Surviving News Media a “Good Test” for Candidates

Coverage of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s “Dean Scream” in 2004, Mark said, was one factor in Dean’s failed 2004 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Washington — At some point, all politicians in the United States and elsewhere must ask themselves how they will face the news media and the challenge of steering clear of controversies while simultaneously delivering their messages so that they will be broadcast accurately to potential voters.

But through their adversarial role, the media are both critical and positive to elections, argues David Mark, a senior editor at the Washington-based news outlet Politico.

Speaking in Washington March 23, Mark said that thanks to media scrutiny, candidates are vetted, their backgrounds are examined, their remarks are scrutinized and compared to past statements, and the election competitors are compared with each other.

“It’s actually a pretty good test for candidates,” he said. “If they can stand the heat, that’s a good test of what you’re going to face once you’re actually president or in another office.”

Whoever is elected U.S. president in November is “going to have the opposition sniping at you constantly, [and] half of the country is probably going to disagree with you on any big decision you make,” he said.

Mark said the current period of the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign is “the best of times [and] it’s the worst of times” for journalists because, with the attention on the Republican primaries and none on President Obama, who is already assured of being the Democratic nominee, “it’s slow-moving and we’re sort of hearing the candidates give the same speeches repeatedly without a lot of news breaking.”

At the same time, “it’s actually a great time to be a journalist following the presidential campaigns and also … other races in American politics because there’s so many new ways of putting out information, of disseminating it, and the rules in many ways are always changing,” he said.

For example, social media outlets such as Twitter, which was still relatively new in the 2008 presidential campaign, have now become “an integral part” of each campaign’s messaging and a main source of information for journalists.

Mark explained that in earlier years candidates would try to “win the news cycle” by getting something out to dominate the next day’s headlines, but because news consumers can now receive news instantly, the public is no longer willing to wait for breaking news. “There really is no news cycle anymore,” he said.

As a result, journalists have to “adjust our game a little bit,” he said, by being prepared for news to break at any moment, being prepared to talk about it and have sources lined up, and sending information quickly over social media outlets instead of writing or producing in-depth news products that compile all the facts.

Asked about several American news media outlets that have obvious biases either toward the right, like Fox News, or the left, like MSNBC, Mark said he welcomes the diversity in viewpoints, arguing that the news media are “the marketplace of ideas” and consumers have the opportunity to hear perspectives other than their own, and in doing so they can often appreciate new ideas or get informed about things they might not otherwise have heard about.

“I think the burden there is really on the news consumer to try and get a rounded viewpoint of information. Most people don’t do that. I’m not naïve about that. But nobody should ever get the news from any one source,” he said.

Mark said he gets his own information as a journalist from many different sources, and “even if I disagree with them, I kind of like getting the different points of view, so my view is the more, the merrier.”

He added that partisan media outlets will often “do the real reporting and dig up facts,” and “their work can be just as valid as anybody else’s.”

However, he criticized what he called “pack journalism,” in which news outlets will repeatedly cover the same story and in doing so, rightly or wrongly influence public perceptions about a candidate.

For example, Mark mentioned former Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s failed 2004 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, which was derailed partly as a result of media coverage of an overexuberant primary concession speech. In the media coverage of the so-called “Dean Scream,” different outlets repeated a gaffe and added it to a narrative on the candidate, which in Dean’s case “was that he was a hothead, that he wasn’t maybe all together, he wasn’t the most organized guy,” Mark said.

“The thing is, once that happens, it’s really hard to take back and that gets embedded in the minds … certainly of journalists and then in the minds of the public. I think it’s kind of unfortunate because it means candidates become more scripted, they’re too careful about what they say. It’s hard to get any real spontaneous moments about … how they might actually feel,” he said.