University Times

Deceptive political advertising was up during the 1996 presidential campaign, press scrutiny was down — and American democracy was the loser, Founders Day keynote speaker Kathleen Hall Jamieson said.

"I think we managed at the national level to run a campaign that was not as accountable or informative or as useful to democracy as it could have been because, in important ways, the public and press defaulted on their obligations," said Jamieson, who is professor and dean of The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She also is an award-winning author of four books, including "Dirty Politics, Deception, Distraction and Democracy," and has served as a part-time media pundit herself for CBS, CNN and PBS, among other media outlets.

According to Jamieson, 52 percent of national television ads by the Democrats and Republicans in 1996 made at least one misleading claim — the highest rate ever — compared with just 14 percent of such ads during the 1992 campaign, Jamieson said.

The Clinton and Dole campaigns were about equally deceptive in their advertising, she said.

"This occurred in an environment in which there was no effective correction [of misleading ads] by the broadcast media" and in which leading newspapers "dramatically" reduced their campaign coverage, Jamieson said.

TV networks either cut back on their "ad watch" critiques of campaign advertisements or rendered them less effective, according to Jamieson. "Ad watches are only useful if you're correcting misleading ads. They're not useful if you use this structure to talk about how strong and effective the ads were," which is what CNN's ad watches began emphasizing last year, she said.

Some major newspapers, particularly the Washington Post, kept the ad watch spotlight on the major candidates, Jamieson said. But the Post's criticisms were blunted by the fact that neither the Dole nor Clinton campaigns ran ads in the uncontested states of Virginia or Maryland or in the District of Columbia, "so the Post's ad watches told people about ads they couldn't see," she said.

Only once during the '96 presidential campaign did the print and broadcast media rise up together in outrage against dirty ads, Jamieson said. It happened in October. First, the Clinton campaign aired a spot calling Bob Dole, who had recently retired from the Senate, "a quitter" who "walked away from the gridlock he helped create" in Congress. The Dole campaign responded by previewing an ad depicting Bill Clinton as a jogging, golfing draft dodger.

Following media attacks on both ads, the Democrats pulled theirs and the Republicans decided not to air their ad.

Still, both parties got away with "big lie" ads that went virtually unchallenged by the news media, according to Jamieson. She cited: * Clinton ads warning that Dole, if elected, would "slash" Medicare by $270 million — never pointing out that Clinton also planned to cut Medicare, and by nearly as much money.

* Dole ads accusing Clinton of authorizing "the largest tax increase on the American middle class in history," a claim that Jamieson disputed. "It was either the largest or second-largest [tax hike] in history, depending on how you factor in inflation. But it was not aimed largely at the middle class. President Clinton, in true Democratic fashion, went after the upper 1 or 2 percent of the population," she said.

Jamieson said that one Republican leader told her: "Look, I know our ads were deceptive, but they [Democrats] lied first." "That," Jamieson added dryly, "is a rhetorical strategy that you will remember from grade school." n Jamieson based her claims about the '96 campaign on data from the Campaign Mapping Project, an archival campaign monitoring system launched at Penn last year.

By comparing 1996 campaign rhetoric, ads and press coverage with those of presidential campaigns dating back to 1960, the computerized project generated periodic analyses last year for use by politicians, journalists and scholars. The project regularly faxed copies of its reports to some 275 reporters and to the Clinton and Dole campaigns.

Jamieson called the project "an attempt to archive and analyze in real time the campaign of 1996" using the same in-depth, comparative standards that scholars traditionally apply to campaigns years after they've ended, when it's too late to influence campaign discourse.

"We believe it is important that scholars and pundits stop saying without historical evidence that 'this campaign is the best,' 'the worst,' 'the least' or 'the most' since those four things are rarely true of anything except one's love life," Jamieson said.

Among other things, the Campaign Mapping Project found that, as of mid-September 1996, campaign news coverage was down dramatically compared with prior campaigns. "We were seeing a drop by over half in the number of front page stories in the major newspapers, and by over half in the number of words on the network evening news devoted to campaigns," Jamieson recalled.

After the project reported this trend, The New York Times Washington editor told CNN: "I don't care what Kathleen Hall Jamieson says, our front page coverage isn't down. But if it is, it's because this is a really boring election year." The editor later said he wasn't aware his remark was on the record. "That was, for me, one of the funnier moments of the campaign," Jamieson said.

During the summer, the project analyzed news reporting and commentary on the Republican and Democratic party conventions and issued an advisory blasting the major news media for their coverage. "Reporters were saying that there is nothing new here, you can't learn anything, these [conventions] are just staged shows," Jamieson said. "They're saying this while they're not giving you the convention. They're just talking to you so you can't make that judgment on your own.

"Then when the conventions are over, they [the news media] turn around and say, 'Nobody watched the convention.' Our response was: We've known about self-fulfilling prophecies for a long time. This is not a big surprise." Going into the first presidential debate, news commentators warned viewers and readers that the debates would be highly choreographed "and that the only thing that could be important about them would be whether Bob Dole could transform his presidential prospects in one of the debates," Jamieson said.

"Now, that is an interesting expectation because it assumes that what you would want to look for was whether Dole could transform his presidential prospects, not whether Dole should be president or whether Bill Clinton should be re-elected." Following the first debate, Campaign Mapping Project scholars called on the media to cease analyzing the debates in terms of sports metaphors (Did Dole score a knockout punch? Did Clinton hit one out of the park?) and "winners" versus "losers." The project also criticized the media's post-debate polling procedures, which targeted proportionate samplings of Clinton and Dole supporters rather than a random sampling of the national population. Studies show that most people, after viewing a debate, think more highly of the candidate they supported prior to the debate, Jamieson said. So if Clinton leads Dole by 55-45 percent in the pre-debate polls, and the media interviews 55 Clinton supporters and 45 Dole supporters following the debate, it's almost certain that Clinton will "win" the post-debate poll, she pointed out.

The Campaign Mapping Project made little headway with its major arguments, Jamieson conceded. But she said the project scored a minor victory when, at its urging, TV networks refrained (for the first time since 1988) from displaying national maps prior to the final debate, indicating that a particular candidate could not win the election. "Instead, they waited until after the debate" to show such electoral maps, Jamieson said.

The good news in last year's elections came mainly from U.S. Senate campaigns, according to Jamieson.

Of the six candidates targeted in what she called a "100 percent negative" campaign by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, five won despite the ads.

And among candidates targeted by "attack ads" sponsored by the AFL-CIO, 21 of 32 won. "Those who didn't win were the most vulnerable and might have lost anyway," she said.

"This was the first year," Jamieson stated, "in which the electorate seemed to say pretty clearly, on a state-by-state basis: 'We don't care about definitions. We know it [unethical campaign advertising] when we see it. And we're not going to reward it with our votes."

— Bruce Steele