The Press's Post-Iowa Tailwinds: As Nature Intended It?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 26, 2007

On the morning of Jan. 4, 2008, the winners of the Iowa caucuses -- one Democrat, one Republican -- will blast into the stratosphere as if they were strapped to a booster rocket.

It's an immutable law of political physics that those who prevail in Iowa will hurtle toward New Hampshire with bulked-up poll numbers, gathering blinding momentum on the path to nomination.

But the chief reason for the Iowa effect is an explosion of media coverage that treats the winners as superstars and the also-rans as lamentable losers. Without that massive media boost, prevailing in Iowa would be seen for what it is: an important first victory that amounts to scoring a run in the top of the first inning.

"It stinks," says veteran political reporter Jack Germond. "The voters ought to have time to make a considered decision, and the press ought to be a little less poll-driven, and we're not." Between the coverage and the hyper-compressed campaign calendar, he says, "the whole system this year is absolutely a disgrace."

The morning after John Kerry won the 2004 Iowa caucuses, ABC's George Stephanopoulos credited him with a "gutsy campaign" that produced "a big, shocking comeback." Charlie Gibson called it "an extraordinary turnaround," telling Kerry: "I had the temerity to suggest that your campaign was dead in the water two weeks ago."

CBS's Harry Smith sounded a similar note, telling Kerry: "It's kind of amazing, isn't it? A couple of weeks ago, you were ruled out." Ruled out, that is, by the media.

As for Howard Dean, who had been leading in the polls weeks earlier, every interview began with some version of "Why did you lose, and can you possibly recover?"

That evening, CBS correspondent Randall Pinkston began a report by saying, "John 'Comeback' Kerry stepped up the battle for votes in New Hampshire today." And some commentators pronounced last rites. Fox's Bill O'Reilly declared that "Howard Dean is finished." Kerry, of course, won New Hampshire and rolled to the nomination.

His Iowa win packed extra punch because the previous November his candidacy had been described as "troubled" (The Washington Post), "faltering" (USA Today) and "in disarray" (Boston Globe). But with Democratic voters obsessed with finding someone who could beat President Bush, the saturation coverage bestowed on Kerry an aura of electability.

Tobe Berkovitz, interim dean of Boston University's College of Communication, sees "an agenda-setting battle" between the press and the losing candidates. "Howard Dean screams and he's gone. The media so overblow everything that unless you have the skills of a Bill Clinton and can say 'I'm the comeback kid' after failing to win a primary, the media manage to drive a stake through your heart."

Perhaps, he says, a creative candidate can use alternative outlets, such as blogs or a popular cable news show, "to reframe the story, to let air out of the tires of the boys on the bus. I'm not betting my farm on that."

Winning Iowa hasn't always done the trick. In 1980 George H.W. Bush declared that he had the "big mo" after Iowa, but lost New Hampshire to Ronald Reagan. (The primary, however, was 36 days later; this time, New Hampshire will vote five days after Iowa.) Dick Gephardt also flamed out after capturing the 1988 caucuses.

But the way the media frame the narrative is crucial. In 1984, Germond notes, Walter Mondale was leading Gary Hart in New Hampshire, 32 to 8 percent. But after Hart was lauded for doing "better than expected" in Iowa -- expected by the media, that is -- despite winning just 16.5 percent to Mondale's 49 percent, the bounce helped catapult him to victory in New Hampshire.

There are more media outlets these days than ever before, with untold thousands of political Web sites, and newspapers and magazines constantly updating their blogs. So the slingshot effect of an Iowa victory could be even greater.

Iowa and New Hampshire, while whiter and more rural than the rest of the country, still serve an important function. As reporters invariably observe at town meetings, residents take their first-in-the-nation duties seriously, forcing the candidates to engage in retail politics before the mega-states turn the campaign into a television-driven blur. Iowa also gives hope to a long-shot candidate such as Mike Huckabee, who has edged into second place there, much as Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere to win in 1976. With so many big states moving up their primaries early next year, Iowa and New Hampshire were supposed to recede in importance, but it's not at all clear that will happen.

With its arcane caucus rules, Iowa remains a small battlefield. Only 124,000 Democrats voted last time, less than a quarter of those eligible. So if Barack Obama, say, edges Hillary Clinton by 2,000 votes, he'll be hailed in headlines as a giant-killer despite the tiny margin.

It's echo-chamber journalism that turns Iowa into a make-or-break contest for so many candidates. And the deafening noise may once again short-circuit the process.

Trash Talking

The equivalent of a street brawl has broken out on the New York Times op-ed page.

The fisticuffs began when liberal columnist Bob Herbert wrote that Ronald Reagan -- by kicking off his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights activists had been shot to death 16 years earlier -- was "there to assure the bigots that he was with them."

That column drew a strong rebuke from conservative David Brooks, who said the "slur" and "distortion" about Reagan was being "spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn't even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence."

Herbert punched back, writing that "Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it." And columnist Paul Krugman rushed to Herbert's side last week, writing that while Reagan may not have been personally bigoted, he "tried to benefit from racial polarization."

Quite a dustup over a single event that took place 27 years ago. And the acrimony spread last week to The Washington Post's op-ed page, where columnist Ruth Marcus wrote a "Krugman vs. Krugman" piece charging that the Princeton economist had changed his stance on Social Security. That arguably amounted to self-defense, coming days after Krugman dismissed a Post editorial on the subject -- written by Marcus -- as "nonsense."

Media Morsels

¿ In a move that has revived charges of liberal media bias, former ABC anchor Carole Simpson has endorsed Hillary Clinton.

Simpson, now a journalism instructor at Emerson College, offered her resignation the day after announcing her support at an event featuring the New York senator, but it was turned down.

"I know I made a mistake," Simpson told the Boston Globe, adding: "But I'd really like to see her win. After being a reporter for so many years, where you wish you could do more than you can, it would be nice to make a difference."

¿ Dan Miller, business editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, wants journalists to "keep an open mind" on global warming.

Miller says so in a letter to journalists on behalf of the Heartland Institute, which says it champions "free-market solutions" and features on its Web site a picture of Al Gore headlined "Global Warming Snowjob."

Enclosed in the mailing are a pair of DVDs -- one of them Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," the other titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle." Neither the Sun-Times nor Miller, a former institute staffer, responded to requests for comment.

After the Chicago Tribune reported the mailing, institute President Joseph Bast criticized the story in an e-mail to subscribers, saying: "The dual DVD set fairly represents both sides of the debate and encourages viewers to make up their own minds."

¿ An ex-congressman is arrested for driving drunk and, it turns out, a 24-year-old woman was on his lap. Sounds like an irresistible story. But the Albany Times Union refused to report the name of the woman who was with former representative John Sweeney (R-N.Y.) because she is a "private citizen."

"We concluded pretty quickly that information wasn't newsworthy and it wouldn't be published in our pages," Editor Rex Smith wrote. "A lot of people figure that in the age of the Internet, there's no place for the sort of editorial judgment our decision represents. . . . People say the era of the editor as gatekeeper of the news is over.

"Well, fine. Knock yourselves out on Google, folks."