Were political journalists ever objective? The role of the reporter in 1912 and 2008

In late September, McCain's campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, had this to say:

"Whatever The New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization that every day attacks the McCain campaign, attacks Senator McCain, attacks Governor Palin, and excuses Senator Barack Obama. This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate, which is their prerogative  to be, but let's not be dishonest and call it something other than what it is. It is an organization that has made a decision to cast aside its journalistic  integrity and tradition to advocate for the defeat of one candidate -- in this case, John McCain."

A few months earlier, supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton were making similar charges about some press outlets, notably MSNBC, and their complaints led to a hilarious parody on Saturday Night Live.

Meanwhile, the left railed against Fox News. For most of the primary campaign, some Democratic Party candidates refused to be interviewed on Fox - and they boycotted a proposed debate on Fox cable.

NBC worked feverishly to sort out its role, and its brand. Was it the brand of Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams, of the NBC Nightly News and Meet the Press, the brand made famous by Huntley and Brinkley and John Chancellor? Or had it become the brand of the commentators on MSNBC, also run by NBC News, which emerged during the campaign as the scrappy Obama-backing alternative to Fox News, featuring headliners like Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews (and now Rachel Maddow), who brought viewers and profits to the company by, it was often charged, backing Obama and bashing his opponents - Hillary Clinton in the primary and John McCain in the general election?

That apparent contradiction came to a head during the political conventions, where Olbermann and Matthews served as anchors for MSNBC. The perceived cheerleading and jeering became so pronounced that NBC News finally felt compelled to make a choice. Reportedly prompted by NBC News reporters who felt that the brand's reputation for fair-minded and professional journalism was in deep trouble, the news division announced on September 8 that Olbermann and Matthews would serve as commentators, but no longer as anchors, on election night.

Writing in Broadcasting & Cable, columnist Ben Grossman, who calls himself an a strong believer in traditional news values of objective reporting, yet an admirer of the colorful, ratings rich programming on MSNBC, suggested a simple solution. Move MNSBC out from under the company's news umbrella. Following this logic, most of the programming on Fox and MSNBC, and even some of the programming on CNN, could be seen as entertainment and opinion and (hopefully) would not be confused with traditional forms of news.

Our Center on Communication Leadership held sessions on the media and politics at both political conventions. One of the panelists in Denver was Margaret Carlson, the former Time magazine reporter and columnist who now writes for Bloomberg News. She contrasted the style of three programs: "Crossfire," the show that she once co-hosted on CNN; Keith Olbermann's Countdown; and Bill O'Reilly's "O"Reilly Factor."

On Crossfire, she said, the goal was to have contrasting views, fairly balanced, who would shout at each other across the table. When she is called by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann's producers, she said, they start off by asking her views on the subject to be discussed. If she disagrees with Keith's views, she said, they tell her that they don't want her on the show.

O'Reilly invites her on, she said, particularly when she disagrees with him, but then only uses her as a punching bag.

During the Democratic convention, one of my friends held a viewing party. He has a room full of TV sets and prefers to have all of the channels on at once so that he can see what each of the news outlets chooses to highlight. But one of his guests said that he refused to be in any room where he would be exposed to Fox News. Someone else attacked CNN. A third person only wanted to watch PBS. In at least some households, we have all moved into our own news silos.

And that really can matter.

A couple of years ago, Andy Kohut, the expert pollster who runs the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, noted that this is the first era in recent memory where people don't just disagree about policy; they disagree about facts. His point is illustrated dramatically by a 2003 study conducted by the University of Maryland.

"An in-depth analysis of a series of polls conducted June through September 2003," the report said, "found 48% incorrectly believed that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found, 22% that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and 25% that world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq. Overall 60% had at least one of these three misperceptions."

The report also found that: "Those who primarily watch Fox News are significantly more likely to have misperceptions, while those who primarily listen to NPR or watch PBS are significantly less likely."

This is not to suggest that the reports on Fox News were necessarily less reliable. Rather, it may illustrate the self-selection process of politically committed citizens.

My guess is that people who watch Fox News have a very different view of Sarah Palin than those who watch MSNBC - and they may well believe a different set of facts about her. The same could be said of those who listen to Rush Limbaugh as contrasted with those who listen to shows on Air America Radio.

One of our other panelists at the Democratic convention was Cass Sunstein, former distinguished professor at the University of Chicago Law School, who is now at Harvard. He has long been warning about the ways in which our democracy may be threatened as we move into our respective but not respectful news corners. He says that the emergence of new technologies may be exacerbating the problem, a point that he discusses in his latest book, Republic.com.2.0.

Professor Sunstein illustrates his point by describing a study conducted in Colorado. Researchers organized groups of liberal leaning voters in Boulder and of conservative leaning voters in Colorado Springs. Each group talked about a series of hot button issues such as gay marriage, affirmative action, and global warming. The researchers found that by talking among themselves, with people of like mind, they developed even more extreme positions. They did not just reinforce each others views. They amplified them. By going into ideological silos, Professor Sunstein argues, citizens are becoming more and more extreme - a result that, in some respects, damages our idea of democracy.

