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Times Watch for
August 17, 2004
Same Campaign Tactic, Two Different Takes
Same campaign tactic, but two very different takes: Both Kerry and Bush hold informal campaign chats with handpicked supporters. But according to the Times, while Bush "fields softballs from the faithful" that sometimes "aren't even questions at all," Kerry supporters merely "raised hands with questions rather than waving signs with slogans." While Bush's campaign comes off as cynical, Kerry's is described as "homespun."
White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller's Monday story, "On the Road, Bush Fields Softballs From the Faithful," opens by talking about Bush's Q&A sessions: "His father loved them, Richard Nixon started them and President Bush has turned them into the near-daily warm bath of his re-election campaign. Last week alone, in Virginia, Florida, New Mexico and Oregon, Mr. Bush had four 'Ask President Bush' question-and-answer sessions with rapt Republican audiences. The week before he had one in Columbus, Ohio, and this week he has one scheduled for St. Croix, Wis."
As the headline indicates, Bumiller's story emphasizes the softball nature of the questions: "As anyone who has sat through the 90-minute forums knows, the questions are not hand grenades that detonate onto the evening news. Take, for example, one of the first queries at the 'Ask President Bush' session in Beaverton, Ore., on Friday: 'I'm wondering if I can get some inauguration tickets?' Or consider this from Albuquerque on Wednesday: 'Can I introduce my mother and mother-in-law, who are new citizens to this country?' Many times the questions aren't even questions at all. Exhibit A might be these words from an audience member in Niceville, Fla., on Tuesday: 'I'm 60 years old and I've voted Republican from the very first time I could vote. And I also want to say this is the very first time that I have felt that God was in the White House.'"
She lets the Kerry campaign criticize Bush's events: "Bush campaign officials tell reporters at every 'Ask President Bush' forum that the questions are not planted and that the sessions are spontaneous. Senator John Kerry's campaign officials say the events are too ridiculous to be believed."
Bumiller summarizes (while getting in two cracks at Bush): "The result is often a love-in with heavily Christian crowds. Mr. Bush relaxes, shows off his humor and appears more human than in his sometimes tongue-tied and tense encounters with the press. He clearly relishes the sessions: As of this coming Wednesday in Wisconsin, Mr. Bush will have had 12 such campaign forums, which is one less than the number of solo news conferences he has had in three and a half years in the White House."
By contrast, Tuesday's story from the Kerry campaign by Jodi Wilgoren, "Front-Porch Chat: Birth of a Kerry Campaign Tactic" soft-pedals the cynicism in favor of profiling the giddy middle-class people lucky enough to be used as a backdrop for the Kerry campaign.
"For every porch picked, there are those passed over," Wilgoren writes, as if regretful, while telling the story of a Springfield, Oregon homeowner whose house was eventually not chosen for use by the Kerry campaign: "On Friday morning here in this quintessential suburban neighborhood, such was the plight of Shannon Imponen, who was eager to share her struggle to pay for emergency post-partum health care with Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee. Ms. Imponen, 24, had instantly agreed when Mr. Kerry's aides knocked late Wednesday afternoon asking to borrow her backyard for an event just 40 hours in the future; she even said they could chop down a couple of trees to improve the view."
Imponen's backyard was in the end rejected in favor of one a few blocks away, Wilgoren explains: "So goes the back story of the Kerry campaign's newest signature, the 'front porch visit'--though the porch is optional. Mr. Kerry and his running mate, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, have held 10 such homespun events, in middle-class neighborhoods across Iowa, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and here in Oregon since stumbling across the form in mid-June." Unlike Bumiller's story on Bush's Q&A's, which features criticism from the Kerry campaign, Wilgoren's story includes no Bush criticism of Kerry's campaign tactics.
Also note the lack of cynicism in Wilgoren's report on Kerry's chats, compared to that in Bumiller's report about Bush's. While Bush's events are in front of "faithful," "rapt Republican audiences," Wilgoren blandly states that Kerry's events are "invitation-only."
