Q & A
Burned by the Spotlight
Howard Dean on the Blistering Coverage of His Candidacy and the State of the American Media
He seemed to swoop in from nowhere. But the unvarnished outsider named Howard Dean galvanized young voters with his antiwar message and Internet organizing blitz. By the Democratic primary season, the former Vermont governor had raised a record $41 million and emerged as the front-runner. And his unexpected success made him a media sensation.
Then the spotlight burned him. By February, the media were questioning his temperament. He was dubbed “prickly,” “hotheaded,” “abrasive,” and “arrogant.” Numerous articles questioned his electability.
In a recent CJR interview, Dean discussed the press’s role in his rise-and-fall candidacy and described the view from inside the media maelstrom.
Dean is now campaigning for Senator John Kerry and supporting other candidates through his new organization, Democracy for America.
Why do you think your campaign caught fire with voters?
Was it your antiwar stance?
I think it was my willingness to say what I thought was right. My stance on the war got me attention, but it was also my willingness to challenge President Bush, to say the emperor had no clothes when all the other Democrats were making for the closet.
The pundits were all saying that it was suicide to go up against George W. Bush, or to be antiwar. Isn’t that correct?
I don’t pay any attention to the pundits.
Okay. How big a role do you think the media played in defining you as the front-runner? A huge role. They played a role in the rise and they played a role in the fall. They defined me as the front-runner, and then their idea was to attack the front-runner as much as possible.
A number of news stories raised questions about your temperament. Why do you think this is?
That started with spinning from the Kerry campaign in March. At that time, we didn’t have a press operation to combat that sort of thing.
Do you think you did anything that caused the media to begin focusing on your personality?
I don’t know. When Al Gore endorsed me for president, everybody including Bill Clinton thought we were going to get the nomination, and the other guys’ campaign people basically got together and tried to figure out how they could take us down, and that [attacking my temperament] was one of the tactics they used. They basically would have said anything.
I think there’s a larger problem that really doesn’t have a lot to do with my campaign, and that is that the media have changed a lot. You don’t see any Woodwards and Bernsteins anymore, because corporations don’t give people budgets to not produce a story for a year and a half while they do the research. And that has a lot to do with the new ownership of the media.
I believe you were quoted as saying you’d like to break up the media monopolies.
I would. I’ve heard ninety percent of Americans get their news from eleven corporations.
I think that the biggest problem is that the enormous pressure on the bottom line affects editors’ judgments. And it doesn’t take too many forced revisions of reporters’ stories to teach them that they shouldn’t be writing anything that isn’t fascinating and scintillating and somewhat scandalous.
Do you think that leads to a focus on personality instead of candidates’ political positions?
I do. And I think it also leads to putting a lot of things in the newspaper that just aren’t so.
Do you think there’s any truth to the idea that the press slighted you because you didn’t schmooze them enough?
Yes, I do. I have a bit of a doctor’s personality, you know. I tend to get to the quick of it.
I think it’s a dangerous thing to have that schmoozy Washington relationship between reporters and principals, because that’s when news doesn’t get reported. But everybody is so cozy in Washington. I went to the Gridiron Dinner, and I was appalled to hear [Vice President Dick] Cheney make a remark about duck hunting with Nino [Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia]. Everybody laughed. The truth is, this is a blatant conflict of interest for the bench. If you did that in my state, you’d have to step aside and recuse yourself. But in Washington, it’s no harm, no foul. That’s not very good for democracy.
I wrote a piece for CJR in 2000 about how the media favored George W. Bush over Al Gore. Reporters seem to have been taken in by Bush’s seeming friendliness. Yet, I don’t get the feeling that this
administration loves reporters. Do you?
No, I think they can’t stand them. I’ll tell you an interesting story about that. I know a reporter. She was on both the Bush and Gore planes. She told me that she thought the reason that Bush got so much better press coverage was that he didn’t work that hard. Bush did two events a day and jogged for two hours during the day, so everybody could take a break and file, and there was no pressure. On the Gore plane, they were doing six events a day and she thought that had a huge influence on the coverage, because people were crabby and tired on the Gore plane.
Do you think the press is treating Kerry unfairly?
The problem is the national press can’t write the same story thirty days in a row. But candidates have to say the same thing thirty days in a row. I’ve been out with Kerry, and things are going great on the campaign trail. He’s energetic, he’s engaged. He connects with people. We did a big event, and then we did a small event for people who had lost their jobs. Kerry was terrific. None of that came across in the national press, but it all came across in the local press. So I concluded the local press does a better job of talking about the campaign than the national press, partly because the national press can’t write the job story, which is the central theme of the campaign, 800 times.
