The New Prince

by Dick Morris

  Your donor list is your voting record. In 1982, Bill Clinton regained the governorship of Arkansas largely by citing his opponent’s reliance on utility company funds to fuel his campaign. Republicans from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan have defeated Democrats from Helen Gahagan Douglas to Walter Mondale by tying them to labor funding. The most overworked cliché in politics is, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”

  Every donation received is a potential negative ad. Vetting money is just as important as raising it. Has any contributor been indicted or convicted of a crime? Do any represent a special-interest anathema to the voters? Do the patterns of any donations seem suspect, suggesting fraud or that the money really is not coming from the donor but from his employer or uncle? Are any of the donors public employees who work for you or contractors who have benefited from your largesse?

  Most candidates regard returning checks with the same enthusiasm that they would contemplate amputation of a limb. But the money a politician returns is worth a hundred times that amount in the cost of trying to rebut a negative ad about the donor.

  Those who despair of reforming campaign finances would do well to realize that politics is usually self-correcting. So extensive has been the publicity about the evils of campaign finances that candidates must self-police to survive.

  Chapter 20

  The Myth of Media Manipulation

  THE MEDIA AND THE POLITICIANS agree that newspapers and TV news are all-powerful. But they are wrong. Both believe that politicians can be very effective in manipulating what the media says. Wrong again. They are deeply convinced that the voters can be easily led by the media. Still wrong.

  Policy and process are developed by the interplay of public officials, the media, and the voters. Each has its role; each has its limitations. But none of the players recognize their limits and all are constantly trying to transcend them. The key to political happiness is to accept what we cannot change and to play within the implicit ground rules of the system.

  Voters live in the real world with their hopes, fears, dreams, and anxieties. But they are not very good at figuring out what to do about them. Robert Frost once wrote, “Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.”

  The average public official is endowed with wealth and privilege and knows little of the quiet desperation of real people. Even if his or her childhood was traumatic, the pain is a distant memory. Most politicians wouldn’t recognize a “real person” if they tripped over one.

  The media plays the key role in bringing the private pains and needs of real people to public attention. Despite romantic fantasies about caring candidates who learn of America in donut shops, most politicians rely on media to teach them what concerns the average person.

  But the media isn’t very good at prioritizing the public’s concerns or figuring out what to do about them. Despite the hubris of editorial writers, there is a good reason why they run newspapers and not nations. Most lack enough understanding of policy, budgets, programs, or politics to govern wisely. Were their editorials followed each day, the zigzag course our government would weave would leave us baffled.

  So it is up to the politician to propose priorities and solutions. With the aid of polling, he is the one who has to sift through the clippings and decide upon what to focus. It is he who must come up with the answers, who must know how to translate the public’s grief into the system’s issues.

  Once the politician has floated his issues and proposals, the media carries them to the public. But in its hubris, the media overestimates its power to move voters. News editors and reporters think that they can drive issues to the top of the list of the public’s priorities. Yet, the evidence of the past few years is that the public decides on its priorities quite independently of the media. People will pay attention to what they want to, regardless of what the media thinks is important. The voters know best.

  People have become terribly suspicious of the media and increasingly sophisticated in spotting its attempts at manipulation. The electorate sees the media as a kind of special-interest group, no more objective than any other in presenting its view. Like the readers of Pravda in the former Soviet Union, voters are increasingly selective in which stories they believe and which they discount.

  When voters are determined to ignore a story, they do so with grit and determination despite the efforts of the media to interest them. Consider the case of Rwanda. Never has there been a story the media wanted to cover more, nor one about which the public wished less to hear. For years, every night’s news carried horrific footage of maimed babies, raped women, and dead men. But the public didn’t care. Yet the media hammered away, rightly considering it a moral duty to bring this suffering to the conscience of America. But the public still had no tolerance for American intervention. The television coverage did nothing to spur popular demand for military involvement.

  The massive coverage of scandal in the Clinton administration and its minimal impact on the elections of 1996 or 1998 is another good case in point. In June of 1996, half of all television news shows riveted on the FBI file scandal. To listen to the news, one would have assumed that Clinton was on his way out. But Clinton’s lead over Dole dropped by only three points despite all the pounding, and he quickly restored those points the next month. In 1998, the Lewinsky scandal had no impact on Democratic candidates throughout the country.

  On the other hand, the public is diligent in searching out news it does care about. Even when the media is determined to underplay, distort, or ignore the message a politician is putting out, if the issue works, it will reach the voters.

  President Clinton issues almost daily messages through press conferences, media events, and speeches to suggest measures aimed at meeting the needs of America’s families in their daily lives. Each day, Clinton speaks out on topics like teen smoking, drunk driving, school construction, educational standards, college scholarships, guns in schools, TV violence and sexual content, computers in classrooms, cell phones for community watch groups, and school uniforms and curfews.

