Infotainment is awfully tempting. Especially when it comes to presidential campaigns. Do you ever wonder about the little things that get picked up? The talk about haircuts rather than budget cuts? (Again, we’re not exactly talking about comedy and news here, but the dangerous merging of entertainment and news. So maybe I’m going to change the way I’m framing my own analysis here to reflect that.)

While what they describe is not exactly infotainment, it’s close (it’s shameless archetyping): Vanity Fair has a great piece on what journalism on the Gore 2000 campaign looked like.

The writer, Evgenia Peretz, says that some of the national politics beat reporters fell too easily into the trap of making the race about caricatures while also judging on expectations, not results (i.e. Bush had low expectations and met them while Gore had high expectations and by the way did you hear about Gore and the Internet?).

The media began the coverage of the 2000 election with an inclination not so different from that demonstrated in other recent elections—they were eager for simple, character-driven narratives that would sell papers and get ratings. “Particularly in presidential elections … we in the press tend to deal in caricatures,” says Dan Rather, who was then anchoring for CBS. “Someone draws a caricature, and it’s funny and at least whimsical. And at first you sort of say, ‘Aw shucks, that’s too simple.’ In the course of the campaign, that becomes accepted wisdom.” He notes, “I do not except myself from this criticism.”

Would it be fair, then, to say that maybe Hillary Clinton is susceptible to this kind of attack? (Yes is the answer.) Will she be able to deflect it? Hard to say. Here are two great posts from the NYT’s presidential campaign blog, The Caucus, on the matter:

The first is a conversation between Matt Lauer and President Clinton about Hillary’s personality and how it pertains to the race:

Mr. Lauer: But it seems personality. It doesn’t seem about policy. It doesn’t seem about ideology. It seems that there’s something in her personality people are saying they’re not comfortable with.

Mr. Clinton: Yes, but it’s something they’ve been preconditioned to think about by 17, 16 years of attacks. And the reason I know this is true — I have two pieces of evidence for you. When she ran for re-election in New York, she carried 58 of the 62 counties, 36 of the 40 counties President Bush carried in 2004, with 60 percent of the vote.

The second is about Hillary being unwilling to choose between “change” and “experience,” (which, to be fair, was a Richardson tactic first) as the race between her and Sen. Obama is currently framed in the papes:

Her new spot, which will run in Iowa and New Hampshire, touts her “experience as a change agent,” as a release from the campaign puts it. With lines like “We will change things in this country, because we want it, because we have one candidate who has spent her life fighting for it,” and “If we have the conviction, she has the experience” the message—and contrast with Mr. Obama’s message, is clear.

Two thoughts here: One, for a guy like me, it’s a lot easier to see Hillary Clinton as a sympathetic character when Bill Clinton explains it — with numbers. He’s such a stats guy without sounding too academic. Weird talent. Two, none of this is to say that Hillary is the only candidate who is susceptible to the death-by-framing in the general election. It’s just to say that she’s the most susceptible in the primary season. It doesn’t matter who emerges from either of the two major parties — everybody’s getting pigeonholed. You just have to wonder whether it’s better to fight it, a la Gore and H. Clinton, or to run with the grain, a la Bush.

I’m not sure I’d be able to find a way to make “smart, exaggerating policy wonk” particularly positive in the public eye, but I also don’t think I’d have been able to make “kinda dumb, fratty son of former president” work, either. So maybe it can be done.

One final note: Katherine Seelye, one of the reporters highlighted in the Vanity Fair piece, is now a blogger for that very NYT blog. She didn’t write either of the posts I linked to, though. Just an interesting connection. Here’s a related excerpt from the VF piece:

Building on the narrative established by the Love Story and Internet episodes, Seelye, her critics charge, repeatedly tinged what should have been straight reporting with attitude or hints at Gore’s insincerity. Describing a stump speech in Tennessee, she wrote, “He also made an appeal based on what he described as his hard work for the state—as if a debt were owed in return for years of service.” Writing how he encouraged an audience to get out and vote at the primary, she said, “Vice President Al Gore may have questioned the effects of the internal combustion engine, but not when it comes to transportation to the polls. Today he exhorted a union audience in Knoxville, Iowa, to pile into vans—not cars, but gas-guzzling vans—and haul friends to the Iowa caucuses on January 24.” She would not just say that he was simply fund-raising. “Vice President Al Gore was back to business as usual today—trolling for money,” she wrote. In another piece, he was “ever on the prowl for money.”

OK. Long post over. Burdick out.

Technorati tags: [ al gore | george w. bush | 2000 | election | democrats | republicans | journalism | ethics ]