed each others' influence, creating a new web of media that easily rivals the old. Take the most important turning point in this campaign so far: the attacks on John Kerry's war-service. The original source was an actual book, "Unfit To Command," published by the conservative publishing house, Regnery. But the ads accusing Kerry of lying about his war medals were financed modestly by a group of Bush-connected operatives and anti-Kerry veterans in a 527 called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The ads might have disappeared into the ether in the old media world. Much of the mainstream media investigated the claims and found them to be, upon inspection, largely unproven hearsay and malice. In the old era, they wouldn't even have covered the story at all.
But this time, the blogs took up the rallying cry. One of the most popular clearing houses for the blogosphere, Instapundit.com, hyped the claims relentlessly (while retaining some skepticism about their content). Drudge did the same, giving the vets star treatment. Fox News duly took up the story and kept on it night after night. As word spread, anti-Kerry forces sent in more money to the Swift Boat Veterans for truth website, allowing them to ramp up their ad efforts. And within a few days, the old media was forced to cover the claims extensively - even if much of their coverage amounted to a debunking. Talk radio added to the chorus. Suddenly a huge story was breaking; and the Kerry campaign seemed caught like a rabbit in front of a pick-up truck's headlights. In this critical moment in the campaign, the new media was running the show.
Last week, the old media tried to fight back. The Boston Globe reported a story that documented how president Bush had won preferential treatment in the Texas National Guard because of his political and family connections. CBS News ran an interview with the former head of that Guard who claimed he had pulled strings to keep Bush out of Vietnam. CBS then ran with a story that was based on newly discovered military memos indicating that one National Guard officer was irritated that political pressure had been brought to bear on him to excuse George W. Bush's erratic attendance record. The supporting evidence was far stronger than that behind the Swift Boat Veterans' campaign - and so the new media struck back. A blog called Powerline immediately claimed that the documents were hoaxes; within hours, Drudge had picked up the story. CBS defended its story, but as of the end of last week, no proof of a hoax had been provided. We'll see. But whatever happens to this new twist in campaign news, it's impossible to understand the dynamic without absorbing the new and varied media landscape American politics now operates in.
The upshot is that the politicians and the major parties have seriously lost control of the process. The race is therefore assured of several new surprises in the weeks ahead. Will a new 527 campaign detonate a new scandal under Bush or Kerry? Will the New York Times and the Boston Globe and CBS get even more aggressive in their scrutiny of Bush - or will the blogs and Fox News pioneer new blows to the Kerry campaign? Sometimes, the political professionals have a clue. The Swift Boad ads were organized and financed by a bunch of Bush cronies; and many of the advisers and consultants behind liberal ad campaigns have connections to the Kerry camp. But unpredictability is the game here.
The downside, of course, is that sleaze is far more easily parlayed and smears more effectively deployed. But the benefit is that the new system is also porous. The competition between new and old media can help both get stories right; media bias is more openly admitted so that the reader or viewer can make up his or her own mind; new information emerges that might never have been known before. It's not perfect and it can lead to some ugly moments (besmirching someone's war-medals or possibly faking documents). But it's real and dynamic and open. It's democratic. And if you're interested in politics, it keeps you looking forward to opening your laptop each morning.
September 12, 2004, Sunday Times.
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