Campaign Compulsion: How the Media Picks the Candidates

by Josh Robinson, Lorna Tychostup and illustrations by Jim Campbell, March 04, 2009

 

As the first primaries of this year’s US election cycle approach, one may be tempted to believe that the time has once again come for members of America’s Democratic Party to select their candidate to run against George Bush in November.

But whatever information the American public receives about the Democratic presidential contenders will be filtered through the mainstream media—a process that focuses attention on the campaigns of the media’s choosing, to the exclusion of other candidates they deem not viable long before voters reach the polling booths.

Already, mainstream media outlets in the US, the owners of which will profit handsomely from the money spent by presidential candidates and their supporters on campaign advertisements, have shown a clear bias in their coverage of the 2004 Democratic primary race. Some campaigns have been given more attention while others have been virtually ignored. And some contenders have had their views distorted to appear more popular.

SORRY FOLKS, DEAN WAS PRO-WAR

A case in point is the recent admission by Howard Dean that he had supported (as did Sen. John Kerry and Rep. Dick Gephardt) the Biden-Lugar resolution allowing Bush to go to war with Iraq. Although Biden-Lugar placed restrictions on Bush, requiring him to “make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that the threat to the United States or allied nations posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program and prohibited ballistic missile program is so grave that the use of force is necessary, notwithstanding the failure of the Security Council to approve a resolution,” it would have allowed him to go to war with Iraq without a vote from Congress.

Dean’s pro-war admission came only after Sen. John Kerry brought it to light. It is no secret that Kerry’s vote for the “blank check” war resolution that passed in Congress fatally damaged his candidacy, while Dean’s highly touted anti-war stance as put forth in TV campaign ads—unquestioned by the media—led him from a seemingly invisible presence among Democratic hopefuls in August to the head of the pack by December.

This example also highlights the financial windfall of campaign advertising, which delivers a huge amount of money to mainstream media owners. During the last presidential election cycle, from January 1999 to September 20, 2000, alone—a period that does not include the last six weeks of the campaign—$342 million was spent on ads, according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. The 2004 campaign is expected to be even costlier. Apparently, if the White House is for sale, media outlets are doing the selling.