In some respects, this phenomenon is far from new. We all have some distant recollection of courses or books where we learned that the press in the early years of the republic was highly partisan - indeed, that most journals were party organs or party funded. Some of us can remember a time in the last century when people were identified by their newspapers. In Los Angeles, conservatives and business oriented citizens proudly identified themselves as readers of the Los Angeles Times, whereas workers proudly bought the Los Angeles Record.

Growing up in New York City, I always thought of the New York Post as the Democratic Paper, with aggressive columnists and an outspoken editorial policy.  That, of course, was long before Rupert Murdoch purchased it and turned it into a conservative journal. Back in those days of my childhood, The New York Herald Tribune was the paper of the blue stocking Republicans. Workers read the Mirror or Daily News.

In most cities, the period when readers identified their papers with their class or their party politics ended in the middle of the last century, when it became financially untenable to have more than one paper in most cities. As metropolitan dailies became monopolies - and then were purchased by large corporations - they became more centrist, or more committed to what we generally call "balance" and "objectivity". There were alternative weeklies like the Village Voice, where I wrote a column for a few years, and there were magazines of opinion such as the National Review and The Nation. But dailies were almost always centrist and mainstream.  Meanwhile, from the 1940s through the 1970s there were only three commercial television networks and they were all pretty mainstream. FCC rules called for balance and fairness, and the advertising based and oligarchic nature of the business encouraged non-partisan reporting. But that period of a largely non-partisan press may have been an aberration in American history. I should add that there were plenty of people on the right and the left who felt that the centrist position of the press was not so much non-partisan as establishmentarian - and, in its way, quite partisan. But the press viewed itself as centrist and fair.

During the past year, I have been conducting research for a book about the political campaign of 1912, specifically the fight for the Republican Party's nomination. It was an era before electronic communications, when newspapers were - or were thought to be - all-powerful. In many communities, there were scads of papers, and most had partisan or party connections. The notion of objective journalism and ethics had, let's say, a somewhat different meaning.

The campaign of 1912 is of special interest, in some respects, because Senator McCain so often invoked Theodore Roosevelt as his hero and inspiration. It is of special interest to me because it was the first campaign that featured presidential primaries.

Most of the owners in that era, 100 years ago, supported the incumbent Republican, William Howard Taft, who came to office in the election of 1908 as Theodore Roosevelt's hand-picked successor. Though TR thought of him as a protégé, and called him the most lovable man he had ever met, he quickly disappointed most of Roosevelt's more progressive friends.

By the fall of 1911, the progressive wing of the Republican Party was organizing against Taft. Some favored Robert La Follette, the Senator from Wisconsin, who was in many ways the consummate progressive.  But by December, 1911, it seemed that Theodore Roosevelt might come out of retirement to seek a third term. At that point, a number of major papers moved in his direction.

The role of reporters during that campaign went way beyond bias. They became advisors, sleuths, intermediaries, and publicists.

In fact, neither Taft nor TR had much use for the press. Both found the papers deeply biased. When William Randolph Hearst turned against him because he vetoed the wool tariff bill, Taft stopped reading Hearst's papers. He told his aide, Archie Butt, that he refused to read Pulitzer's New York World because "it makes me angry." After a while, Taft relied exclusively on two papers, the Sun and the Tribune. Archie Butt and Taft's wife both urged him to read other publications. But he refused.

If possible, TR had an even lower opinion of the press - and once described an unusual fantasy to deal with a few special editors.

Financier George Perkins, who funded a large share of TR's run for the presidency in 1912, left a memo describing a remarkable exchange.  "While calling on Col. Roosevelt one afternoon during November, 1911," Perkins recalled, "the conversation turned to some newspaper editorials and stories that had appeared." In his usual vigorous way, Perkins said, Roosevelt expressed his opinions about some of the newspapers and newspapermen. TR said that he supposed every man had at least one unrealizable idea. He described his unrealizable idea as follows: He wanted "to get the owner of the New York World, the owner of the New York Herald, at least two editors from the New York Evening Post, and two or three other people to be selected from time to time, in a bunch," and send them to a place on the other side of the Mexican border, where riot and revolution were at their height. Then TR would arrange to show up with a shotgun, and, in the midst of the chaos, he would "fire at the whole group of them, taking particular pains to shoot them in the stomachs in order that they might die a lingering death."

But despite his adversaries, Roosevelt had lots of his own agents in the press corps. And a great many of them were far more than reporters.

For example, Gilson Gardner was the top political correspondent for the Scripps newspaper chain, owned by E.W. Scripps, who fancied himself and his papers as the champion and educator of the working man. Using his press credentials, Gardner spent the first weeks of October, 1911, travelling through the midwest, ostensibly reporting for his papers, but actually gathering information for La Follette, who was planning to challenge Taft for the Republican Party nomination. As La Follette later explained, Gardner was conducting interviews quote "for the purpose of forming a judgment with respect to the Taft's strength as a candidate and the strength of my opposing candidacy."

