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Newspaper Positions Itself as Cynical

By Robert WrightPosted Tuesday, July 4, 2000, at 2:30 AM ET

There was a time—it seems like only yesterday—when a presidential candidate could lambaste the drug industry and expect the New York Times to run a headline like, "Presidential Candidate Lambastes Drug Industry." But that was before an arms race in cynicism swept the world of elite newspapers. These days, a presidential candidate can expect to get the headline that appeared on the front page of Saturday's New York Times: "Gore Tries Pitching Himself As Drug Industry Opponent."

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Now, when it comes to cynicism, I take a back seat to no one. If I had a dollar for every snide thing I've written about a politician, I could afford to live on what Slate pays me. But those snide things have appeared as commentary in various avowedly opinionated rags, not as reportage in august newspapers. It seems to me that if you're going to put out a newspaper—especially the newspaper of record—you should have rules governing the cynicism in your headlines. For example: The accompanying story should support the cynicism.

God knows the article in Saturday's Times, written by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, does its best. It says up high that Gore has "cast himself [emphasis added] as a longtime critic" of excessive drug prices. But the article then has to confront an inconvenient fact: Gore is a longtime critic of excessive drug prices. Stolberg herself concedes that Gore's position dates back "to his days as a young Tennessee congressman." So, how does a reporter bent on maintaining the obligatory air of cynicism proceed in the face of this bothersome ideological consistency?

First, make the ideological consistency itself sound vaguely opportunistic. Stolberg's third paragraph begins, "So Mr. Gore is dusting off his Congressional record and past speeches to stake out policies at odds with the manufacturers." Ah, he's a wily one, that Gore—recycling old convictions! And "staking out" policy positions that were already grounded in those convictions!

Second, hint at contradictions without documenting any. "A review of his record, though, and a detailed talk with the vice president make clear that his views are more nuanced than his languages suggests." Imagine—nuance. And in a presidential candidate, no less! But what exactly does "nuance" mean? Does Gore have views or past utterances that contradict anything he has said lately? The article gives no example of any. Instead, we get sentences like this: "And while he argued for greater disclosure of the industry's pricing practices, the vice president allowed that some information probably should remain proprietary." Yep, that's nuance. Book him, Dano.

The indictment also includes this point: "And some of the same drug makers that Mr. Gore now criticizes have hired his friends and advisers to represent them as lobbyists." So what was Gore supposed to do? Have these friends killed? Couldn't a reporter just as logically look at these facts and laud Gore for resisting the pressure of his lobbyist friends?

And, finally: "Mr. Gore has also been a strong supporter of the biotechnology industry, which through collaborations and mergers is becoming part of the prescription-drug business." Yes, a man truly qualified to be president would have anticipated these collaborations and mergers and withheld support for biotech research in light of its impending association with evil corporations. (To do anything less is evidence of nuance!) Or, he could have just waited for the biotech companies to be acquired by the big pharmaceuticals and then have them killed along with those friends of his that the pharmaceutical industry also acquired.

You may think I've carefully culled a few weak sentences from a long, generally strong piece. But these sentences appear almost consecutively at the piece's outset. (Read them in context here.) And the rest of the piece never gives us reason to doubt the conviction behind Gore's opening allegation that drug companies are "gouging" consumers. In fact, Gore provides specific examples in which he thinks drug prices are unwarranted (e.g., when the drugs are developed with the help of government subsidy, but the companies get normal patent protection and the taxpayers who supported the research get no piece of the action). All the Times article winds up establishing is that Gore doesn't think all drug pricing is "gouging." Then again, he never said he did.

Do I doubt that political calculation shaped Gore's recent remarks on "gouging"? No. In fact, I don't doubt that political calculation—whether conscious or unconscious—shapes a good part of everyday life on this planet. So much so, in fact, that a newspaper just can't afford to go around speculating about it all the time. ("With Amistad, Spielberg Aims To Burnish Liberal Credentials.") The responsible thing to do, it seems to me, is for newspapers to save their cynicism for cases in which people are manifestly hypocritical, doing or saying things that are clearly at odds with what they've done or said in the past. If Gore's record on drug prices contains such examples, the Times didn't find them.