Wilgoren emphasizes the positive: "The low-key, invitation-only events, where perhaps 100 people sit around red-checked picnic tables, raising hands with questions rather than waving signs with slogans, mimic the town-hall style campaigning for the Iowa caucuses at which both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards excelled. For Mr. Kerry, porch visits follow the chili feeds he held at firehouses all over New Hampshire and Iowa. The first one happened almost by accident. Before a rally at a park in Columbus, Ohio, Mr. Kerry's aides sent him to the home of Lynette Farmer, thinking it would be a good image for them to walk together to the event. They chatted on Ms. Farmer's porch, and a gimmick was born. Situated mainly in swing states, the visits are intended to emphasize the Democrats' kitchen-table economic appeal--light on partisanship, laden with 'we're here for you.'"
Wilgoren let lucky Kerry-supporting homeowner Claire Kronser gush: "It was like the day before Christmas when you're a kid. You can't sleep and you can't explain it."
For more of Bumiller on Bush's campaign tactics, click here.
For more of Wilgoren on Kerry's campaign tactics, click here.
• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Sen. John Kerry
The "Campaign Against Political Dissent"?
The Times editorial page on Tuesday gets a bit overwrought about the alleged threat the government is posing to civil liberties. Regarding the F.B.I.'s questioning of potential demonstrators at the Republican National Convention in New York City, they quake: "The F.B.I.'s questioning of protesters is part of a larger campaign against political dissent that has increased sharply since the start of the war on terror. At the Democratic convention, protesters were sent to a depressing barbed-wire camp under the subway tracks. And at a recent Bush-Cheney campaign event, audience members were required to sign a pledge to support President Bush before they were admitted. F.B.I. officials insist that the people they interview are free to 'close the door in our faces,' but by then the damage may already have been done. The government must not be allowed to turn a war against foreign enemies into a campaign against critics at home."
For the full editorial, click here.
• Civil Liberties | Editorial | FBI | Terrorism
Hocking Another Anti-Republican Art Project
"A Convention Briefing From the Department of Art," a Sunday Arts & Leisure story by occasional Times contributor and art critic Edward Gomez, is just the latest bit of PR for
anti-Republican art trumpeted in the Times.
Gomez writes: "As the carefully staged spectacle of the Republican National Convention rolls into Madison Square Garden, the U.S. Department of Art & Technology will present a media-focused, high-tech spectacle of its own uptown. The multimedia installation, which opens for three weeks on Saturday at Luxe Gallery (24 West 57th Street), is an ambitious undertaking for the department, the stated goal of which is to promote the appreciation of the role of the artist in society and advocates free expression for all Americans."
But based on Gomez's description, it sounds like typical agit-prop: "The department, which can be found on the Web, 'blurs the line between reality and fiction,' he said. More recently Mr. Packer established a mock political organization called the Experimental Party, which 'takes off the bureaucratic mask' to reveal the true intention of his artistic initiatives, 'which is to subvert the Republicans' propaganda by countering it with our own techniques of media manipulation and illusion.'….The centerpiece of the show is the 'Media Deconstruction Kit' Its name refers to the software that generates its content and to a montage that will be made from cable television coverage of the Republican convention (especially from Fox News), prerecorded U.S.D.A.T. material and fresh, daily footage shot by camera-equipped 'reporters' around Madison Square Garden and in the streets of New York."
Showing that no conservative bashing is complete without a crack at Fox, the story's cut-out line reads, "Just in time for the Republican National Convention: Fox News, cleverly remixed."
For the rest of Gomez on the anti-Republican art show, click here.
• Arts | Campaign 2004 | Fox | Edward Gomez | Republican Convention
Times Still Hasn't Learned to Label Liberals
There's a bit of labeling bias in Greg Winter's Tuesday story on the defeat of religious school vouchers in Florida: "Researchers at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy group, contend that the threat of vouchers has placed so much pressure on poor-performing schools that they have made the greatest gains on state tests."
But while MI is labeled conservative, the Times keeps the arch-liberals at People for the American Way unidentified: "Vouchers don't really provide significant opportunity for low-income kids,' said Elliot Mincberg, vice president and legal director of the People for the American Way Foundation, which has long opposed vouchers. 'They drain money and resources from sometimes the most needy public schools.'"
For the rest of Winter's story, click here.
• Education | Labeling Bias | Greg Winter
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org