  The media constantly belittles these initiatives as “bitesized” and laments the absence of bold, sweeping presidential vision. When the media covers his statements, it is through a veil of criticism, calling the ideas “small-bore,” “opportunistic,” and “unpresidential.”

  But the voters seek out the ideas they want and read the president’s statements, ignoring the media’s criticism. Day after day, these “small-bore” ideas have held up the president’s popularity, demonstrating his connection to the problems of the average person despite the daily pounding of scandal and congressional hearings.

  If the media overstates its power in shaping public opinion, politicians and their “spin doctors” overstate their ability to influence the media. A politician can have very little impact over how he is covered or presented. The media will cover his ideas as it wishes. It will give them the headlines, the placement, the slant, the photos, and the play it chooses. At most, politicians can influence the process around the edges. The vast bulk of the time public officials, candidates, and their staffs spend on spinning the news is largely ineffective, mostly irrelevant, and basically unnecessary.

  It is ironic that political consultants and handlers are called “spin doctors” and that much of the media coverage they receive revolves around their effectivness at manipulating the media. This characterization is founded on a mutually reinforcing conceit. Consultants and press secretaries overly pride themselves on their ability to manipulate press coverage, which they really can’t. The media revels in the assumption that its slant and bias are so important that they are worthy of the skills of great manipulators, which they really aren’t.

  Politicians and their handlers overstate their influence on the media. President Clinton’s ability to recover, so far, from the scandals that have plagued his administration is, at the time of this writing, extraordinary. Hubristic consultants and spin doctors have taken full credit for his nine lives by extolli
ng their ability to structure media coverage of the president’s accusers.

  But polling shows that most of America believes that private matters should remain private. It is not the skill of the president’s staff in deflecting blame that is keeping his ratings afloat. Voters are much more independent than media experts want to believe.

  In other administrations also, handlers have overstated their ability to control events. Despite all the efforts of Reagan’s people, few voters believed the president was ignorant of the arms-for-hostages trade. The manipulations of Bush’s media advisors did nothing to convince voters that the president was on the job fighting the recession day and night. And all the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men and women could not hold Hillary’s healthcare package together.

  An issue will stand or fall on its own merits based on the real-life experience of voters and their innate ability to distinguish the real from the phony, the practical from the illusory.

  The job of a consultant or handler is to help a candidate or public official find a place to stand from which to move the earth. Once they find the proper ground, this “great huge world will come round to them,” in Emerson’s words.

  So, there is good news and bad news for the politician. The bad news is that his staff can have little influence over how his ideas are presented by the media. But here is the good news it doesn’t really matter. The public reserves to itself the right to decide what to accept and what to reject. The slant and bias of the media does little to influence their decisions; it is overwhelmingly the content of the ideas that matters.

  Everybody thinks they have more influence than they do in this process. So, a few basic principles should guide our understanding of the interplay of voters, the media, and politicians.

  • Politicians are not very good at understanding what people want and need. The media has to explain it to them.

  • The media fails to prioritize the problems it covers or to develop solutions. Politicians are much better at developing answers, and voters do their own prioritization regardless of the media’s attempts to manipulate them.

  • Political handlers are largely unsuccessful in affecting how stories are covered. The media usually does just what it pleases. There may be an episodic victory in structuring the coverage of one outlet or one reporter, but the pluralism of the media and its multiplicity of outlets make real success at spin beyond reach.

  • Voters don’t much care what the media thinks. They peer past the editorials, the headlines, and even past the front page to find out what they want to know and to get answers to the problems they consider important. No matter how little coverage a story gets or how slanted it is, voters will draw their own conclusions.

  With due regard for the difficulties in manipulating media coverage, there are certain ideas that might help a politician maximize such opportunities as he does have to influence it.

  The most important part of selling a story is the sound bite. The rest of the statement can be boilerplate or detail. It is the one-paragraph sound bite on which the story lives or dies. The better the quote, the more likely it is to make its way into print and the more likely it is to shape the story. Style matters. Some sound bites, like Clinton’s “The era of big government is over,” or Reagan’s “Government is the problem, not the solution,” define an entire philosophy, not just that day’s news.

  But the most delicate of tasks is developing the analytic line of the day. In the Clinton administration, presidential aide George Stephanopoulos and Press Secretary Mike McCurry would carefully analyze the mood of the media and seek to galvanize it into a “spin” that would dominate the news analysis. They did it well because they approached the task with humility. They realized they had to work with the existing preconceptions of the media and were able, at best, to alter them only slightly or to channel them in the direction they wanted. But only slightly. They both realized that you couldn’t bring about 180-degree, 90-degree, or even 45-degree turns. Their slant and spin was based on a profound understanding of what reporters are thinking and a sensitive ability to predict how they will react to suggestions. Senator Eugene McCarthy trenchantly noted that the press were like blackbirds on a telephone wire. When one took off, all the others followed. If you can get a few top reporters to see the news from your angle, it will spread rapidly down the line.

