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Times Watch for
October 6, 2004
"Cheney on the Defensive"
A front-page story on the vice presidential debate by Richard Stevenson and Robin Toner hammers home a theme running through this morning's edition -- that Sen. John Edwards more than held his own in the debate with Dick Cheney: "In a strikingly personal and bitter debate, Vice President Dick Cheney defended the Bush administration's record on Iraq on Tuesday night as 'exactly the right thing to do' and asserted that Senators John Kerry and John Edwards bent with the political winds on national security. Mr. Edwards fired back with a wide-ranging assault on the administration's honesty and competence in foreign and domestic policy….Mr. Edwards appeared to hold his own in the remarkably intense thrust and parry of the evening, at times putting Mr. Cheney on the defensive. But their confrontation contained nothing that is likely to alter the race fundamentally, and the focus is likely to shift rapidly back to the top of their respective tickets."
In a turnabout from when the polls were showing Bush with a large lead, the Times today harps on the polls now that the race is closer: "Five days after Mr. Bush's first encounter with Mr. Kerry, in Florida last Thursday, Mr. Cheney was under pressure to halt any momentum the Democratic ticket had picked up and sharpen the Republican assault on Mr. Kerry. After weeks in which Mr. Bush held a steady lead, polls have shown the race tightening markedly, to a statistical dead heat in several of them."
For more on the veep debate, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Dick Cheney | Debates | Sen. John Edwards | Richard Stevenson | Robin Toner
Drawing Out Cheney's "Ire"
Chief campaign reporter Adam Nagourney picks up on the paper's theme of Edwards throwing Cheney off his game: "For much of the night, he offered a competent, calm performance as he sought to turn back challenges to his experience. Mr. Edwards frequently drew the vice president's ire -- and also drew Mr. Cheney's attention away from Mr. Kerry, his intended target….Indeed, if Mr. Cheney came into the debate seeking to reverse the slippage the Republicans have witnessed since Mr. Bush's answers and demeanor Thursday night distressed many supporters, Mr. Edwards succeeded in blocking him for much of the night, although certainly not all….But on Tuesday evening, Mr. Kerry clearly had the advocate he was looking for when he chose this young-looking and relatively inexperienced lawyer from North Carolina to join his ticket; and that is something that Democrats are apt to remember for a long time."
Kerry has narrowed the gap in some polls, and Nagourney takes the results seriously: "For most of the 90-minute encounter with his rival, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, Mr. Cheney tried to reassure Republicans unsettled by President Bush's debate performance against Senator John Kerry last week, while hammering home the case against Mr. Kerry that polls now suggest Mr. Bush failed to make."
Nagourney wasn't quite so interested when most polls were showing Bush with a clear lead: "Most polls suggest that Bush has a lead, but not a large one and not a solid one. And there's so much sort of variation in polls these days, that I think no one is really quite sure what's going on out there."
Earlier, after the Republican convention, when some polls showed Bush with a double-digit lead, he sniffed: "Polls taken right after a convention offer an inflated sense of a candidate's standing. In this case, getting reliable results may be trickier because much of the polling was done over the Labor Day weekend, when many people are away."
For the full Nagourney, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Dick Cheney | Debates | Sen. John Edwards | Adam Nagourney | Polls
Dick "the Slasher" Cheney
As she did for the first presidential debate, reporter Katharine Seelye "live-blogs" the vice presidential debate, comparing Dick "the slasher" Cheney with the "engaging" personality of Edwards: "Mainly, this debate showed what Cheney must have been holding back when he debated good ol' Joe Lieberman four years ago: Cheney is a slasher. Cheney also seemed better prepared, in some ways, than Edwards, at least in terms of bringing up the other side's records, votes and quotes, even if not always accurately. While he certainly had command of the issues on the domestic front, he had virtually no passion. Edwards was the more engaging debater and personality. He laid out his arguments with the precision and logic that you would expect from a star litigator but also managed to smile and appear less rehearsed….Cheney again does the most direct personal attack. He is so intent on tearing down Edwards that he postpones his answer to a question about Israel by trashing Edwards, by saying, 'You have a record that is not very distinguished.'"
For Seelye's full live rundown, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Dick Cheney | Debates | Sen. John Edwards | Katharine Seelye
"Arid, "Astringent," "Practically Growling" Cheney
A front-page story by James Bennet piles on negative colorful adjectives while describing Vice President Dick Cheney's debate performance Tuesday night: "Gravel-voiced, practically growling, Mr. Cheney leaned heavily on his elbows on the desk before him as he recalled his long service in Congress and the White House….A freshman senator from North Carolina, [Sen. John] Edwards was clearly used to Mr. Cheney's line of attack, that Mr. Edwards was inexperienced and inconsistent. But Mr. Cheney, a Washington mandarin and among the most influential vice presidents ever, found himself playing defense on what has been unchallenged home turf, his reputation for competence….With Mr. Cheney in one corner and Mr. Edwards in the other, viewers could pick their own frame of reference and apply their preferred images to each set of points, corporate leader versus trial lawyer, executive versus legislator, astringency versus empathy, the arid sensibility and granite consonants of Big Sky country versus the honeyed humor and swampy vowels of the Carolinas."
For the rest of Bennet on the debate, click here.
• James Bennet | Campaign 2004 | Dick Cheney | Sen. John Edwards
No Outcry Over NBC's "ILIE" --
But Times Smelled out "Subliminal" Message
in "RATS" Ad from 2000
In a catch picked up by the Drudge Report, the Media Research Center caught an NBC Nightly News graphic showing the letters "ILIE" for 16 seconds next to President Bush's face, while anchor Tom Brokaw was introducing a story from reporter David Gregory.
Today's Times ignores the brouhaha, perhaps dismissing the juxtaposition as inadvertent. But that's not how the paper treated a similar moment during Campaign 2000 regarding complaints from the Gore campaign about a Bush ad in which part of the word "BUREAUCRATS" ("RATS") was highlighted in a single frame, which appeared on screen for less than half a second -- extremely difficult to spot unless you were watching for it.
Yet somehow "RATS" became a week-long story in the media at large and especially at the Times, which put it on the September 12, 2000 front page in a story by then-reporter (now Washington editor) Richard Berke: "Democrats See, and Smell, Rats in G.O.P. Ad."
Breathless Berke: "Then, if the viewer watches very closely, something else happens. The word 'rats,' a fragment of the word 'bureaucrats,' pops up in one frame. And though the image lasts only one-thirtieth of a second, it is in huge white capital letters, larger than any other word on the commercial….Several Republican and Democratic advertising consultants who were told of the commercial, as well as many independent academics, said they were startled that such a word would appear and said it appeared to be a subliminal attempt to discredit Mr. Gore."
Berke's article tossed around accusations of subliminal advertising, as did a Times editorial on September 13th (headlined "Subliminal Headache for Mr. Bush"), which darkly accused ad producer Alex Castellanos of "a declaration of intent to use subliminal techniques….If Mr. Bush really means that such techniques are not acceptable to his campaign, perhaps he should sever his connection with Mr. Castellanos."
At the end of the week, Berke went on PBS and demonstrated how he'd been spoon-fed the story by the Gore campaign: "The Gore people called me last week, and they said, 'We want you to view this tape of a commercial. We don't want to tell you anything more about it. Judge for yourself.' So they showed it to me. I'm looking at it. I don't notice anything unusual about it. Then they slow it down; I still don't notice. It takes me a while sometimes -- you know, go figure. It took me several viewings to notice the 'rat.'"
• Advertising | Richard Berke | George W. Bush | Campaign 2000 | Campaign 2004 | ILIE | NBC | Subliminal
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org