Based on his interviews, Gardner told La Follette that he was convinced that had "a fair chance to win the nomination at the convention."

But Gardner was something of a double agent, in the service of two competing progressive heroes:  La Follette, who already planned to run, and TR, who was trying to decide whether to enter the fray. So after briefing La Follette in Washington, D.C., Gardner  went to New York to brief TR. Partly as a result of Gardner's report, Roosevelt decided to become a candidate himself.

In the fascinating eight-month saga that followed, Gilson Gardner tried to maintain close relations with both Roosevelt and La Follette, often serving in the inner circle of both men. Once TR entered the race himself in February, La Follette's effort became a lost cause. The former president was still a national idol. But La Follette remained in the race and was a strong candidate in a few states such as North Dakota. Gardner decided to support Roosevelt, but he used his relations with both men to try to broker an arrangement under which TR would withdraw his name from the ballot in states where La Follette seemed to have the lead.

Scripps, his employer, specifically encouraged Gardner to be more than a reporter, to be an activist and to back the progressive candidates as strongly as he could. Knowing that most of his local editors were more conservative than either he or Gardner, Scripps urged them to give Gardner what he called "a very free hand in dealing with" what he called "this particular phase of politics."

"In order to balance the scales fairly," Scripps told Gardner, "you should give full play to your personal sentiments" favoring Roosevelt, since it was certain that most of the editors would be "lukewarm. if not antagonistic, to the Colonel."

Gardner himself found the press totally biased. As the primary campaign was drawing to a close, Gardner sent a note to Hiram Johnson, the progressive governor of California who was one of TR's leading supporters, underlining the unfairness of the press's opposition to TR. "But one thing stands out in my thoughts," Gardner wrote. "Even newspapers cannot entirely obscure the truth."  

Gilson Gardner was one of several reporters who went far beyond partisan reporting in their support for TR.

There were a great many other reporters in the Roosevelt camp. One of the most interesting was John Callen O'Laughlin who worked for the Chicago Tribune. Like the Scripps papers, the Tribune was at that time a progressive journal. It's owners included Medill McCormick, who led TR's press operations in Chicago and was later elected as a progressive member of the U.S. Senate, and Medill's brother, Robert, who later came to symbolize mid-western conservatism, but was so close to TR that he served as a Roosevelt delegate to the 1912 convention and as a powerful member of the all-important credentials committee. The Tribune, determined to see Roosevelt back in the White House, turned its resources over to his campaign

O'Laughlin, one of the paper's star reporters, had spent much of 1910 in Africa and Europe as a part of Roosevelt's entourage. He described TR's travels in a volume called From the Jungle through Europe with Roosevelt.

When TR began to consider a fresh bid for the White House, Cal became his eyes and ears. In early December, 1911, when TR was still trying to decide whether to run, O'Laughlin sent him a detailed letter with a state by state analysis of the political scene and the press, a description of the views of the members of the Republican National Committee, and advice about the management of his campaign. In the days that followed, he served as an intermediary for sensitive conversations.

"In case you wish to communicate anything ...that it would not perhaps be wise to tell.... directly," he said, "I will be glad to be the medium."

He even became a fundraiser for a campaign that had not even been launched. O'Laughlin told Roosevelt that Senator William Borah was enthusiastic [about his candidacy, but] will need $10,000.  "Unless you object," he told the former president, "I intend to raise this sum."

Throughout the campaign, O'Laughlin remained a key adviser and advocate, introducing Roosevelt to important potential supporters and peppering him with advice about campaign personnel and political strategy. When there were public misunderstandings about TR's views or statements, O'Laughlin wrote authoritative stories that he cleared in advance with the candidate.

The Republican convention was held in Chicago that June. In a highly unusual move for the era, Roosevelt came to the city himself to take over the command post. When Roosevelt's train stopped in South Bend, Indiana, on its way to Chicago, O'Laughlin hopped on board, full of good news about Roosevelt's prospects for victory, and filled with stories about the Taft forces who, he reported, were in a panic. Roosevelt's family gave him a lavish greeting, and TR announced that O'Laughlin would become his top personal aide if he won the nomination and election.

During the week long convention that followed, O'Laughlin wrote a series of front page stories for the Chicago Tribune that were less than objective, less than accurate, but always designed to be singularly helpful. When it seemed that the Taft forces won the nomination in a hotly contested - and some thought fraudulent - battle, O'Laughlin wrote the first authoritative piece announcing that TR's supporters would march out of the convention hall and form a third party.

So today, when we criticize journalists and the press for bias, when we speak of Matthews and Olbermann, and of Limbaugh and Hannity, I like to think that they have a lot to learn about the ways in which journalists can be used to manipulate an election.

This post is based on a speech delivered to the Trojan Guild of Los Angeles on October 2, 2008.