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On Monday, The New York Times broke a story suggesting that Bush administration war planners failed to secure an enormous stockpile of explosives in post-Saddam Iraq. The story was immediately consumed in the campaign inferno, and the candidates spent their final days on the stump trading accusations, even as the details of the story continued to shift under them. Brooke reviews the coverage with Talking Points Memo mastermind Josh Marshall.
An article in this week's New Republic lays out a four-fold endgame strategy by the Bush campaign. Phase one: go on attack. Phase two: roll back time to before 9-11. Phase three: soften the president's image. And phase four: KILL THE MESSENGER. The article's author, Ryan Lizza, tells Bob how the Bush/Cheney campaign is updating a tried and true tactic.
While it's unclear how many undecided voters were swayed by the presidential debates, the three duels do seem to have set the tone for media coverage in recent weeks. A new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in early October, 59% of mainstream news stories about Bush were negative in tone. Only 25% of Kerry stories, in contrast, were negative. Brooke talks with PEJ director Tom Rosenstiel about judgemental campaign journalism current and past.
Try as they might, political journalists just can't seem to get past the horse race. There's been just as much (if not more) tactical coverage this year as ever. But there is one bright spot this time around, and that's the proliferation of fact-checking. Brooks Jackson, founder of factcheck.org, joins Bob to discuss whether the truth-squadding has at all diminished the volume of lies generated in Campaign '04.
As we've all seen, voters in those all-important states are being swamped by ads and canvassing in a last ditch attempt to close the sale. In one of the more novel tactics, the Bush campaign has taken to sponsoring local radio traffic reports. In many swing-state markets, listeners can now tune in for updates on their commute, courtesy of Bush-Cheney '04. OTM's Paul Ingles reports from New Mexico.
On Tuesday, the networks will rely on a new apparatus for determining poll results. It's called the National Election Pool, and it has risen from the ashes of the Voter News Service, which led the networks to call Florida for Gore in 2000. The NEP will be doing exit polling, while the Associated Press will be responsible for the actual vote count. But both sets of numbers were flawed four years ago. Bob talks with Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Jonathan Storm about the possibility of another long night.
Halloween arrives this weekend, even though for about half the country, this year's Fright Night will occur the following Tuesday. But until the mid-seventies, spookiness was delivered not only via the network news, but also by locally produced late-night TV. OTM's Rex Doane looks back on the genre of horror shows with hosts like Jeepers Creepers, Sir Graves Ghastly and Dr. Shock.
Highlights from Past ShowsSince the days of President Jimmy Carter, incumbent presidents angling for another term have had a 50 percent success rate. Not so with candidates further down the ballot. For Congress members, re-election has increasingly become as sure a thing as death and taxes. WNYC's Bob Hennelly reports from New Jersey on the ways media coverage and redistricting have stacked the deck against challengers.
Throughout the last few weeks of hotly-contested presidential debates, a quieter debate has centered on the media's role in covering the stage shows. Slowly but surely, journalists have started checking the candidates' claims against the facts. But are all misrepresentations born equal? A recent internal memo at ABC News urged staffers not to "reflexively and artificially hold both sides 'equally' accountable when the facts don't warrant that." Conservatives saw the memo as proof of liberal media bias, but others, like Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum, took the advice to heart. Drum and Bob discuss the measure of mistruth.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
