WOMAN-BASHING IN CAMPAIGN DISCOURSE:

WOMAN-BASHING IN CAMPAIGN DISCOURSE:

AN OUTRAGEOUS CASE STUDY Although politics in most countries has been long dominated by men,

women are entering in record numbers, having held the top elected positions in Great Britain, Norway, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Israel, Iceland, Argentina, Bolivia, Nicaragua, New Zealand, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Still, in many places a candidate’s being a woman remains a liability. In 1990, Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate and political novice Clayton Williams seemed to bring insensitivity to new depths in his campaign against Democratic state

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treasurer Ann Richards. First he vowed to bring back the days when “a man was a man” and “a woman knew her place was not at the top of the Democratic ticket.” Later at a cattle roundup, he commented that bad weather was like rape, “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it,” a comment that drew shocked widespread condemnation from people concerned about violence against women. Slow to learn, Williams went on to insult Mexicans and Mexican-Americans by saying that during his youth, crossing into Mexico and “being serviced by prostitutes” was part of a healthy male’s coming of age. Aides of Williams called Richards an “honorary lesbian” for supporting gay rights (Carlson, 1990). Do such tactics work? Although Williams began over 10 points ahead of Richards, he became an acute embarrassment to Texas Republicans and lost the election.

Fourth, meetings of a candidate with important people receive press coverage. This is particularly important for candidates without wide experience in some areas. For example, U.S. presidential aspirants with little foreign affairs background often make visits to foreign leaders, in order to be seen on the evening news shaking their hand and conferring.

Finally, and probably most importantly, any aspect of a campaign that emphasizes the “horse race” receives coverage. Poll results are reported widely and promptly, as are predictions by experts and any event that “upsets” the relative standings of the “players.” In the 2000 U.S. Presidential campaign coverage, 71% of the news stories were concerned with the horse race, rather than the issues (Lichter, 2001), while fewer than a third of the TV news stories mentioned any issue at all (Jamieson & Waldman, 2003). The number of poll-related stories and the relative prominence of such stories have risen greatly in the last 40 years (Craig, 2000), with the agenda increasingly set that what is important in the campaign is primarily the change in poll results since the last report.

What are the effects of such preoccupation with who’s ahead and who’s behind? Relatively unknown candidates suddenly perceived as serious contenders or frontrunners receive a rapid and substantial increase in coverage. At least in primary elections, they do not necessarily even have to win; a simple “better-than-expected” showing is often enough for a media victory. Dark horse anti-Vietnam War candidate Gene McCarthy’s surprisingly good showing in the New Hampshire Democratic primary in 1968 was instrumental in President Lyndon Johnson’s surprise decision not to seek renomination himself. Right wing Patrick Buchanan’s surprising (although not close to winning) showing in the 1992 New Hampshire Republican primary catapulted him from a fringe extremist candidate to

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someone that the media apparently perceived as a serious challenger to incumbent President George H.W.Bush.

This heavy coverage of horse races has probably encouraged the proliferation of more and earlier contests. With the New Hampshire Presidential primary established by law as two weeks before the earliest primary of any other state, that state ensures the continued attention and economic development benefits of all the media coverage. Other states such as Iowa have attempted an ‘end run’ by having non-primary caucuses or statewide straw polls earlier. These contests end up drawing considerable coverage, often starting close to a year before the general election. Most primary states have moved their primaries earlier in recent years so as to have some say before the contest is decided. The primary system has now become so front-loaded that the two major candidates are usually effectively chosen by March or April, 7 to 8 months before the general election in November! This extensively protracted campaign period is a major reason for both the rapidly escalating cost of campaigns and the public’s weariness of them. They simply last too long, a fact almost everyone acknowledges but no one knows quite how to fix.

The race aspect that is covered the most heavily of all is, of course, the result of the actual election. There is a lot of concern that knowledge of the results, or predicted results, in the case of network projections of winners, may actually affect the outcome of the election by influencing voters who have not yet gone to the polls. See Box 8.3 for further discussion of this issue.

What Is Lightly Covered

Just as some aspects of political campaigns are heavily covered, so others are relatively lightly covered. Candidates’ qualifications in intangible, but highly important, ways are relatively difficult for the press to cover. What has someone gained from being governor of Texas or senator from Tennessee, for example, which would help in being president? Very abstract issues such as character are in one sense extremely important but in another sense very difficult to assess. Coverage that does occur tends to focus on superficial, though not necessarily irrelevant, indicators of integrity (or more often lack thereof), like marital infidelity or shady business dealings. Although there was much talk early in the 1992 presidential campaign of Democrat Bill Clinton’s apparent extramarital affair some years before, the exact relevance or irrelevance of this to his possible performance as president was never clarified (and perhaps could not be).

Also relatively lightly covered are positions on issues, especially complex ones. Television news especially is ill-suited to detailed presentations of positions on complex issues like the economy. Print media can do much

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issue. However, few people read such reports; they listen to television’s 30- second interpretation of it, which may focus on peripheral aspects that are more ‘newsworthy.’ Some candidates and incumbents have written scholarly books or papers carefully outlining comprehensive positions on complex issues; such positions may be vitally important to predicting their performance in office, yet they are difficult to cover adequately in the media, especially on television. A 200-page treatise on economic issues simply does not translate well to a 20-second news story. Most TV campaign coverage is even shorter than that; the length of an average TV political news story fell from 43 to 9 seconds from 1968 to 1988 (Hallin, 1992).