Rethinking The Fair Game Rules

By Laurence I. Barrett/Washington

The scorecard on the still young 1988 election cycle would have been inconceivable a generation ago: two presidential candidates already dispatched by fatal headlines, several others wounded, a few discouraged from entering. As recently as the 1960s, journalistic convention protected the private lives of politicians except under unusual circumstances. Now any behavior that would earn demerits for a boy scout seems fair game. But is that fair? Last week this trend was prompting some healthy reappraisal that might save campaign '88 from runaway triviality. As James Gannon, editor of the Des Moines Register, puts it: "A lot of respected journalistic guts are saying 'Whoa!' "

Not to the press's proper occupation of examining candidates but to an increasing preoccupation with finding minute character flaws. The event that was giving pause to Gannon and others was the recent addition of marijuana use -- no matter when it occurred -- as a scandale du jour. The tendency to press excess was visible in a little-noted but unforgettable moment on Nov. 7, as all six candidates gathered in Des Moines for the Iowa Democrats' Jefferson- Jackson Day dinner, ready to discuss the issues. That same day Douglas Ginsburg's nomination to the Supreme Court went up in marijuana smoke, and the politicians were forced to hack through thickets of have-you-ever interrogation. Two (Al Gore and Bruce Babbitt) volunteered that they had. When it was Richard Gephardt's turn at the pressroom ritual, he restated his lifelong purity concerning controlled substances. Then a question shouted from the back row: Why didn't you smoke marijuana? If he could not be nailed as a pothead, then he would be tagged a nerd.

It has been a season of unprecedented questioning, which began when Gary Hart was asked in a press conference, "Have you ever committed adultery?" Soon reporters were talking about who else would be asked the A question. And then the M question. Few candidates summoned the nerve to rebel, as Alexander Haig did on a CNN interview when asked why he was "touchy" about the pot issue. "I'm not touchy about it at all," he replied with a Haigian glare. "But if you ask me if I ((used marijuana)), I'm going to tell you it's none of your damn business."

That is exactly the response proposed by the Miami Herald's Tom Fiedler, who was the lead reporter in the stakeout that broke the Gary Hart-Donna Rice story. Last week Fiedler wrote in a column that the "character issue" was now being carried to "absurd" lengths. David Broder of the Washington Post, the paper that delivered the final blow to Hart, also fretted. "It's time to slow down and take another look at what we're doing," Broder wrote, "before more damage is done."

New evidence that readers agree came last week, when the Times Mirror company published the latest installment of its "People, Press & Politics" survey. Two-thirds of the 1,501 Americans polled by the Gallup Organization said journalists had gone "too far" in reporting the Hart-Rice story. The same proportion disapproved of the revelation about the date of Pat Robertson's wedding, which occurred after his first child was conceived. But significant pluralities felt that the press had "acted properly" in reporting Joe Biden's plagiarism as well as the role of Michael Dukakis' campaign staff in Biden's downfall.

Whatever the results, editors and network-news producers can hardly trim their political coverage to the public's comfort level. If the press has greater influence on election campaigns, one reason is that political parties have less clout. When smoke from cigars rather than joints polluted the political ethos, party bosses tended to vet candidates at an early stage. Executive Editor Max Frankel of the New York Times argued at a Barnard College seminar that "there is an overwhelming interest in who these characters are who are nominating themselves and coming at us so fast. The press and television are playing the filtering role that the parties used to play."

Though that has been true for the past four elections, the particular dynamics of 1988 compound the effect. It is a period when no war, recession or other single visceral issue dominates public concerns. Most of the dozen active contenders have had difficulty defining policy niches that set them apart from their competitors. Instead they run essentially on the claim that "I am the best." This cues reporters to use ever more powerful microscopes to study the contention. And since campaigning now starts two years before the first caucus, with no real events in the interim by which to judge the contest, journalists are drawn to examining the horses rather than the horse race.

Washington Attorney Leonard Garment believes reporters are still in thrall to the mentality born during Watergate. The press, along with Congress and the special-prosecutor system, is "caught up in a vast game of 'gotcha!' " he says. "It's how reputations are made." Few journalists like to admit to the dark side of competitive spirit, but it is there. The Register's Gannon observes, "When you see the Herald 'score' on Hart and then a couple of others on Biden, there's a certain amount of feeling along the line of 'I want my big story.' "

Though some editors, like Frankel, contend that the press has "nothing to apologize for" because the "issue is the character and nature of our public officials," others feel anguish about the curdling effect on political debate. One undesirable consequence is that able candidates may pass up the fray. The prospect of intrusive coverage ransacking family history seems to have been a factor in discouraging several "possibles" from becoming "actuals," including New York Governor Mario Cuomo, Ohio Governor Richard Celeste and Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers. In interviews with young potential leaders, the New York Times last week found unease. "If things keep going this way," said Harvard Law School Student Andrea Kramer, "I would think twice before running for office. The standards are impossible."

No hard-and-fast rules could ever gain unanimous backing from individualistic reporters, but the time is at hand for testing predictable, if rough, new boundaries. Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar who analyzes the collision of newsies and pols, thinks a "self-correcting mechanism" is beginning to work, by which journalists will "pick and grope their way" to balance. If so, at least two criteria merit consideration in any new equation: relevance and proportion.

Hart's extracurricular activities, for instance, flouted convention so recklessly that they have to be judged relevant to his fitness for the White House, however much the public might view the story as Peeping Tomism. Further, though he knew that he in particular would get close scrutiny, Hart practiced his high-risk life-style after becoming a serious candidate. The occasional use of pot by Gore and Babbitt years previously, when it was common among young people, may have been a legal infraction. But no one has argued that these offenses say anything at all about their qualifications or character today.

Even if an accusatory story is both relevant and accurate, fairness demands that it be presented with a sense of proportion. Joe Biden's plagiarized material and his inaccurate description of his law-school standing pass the relevance test for a number of reasons, including his claim to high idealism. But the disclosures were so heavy in volume and derisive in tone that they became the defining facts about a candidate who was still little known to most voters. By contrast, when the Wall Street Journal disclosed that the Robertsons married ten weeks before their son was born, the information was contained in two sentences midway through a long profile, where it belonged. Then the Washington Post, which had done a detailed story pointing out other discrepancies in Robertson's bio, used that new fact as the centerpiece of a second front-page piece making much of how he had misled the Post about the wedding date.

Overkill is as unavailing as timidity. The 1987 booby prize in the proportion category goes to the Boston Herald. In covering Dukakis' belated admission that his aides had leaked the anti-Biden tapes, the tabloid devoted 18 articles to the subject, consuming all the news space in the first eleven pages of its Oct. 1 edition. With that degree of excess in the system, the groping toward common sense discerned by Stephen Hess clearly has a way to go.