  Humility is especially important when reporters call with their own stories. Remember that reporters usually have written the story in their mind before they start. They formulate a hypothesis and then gather evidence to prove it right or wrong. Rarely do they cast a wide net and inductively seek to find a pattern while keeping a completely open mind. Their original hypothesis will most likely be the story’s final verdict.

  A reporter usually begins his call by laying out his thesis. Live within it. Don’t try to change it. See if you can steer the story within the parameters of what the reporter wants to write anyway.

  When the press was working on the story of what motivated Clinton to seek NATO expansion, the mind-set of the press was that Clinton wanted to get votes in the white ethnic neighborhoods in the Midwest. In fact, this consideration was very remote in the president’s thinking, not that he’s above it; he just doesn’t believe that white ethnic divisions are that important in the Midwest. He expanded NATO because he is haunted by Richard Nixon’s question from the grave: “Who lost Russia? Who lost Eastern Europe?” But the press would not be deflected. The best Clinton’s press handlers could do was to sell the idea that politics affected the timing of Clinton’s discussion of the issue (before the election) but had not been his motive in making the decision itself.

  Reporters will write the story they want to write. All evidence is either helpful—and gets included—or is unhelpful and is omitted or downplayed. It’s their paper. They do what they want.

  When you see a negative story coming, go through the motions of rebuttal but understand that the only way to come out ahead is to distract attention from the piece by making some other news that is more compelling. When David Maraniss wrote his biography of Clinton, First in His Class, exposing more of his sexual past, the president chose the moment of its release to intervene in the baseball strike. He knew that he didn’t have any leverage to exact a settlement and that owners and players were too far gone to listen to reason. He knew he’d fail. But the baseball strike story was a whole lot better than letting the Maraniss book dominate the weekend’s coverage.

  When David Stockman, President Reagan’s budget director, told a reporter that he realized early on that supply-side economics would swell, not reduce, the deficit—even though he had said the opposite at the time in public—all hell broke loose. The liberal media jumped all over the Stockman quote, attacking his cynicism in backing tax cuts that he apparently knew would balloon the deficit while preaching deficit reduction.

  Reagan’s people deflected the story by describing in lurid detail how Stockman was punished for his remarks. In a famous quote, they told the media that the president had “taken David to the woodshed” to express his anger. By focusing on the punishment—and on whether Reagan would fire Stockman—they deflected the central negative thrust of the story.

  In handling television, bear in mind that the medium cannot help itself. It needs pretty pictures. Even if you feel that only misanthropes write the copy for the evening news, remember that those who choose the visuals for the story want attractive footage. If you frame a good-looking visual, it will make it past the editors and go out over the air. Caught between negative reporters and artistic film editors, TV news programs are often a civil war between the text and the visual. The text is up to them. The visual is up to you.

  Backdrops matter. The candidate should stand in front of an assemblage of American flags or a bevy of uniformed police with medals. Right over his head, so it has to make it into the cameraman’s shot, should be a printed message summarizing the theme of the statement. Slogans like “Creating Jobs,” “Raising Education St
andards,” or “Protecting the Environment” should blare their message on the TV screen. That way, even if the TV editor cuts out your candidate’s voice and superimposes a soundtrack of an anchorman or reporter dumping on your candidate, the message du jour will still come through.

  Many observers, particularly on the right, impute an ideological bias to the press. On the other hand, President Clinton never thought the media was tilted to the left. He felt it was focused on opportunism and careerism with each individual reporter hunting for a scalp and a prize regardless of the facts. I think both analyses miss the point.

  Mark Hertsgaard’s excellent book about the coverage of the Reagan presidency, On Bended Knee, assigns the key role in determining media bias to institutional history. Tracing the oscillations of relations between the press and the presidency, Hertsgaard notes that the media was chagrined by its intimacy with President Kennedy and revolted by its credulity in accepting Johnson’s version of the facts at face value during the Vietnam War. Their ensuing anger at their own failures made them overreact when Richard Nixon took office. An especially attractive target, he helped journalists compensate for their past complacency in covering the White House. But when the anger at Nixon spilled over into negative coverage of Ford and Carter, the media wondered if it was not permanently condemning America to one-term, ineffective presidents by its acerbic tone and jaundiced attitude. Hertsgaard says that President Reagan benefited from journalist guilt over their past excesses and enjoyed comparative media largesse as a result. To carry this analysis forward, one would have to assume that President Clinton has been the unwilling victim of the media’s self-criticism over its indulgent attitude toward Reagan and Bush.

  This kind of media mood swing is far more likely than either ideology or blind ambition to motivate press coverage. But the public understands the moods of its journalists and will ignore both incessantly negative and constantly positive coverage to seek out what it wants.