CASE STUDY: PRESS COVERAGE OF THE 2000 U.S.

CASE STUDY: PRESS COVERAGE OF THE 2000 U.S.

PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN AND ELECTION The historic 2000 Presidential election on November 7 was perhaps the

closest race in U.S. history. Republican George W.Bush and Democrat Al Gore were virtually tied in both electoral and popular votes the morning after the election. For the next 36 days, the outcome was uncertain as the controversy swirled around the count in the state of Florida, The election

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was only finally declared decided on December 12, after a close decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that favored the claims of George Bush. After this decision, Al Gore conceded; but it probably will never be definitively established which candidate actually won Florida, where the popular vote was within one hundredth of one percent, with the winner receiving the entire electoral vote. The role of the press in covering this election and the post-election process was carefully examined in an illuminating book by Jamieson and Waldman (2003).

Election Night Coverage Premature Overconfident Projections. On election evening, the networks

early projected Florida first for Gore and later reversed themselves and called it for Bush. Around 10:15 they retracted both and placed the state (and thus the whole election) back into the undecided category. Several smaller states were also very close and undecided until well into the next day or days. At 2:20 a.m. the networks called the election for Bush but retracted this call at 3:50 a.m. When networks made projections that turned out to be accurate (as most were), they tended to take credit for their skill. However, when they had to retract their projections, as they did repeatedly with the Florida presidential returns, they tended to blame “bad data,” even though all networks were drawing on basically the same data, from the Voter News Service (VNS).

As the election results became increasingly uncertain as more returns came in, which is the opposite of the usual trend, reporters and pundits struggled in their interpretation. There was numerous discussion about “egg on their faces” and “eating crow,” as well as extended discussions of possible scenarios (“if Gore wins these three states, he could still lose Florida and win…”). Some of this discussion was accompanied by the startlingly low-tech graphics of network analysts and anchors drawing scribbles on paper with a crayon and holding them up to the camera!

Framing the Electoral Uncertainty

Jamieson and Waldman (2003) argue that, during the next five weeks, the prevailing frame for discussing the outcome of the election gradually came to increasingly favor Bush over Gore, although the objective data coming in over that time did not necessarily do so. The three possible frames, each drawing on true information, would be that (1) Gore had won the popular vote and was ahead in the electoral vote, and the final outcome in the Electoral College was uncertain, (2) Bush was ahead in the key state that would decide the final electoral vote and thus was the presumed victor unless Gore’s campaign proved otherwise, or (3) Neither candidate was ahead nor

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held an advantage over the other. In the news coverage over the next five weeks (especially the critical Sunday morning network news shows), the bias favoring the second frame with Bush’s victory did not immediately emerge after Election Night but rather did so gradually, as Bush’s campaign people managed the media more effectively than Gore’s people. See Wicks (2001) for discussion of the idea of framing of news events.

First of all, Republicans began to frame the post-election hand recount as flawed and unfair. The Bush camp framed the initial machine count, which showed him ahead by a few hundred votes out of several million cast, as legitimate and the subsequent statewide hand recount as suspect and unreliable. The latter was always referred to as a “recount” rather than with such terms as “full count,” “complete count,” or “hand count.” Attempts to force a recount were described as attempts to “overturn the results.” Also, the Bush campaign talked openly of challenging Gore’s winning results in other close states like New Mexico, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Iowa, but Gore’s camp did not aggressively do so.

Perhaps the most telling reframing came in the decisions about the legitimacy of the overseas absentee ballots, which came in late and had to be counted by hand. Gore attempted to have those strictly evaluated, with those not meeting specified criteria (such as containing a postmark no later than Election Day) thrown out, while the Bush campaign framed those ballots as “military ballots” (which only some of them were) and questioned the patriotism of those trying to “disenfranchise” the voting of our “brave men and women defending our country.” Both sides insisted on strict adherence to the law only when it favored their candidate. In the case of the absentee ballots, whose legitimacy was decided very idiosyncratically in each county, the Bush frame of casting Gore’s adherence to the law as an attack on the patriotism of the military came to be adopted by the news networks, who came to see Gore’s moves as illegitimate and as a desperate attempt to overturn the election results favoring Bush. Thus, 680 questionable votes were accepted and counted, even though some had no postmark, or a postmark after Election Day, and in some cases were from people who had already voted. These may well have determined the election, where Bush’s final certification of victory was only a 537 vote margin.

The frame of Bush as the apparent winner and Gore as the stubborn loser became the prevailing network news frame by late November. Frequent photo shots of Bush supporters holding “Sore Loserman” signs parodying the Democratic “Gore Lieberman” placards supported this frame. When Bush starting naming people to his cabinet but Gore did not, this perception of the inevitability of a Bush victory was only further reinforced. Implications of “stealing the election” were raised for Bush only three times in the five weeks of Sunday news shows but were mentioned 12 times in connection with Gore. Also, 20 out of 23 times the word “concession”

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appeared in a question over these weeks; it was applied to Gore. The contest was finally ended 36 days after the election when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to halt the further counting of votes, arguing that the petitioner Bush would be “irreparably harmed” by continuing the count and “casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election” (Jamieson & Waldman, 2003, p. 127). The vote was 7–2 that there were constitutional problems with the state-court-mandated recount and 5–4 to halt the count and declare Bush the victor. Two of the original seven majority had thought there were possible ways to correct the problems with the recount; a bare majority of five believed there were not. After the ruling in Bush vs. Gore, Al Gore promptly conceded the election.

Once Bush had been declared the victor and especially after he assumed office on January 20, 2001, the press seemed eager to assert his legitimacy and downplay a consideration of the possibility that the wrong man may have assumed the Presidency. In fact, there were two media recounts in 2001 of the Florida votes, designed to answer the question for the historical record. The first, by the Miami Herald, USA Today, and Knight-Ridder, produced eight sets of results, depending on the standard used to judge acceptability of ballots; five of these favored Bush and three favored Gore. The second, more comprehensive, recount was conducted by the Associated Press, the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal This count produced 44 separate results, 22 favoring Bush and 22 favoring Gore! Because these were not available until shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, their release was not trumpeted with much fanfare to

a press and country too traumatized from terrorism to consider it might have made a mistake at the last Presidential inauguration. The fact remains, though, that we will never definitively know which candidate actually received more votes in Florida and thus actually “won” the election.

Now that we have considered the use of news for one’s political advantage, let us now consider the most direct form of political media, namely political advertising, Although political advertising has much in common with advertising in general (see chapter 4), there are also some important differences (Thorson, Christ, & Caywood, 1991).