What could the press do differently? People aren’t going to want to watch the same thing every night on the evening news, are they?
The truth is, they generally do put that [candidates’ daily speeches] in the evening news most nights. The evening news is more accurate and more serious than cable or print. Cable networks have got three hours worth of news and twenty-four hours to fill, and the consequences are perfectly obvious. I think the network TV news — Jennings, Brokaw, and Rather — does the best job. The exception is investigative journalism, which is spotty on the networks.
Let’s talk about the infamous scream speech after your loss in the Iowa caucus. You say the incident didn’t happen, at least not the way it was reported.
That’s right. I was in front of 1,200 screaming kids who couldn’t hear the speech, and the cable networks ran it as a speech with a directional mic — no crowd noise and no pictures of the crowd. So it didn’t happen at all the way it was on television.
I heard that reporters in the room didn’t think it was that big a deal, and then their editors said, “Did you see that?” And that’s how it started.
The editors said, “How come you didn’t say anything about this?” The reporters were there; they didn’t think it was a big deal.
Did you consider asking the networks to play the incident the way it actually happened?
That never does any good.
But did you ask them to do it?
I didn’t. I was too busy campaigning. And the press coverage didn’t hurt me that much. I don’t think the scream had any effect on the campaign whatsoever.
You don’t? Really?
Well, Edwards didn’t have a scream and he didn’t win any more primaries than I did. [Laughter]. Basically, whoever won Iowa was going to win the whole thing, and we knew that, and so did everybody else.
So it’s not something you’re sitting there chewing over and thinking, “Damn it, they done me wrong”?
I think they done me wrong, but I think there was no harm. I mean, I think it reflects worse on the press than it does on me. Playing the scene 600 or 900 times on cable television doesn’t leave you with much respect for the medium. Essentially they figured out a way to take an event out of context on television.
The editors at home made a decision about a story that they knew nothing about. That is the hallmark of what’s the matter with the press in this country in the last fifteen years or so. Because of the enormous pressure to “sex up” the news and have a storyline, the truth often is missed — and not the whole truth. There’s a nubbin of truth that often becomes not the truth when the story gets out.
Do you think reporters today often have a preconceived storyline about a candidate, like Dean is angry or Kerry isn’t visible enough?
Yes, I do. They write the story and then they go out and get the quotes to support the story. And that happens much more than reporters are willing to admit. I can’t tell you how many disappointed reporters and argumentative reporters I’ve talked with who really want to write a certain story and I just won’t give them the quotes to do it, because I don’t think they’re pursuing the right story.
If you were to say to the media, “Next time, let’s do it differently,” what would be your prescription?
First of all, I’d probably do more rotation of reporters in the plane. They get sort of jaded. And I’d switch them back and forth between candidates so they would have a broader perspective on the campaign and make more apt comparisons. Secondly, you’ve got to find a way to empower reporters to stand up to editors. The other day somebody asked me about the role of Al Gore in my campaign, and I said, “Al Gore’s endorsement turned out to be the beginning of the end because it gave everybody else the sense that we were going to win and they redoubled their efforts and started to work together to take us down.” That was played in several major papers as DEAN BLAMES GORE FOR DEFEAT!
I think at least half the problem comes from editors who push back on reporters and want them to write the story in a different way, having no knowledge of what the story is really about.
When you’re talking about print being worse than broadcast, are you talking about the reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post?
Absolutely.
You want to name some names specifically, people who were covering you?
I may do that in the book I’m writing, but I’m not going to do it right now.
I’m not saying there aren’t good reporters at these papers. But between the reporters and the editors, I was pretty shocked to see how often they got it wrong. Or at least partially wrong.
I’ll tell you an interesting story. When I was the front-runner, I went to a Martin Luther King Day event in Iowa, and it was essentially a press riot. There were about fifty or sixty people. One of the congressmen there was knocked down, somebody was hit in the head with a camera lens, and the press was so loud that I had to leave. And they followed me to the bus and pushed and shoved.
The story came across as if I had wrecked the event. Somebody asked me some in-your-face question, and I said, “You know, you guys have got to get a grip and start to behave,” which was then cited as a part of my temperament issue! I mean, there’s a huge number of problems in this country, and we can muddle through them, but it’s not going to get any better unless somebody wants to be serious about it on the media side.
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