By the way, if you turn to the jump page, you'll find—right there under the jump head "Gore Promotes Himself as Industry Opponent"—that Gore champions a far-reaching Medicare prescription drug benefit for senior citizens. Oops—I mean "Gore is positioning himself as a champion of a far-reaching Medicare prescription drug benefit for senior citizens." Pardon my uncool naiveté.

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Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the editor in chief of Bloggingheads.tv and the author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and, most recently, The Evolution of God.

Photograph of Al Gore on Slate's Table of Contents by John Sommers II/Reuters.

COMMENTS

Reader Response from The Fray:

It is impossible to read a story on Gore by Katharine Seelye (the reporter who writes the the majority of the Gore stories for the Times) without coming across an endless series of words like "seems," "appears," and "attempted." Last week, she described Gore "overzealously" raising campaign funds! Why is Gore overzealous and the record-setting Bush organization not? Bush "repositions himself" while Gore "reinvents himself."

--Mickey Finn

(To reply, click here.)

The trouble with this sort of reportage is that it overlooks the degree to which a candidate's speeches are speech acts, things said in a particular context with the goal of inducing a particular response in others. At its theoretical simplest, the desired response is a vote for the candidate--but in today's political climate, the speech act content of a stump speech or press conference is much more complicated. The news media literally does mediate between the candidates and the voting public, especially in the presidential election. Campaigns craft images of themselves for the press, images which will be filtered, edited, transmuted on their way to the viewing and reading public. And if the campaigns are appropriately on the ball, the content of those transmuted images will align with the speech acts the campaign would actually like the public to see. Succinct sound bites have a better chance of making the evening news; print coverage of a candidate tends to spike when they announce "major policy initiatives" and the like. Negative campaigning isn't always so much an attempt to directly tell voters mean things about the other guy as it is an attempt to interfere with the other campaign's own message transmission.

The trouble here is that the Times is recognizing that political speech will be mediated, while completely ignoring the mediator. "Who is he trying to fool?" asks the Times, boldly stepping in to point out the "artificiality" of Gore's position, as though, had the Times not intervened, Gore would have successfully fooled the American public. In fact, had the Times not intervened, the American public wouldn't have heard about Gore's attitudes on drug prices one way or the other. The press, in trying to decode candidates' messages without acknowledging that the press itself is the intended recipient of those messages, isn't making things better. The result is not the canceling-out of spin, but the addition of an additional, self-reflective layer, so that it becomes increasingly hard to pull even one coherent message out of the tangle. And to the extent that political campaigns start trying to repitch their messages to successfully pass through this layer of press corps cynicism, things are only going to get worse.

Irony alone is not necessarily a bad thing; clear-eyed ironic detachment is often an important perspective. But to be cynical about one element of an interlinked process while leaving the rest apart from examination--this cheap cynicism too often has the effect of making the whole more worth being cynical about.

--James Grimmelmann

(To reply, click here.)

To James Grimmelmann:
I think another way of saying it is that the readers are capable of coming to their own conclusions and of understanding pandering when they see it; but when the Times takes it upon itself to announce conclusions and interpretations in advance, it makes it (as you say) impossible to see through all the spin to the core truth of what actually transpired. If the Times so adamantly wants to deconstruct political speech, save it for the ed page!

It's Sheryl's job to report the hard facts and our job to say, "A-ha! Gore is a lying SOB!" But she's neglecting her job because our job is more fun. That's not good. We can't assess politicians if our information is not accurate and unbiased, but the NYT lately seems more like the National Enquirer, and Sheryl and her editors are leading the way.

--Nigel Pistov

(To reply, click here.)

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