NEW YORK, January 27, 2004 -- Howard Dean's now notorious Iowa speech may have marked the beginning of the end of the candidate's campaign to become president -- not so much for the content and fury of his words, but because of the way mainstream media subsequently characterized those 18 seconds in Iowa as a summation of the candidate himself.

The Dean "moment" is just one of many set pieces in network news' ongoing portrayal of the 2004 elections as a horse race pitting archetypal personalities against one another. Dean is the mercurial candidate; John Kerry the aloof plutocrat, while John Edwards is the simple populist. This drama may play well on the small screen, but it accomplishes little towards educating voters about the candidates' political views as Americans head to the polls this year.

According to MediaChannel/Media Tenor's ongoing monitoring of CBS Evening News, ABC World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News, the Democratic candidates are increasingly not being identified according to their stances on political issues, but by their incremental movements, up or down, in the polls and by their personality traits as perceived by the campaign media horde.

Horse Race Coverage Tramples the Issues

Coverage by the networks in the week before the New Hampshire primary, tells the tale. Less than 4 percent of the networks' January 19-24 coverage of Democratic candidates dealt with their positions on policy issues such as health care, education, the war in Iraq, the economy and employment. American voters ranked these five topics as the "most important issues for the government to address," according to a December 2003 poll by Harris Interactive.

Instead, MediaChannel/Media Tenor analysis shows that during the week before New Hampshire the big three networks focused 96 percent of their coverage on "other topics," primarily horse race issues such as the results of up-to-the hour polls indicating each candidate's relative position in the anticipated primary vote. This and other non-issue-related campaign news made up more than 56 percent of all network coverage during the week ending January 24.

Other coverage includes in-studio pundits attempting to position themselves as the first to spot a hidden campaign trend or to champion a sleeper candidate. "As a result, too much of the coverage -- as the candidates themselves have complained -- emphasizes the process itself over substance and issues," writes New York Post columnist Eric Fettman.

"No one doubts the importance of figures and who is ahead of whom, but some form of information on the candidates' standing on certain issues is still important," said Media Tenor president Roland Schatz. "Network coverage of the elections does not focus on issue information, but spends time highlighting everything else on the campaign trail. This makes it even more difficult for the voter to decide based on substantial information on the candidates' views."

Dean Done In Before Iowa? Media Survey Indicates So

Another trend revealed by MediaChannel/Media Tenor analysis is the shift of network media coverage against Howard Dean even before his now infamous speech in Iowa on January 19. "Although media reports turned particularly negative following the Iowa Caucus, the positive media bias toward Dean had steadily eroded ahead of his Monday night speech," Schatz reports.

During the week of January 5-11, 38 percent of the networks' coverage of Dean had a positive cast to it, against 13.3 percent of statements that MediaChannel/Media Tenor analysts characterized as negative.

Dean's overall positive rating began to shift downward during the week of January 12-18. In that week, positive coverage of Dean by the networks comprised only 23.5 percent of total news and information on the candidate.

A precipitous decline followed in the days after Iowa. From January 19 through 21, Dean's positive news coverage fell to 16.6 percent, while his negative rating in network coverage rose from 12.3 percent in the previous week to 36.6 percent of all network news statements about the candidate from January 19-21.

Media Tenor analysts compile their data based on the number of statements made about each candidate during network news' half-hour broadcasts. Statements are then rated as positive, negative or neutral coverage of the candidate. Their full report is available here.

MediaChannel/Media Tenor will continue to compile data on mainstream media coverage of the elections through the November vote. The research is part of "Media For Democracy 2004" a MediaChannel.org initiative to professionally monitor mainstream news coverage of the elections and advocate fairer, more democratic and issue-oriented standards of reporting. The project provides reliable data to a vast constituency of Americans who have come together in a targeted campaign to prevent the types of media mistakes -- such as early, erroneous and politically biased projections -- that plagued the 2000 elections.

More information on Media For Democracy is available at www.mediafordemocracy.us

-- Timothy Karr is executive director of MediaChannel.org, which on February 1 launched Media For Democracy 2004 (www.mediafordemocracy.us), a citizens-powered initiative to hold mainstream media to a higher standard of election coverage.

Read the Media Tenor Report

© MediaChannel.org, 2004. All rights reserved.

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