Out of Order

If you are unhappy about press coverage for a Presidential candidate you are supporting, you will love this book. The author offers detailed examples from both daily press coverage and scholarly articles and books as to how the media is harming American democracy by trivializing the campaigns and obscuring the messages the candidates are trying to get out. He thinks all major party candidates are poorly covered, and he unhappily blames the media for Ross Perot's strong 1992 showing. The author blames the McGovern-Fraser Commission of 1969-1970 for empowering the press to play a major political role under the guise of opening up the system to the voters and taking control away from party bosses. He believes the party bosses produced far better candidates and Presidents--Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson--than did the voters. This reviewer certainly agrees that the boldness of Presidential leadership has become greatly attenuated in the modern era. The author blames the media for relentless negative coverage which demeans government and the Presidency in the eyes of the people, and thus makes governing effectively extremely difficult. The greater the exposure to media coverage, the more negative toward the candidates the voters feel. The media, he says, is a "miscast institution" in the Presidential primary process. They are concerned with what is new and newsworthy, and not what is significant over the long run. The voters are much more concerned with issues of long-range significance than the media is, he argues. A position paper on a major issue will perhaps get a day's worth of coverage, while a gaffe by the candidate can last for a week or two or more. The media, he finds, is more about game than governing. The initiatives of candidates to build a broad coalition capable of leading our country is reduced to game elements. We learn of day by day strategical considerations, but do not learn of consistently pursued goals over the length of the candidate's career. The candidate is left with having who he or she is personified by strategical campaign decisions, since the candidate's record and plans for the future are essentially only on the table on those rare occasions--often in new media--where the candidate can get his or her message across without having it distorted by media interpretation. The images of the campaign are all important. Media coverage can create a bandwagon effect, where candidates are backed by voters largely because other voters are backing them. He quotes the Markle Commission analysis of the 1988 Presidential campaign: "Viewers and readers are implicitly invited to assume that the strategic political game is a worthy and possibly a sufficent test of suitablity for office, and that the shrewdest candidate with the most effective campaign both wins and deserves the Presidency for that reason alone." The author's conclusion about campaign imagery states tha

This book is a must-read for any student of the media or politics. Thomas Patterson writes a terrific critique of the role the media has played in corrupting politics - particularly the political election process - arguing persuasively that things are now "out of order." Patterson provides numerous examples of how the media has negatively impacted elections. Some of these are: 1. Articles about campaigns focus on the "horse race," or the constant jockeying between candidates and their campaigns, rather than on the actual platforms of the candidates or the important issues being discussed. 2. Great emphasis is placed on poll results, and on candidates' rise and fall in the polls, rather than on their stated goals or positions on various issues. 3. Reporters travel around with a candidate for months on end (as the candidate travels around the country or state to meet with voters) and as a result start focusing more on internal problems within the campaign (campaign staffers disagreeing with each other, for example) than on the substance of the candidates' speeches. Minor gaffes, such as a candidate tripping, or a candidate's spouse saying something odd, take on much greater importance in the media than they should. 4. Media "talking heads" become celebrities in their own right and dominate news casts. They may show 30 seconds of a candidate's speech and then spend 5 minutes talking about their spin on the speech. This hardly gives the candidate much opportunity to communicate directly with the voter. We've gotten to the point now where a substantial portion of articles about campaigns tell you everything about the campaigns *except* for the candidates' stances on actual issues. Patterson proposes a number of remedies for this: shorten the nominating primary season to 6 weeks, and make it so that candidates all have the opportunity to communicate with the electorate in some sort of national broadcast. Patterson believes that this will help reduce the impact of the media on the election and give the candidates a more direct communication vehicle with voters. This is a fascinating read, and it has greatly influenced my understanding of the media and how it affects politics. I highly recommend it.

Thomas Patterson's sweeping indictment of the media is especially relevant this election year. The press is once again fulfilling Patterson's worst predictions of its behavior and making it easy to agree with his thesis that the media is failing its duties and harming our political process.Patterson makes many points, but his central ones are below, and it's easy to find supporting examples from the 2000 campaign cycle:1. The press sees the election as a game, not a democratic process. Its news stories are focused on the candidates' strategy, not their views, and makes the candidates look shallow and pandering as a result.2. The tone of the news is generally negative. Candidates are relentlessly criticized and negative stories are much more frequent than positive ones.3. The press focuses far too much on gaffes and trivialities. In the 2000 campaign, Bush's RATS ad and Gore's simple misstatements have resulted in feeding frenzies portraying both candidates as untrustworthy.4. Journalists have become the center of the news. Much of the news has reporters' own interpretations as the main story (In an attempt to bolster his support among elderly voters, Bush/Gore ...), instead of quoting the candidates at length.The inescapable conclusion is that the media is failing to inform the public of the important issues in a presidential campaign and contributes greatly to our general lack of faith in our political system.

The simple thesis which dominates the book "Out of Order" by Thomas J. Patterson is that the media should not play such a powerful role in electing the leader of the free world. All of the ancillary themes found in the book, and they are multitude, serve to highlight this main thesis and what might arguably best be described as Patterson's conviction. The book provides a litany of examples and studies, all of which indicate support for the basic premise that the media are woefully inadequate at informing the voters of their choices during presidential primaries and that the press' perceptions rarely match the concerns of the voters. Further, Patterson believes that the media, by and large through repeated negative and distorted reporting methods during a campaign, can effectively sabotage a politicians' credibility and erode public confidence to the point were the winner's ability to lead effectively is at the very least compromised. In one passage Patterson exerts: "It was not the public but the press who defined the 1992 Democratic race as a choice among the `seven dwarfs,' `Slick Willy,' an inept president, and a paranoid billionaire." In one section of the book, Patterson describes how the demands of the press as a business, conflict with its political role. The media business forces reporters to think of the election process in terms of a narrative and "game schema." Here he is referring to a concept within the larger communications construct known as "framing," whereby the manner in which a news item is portrayed (the presentational aspects), can be as (or more) important as the facts being reported about the story itself. Patterson includes a chart based on a study to illustrate his point that "...the tone of news coverage becomes increasingly negative as the campaign progresses." He uses numerous examples of "one-liners" ("You're no Jack Kennedy," "There you go again," Quayle's Murphy Brown statement, Mondale's use of "where's the beef?" "Read my lips," etc.) and campaign gaffes (Dukakis' tank photo-op, Ford's numerous tripping episodes, Bush in the grocery check-out line, Hart's Donna Rice excursion) by presidential hopefuls to illustrate the often ruthless nature of the press towards candidates. In the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Democratic party made what Patterson would term a big blunder, they passed the McGovern-Fraser reforms; no longer would the party elite make the choice. Henceforth, the rank and file of the party would have a prominent say in the selection process. By allowing the voters to handle this phase of the process, Patterson argues that the party elite indirectly turned a traditional role of the party - nomination of candidates - over to the media, the logical place where the mass electorate would turn for information. The rank and file technically were now the decision makers, but they were largely uninformed. Patterson asserts: "...the press is not a po

This book synthesizes a huge amount of information about media bias and presidential election politics and policies, and pinpoints where voters are amidst this whirlwind: unsure if they should be urging on their favorite racehorse/candidate with oats and sugar, or figuring out which candidate would put forth policies that would have a positive impact on their lives and the nation as a whole. I don't know about you, but during the past two presidential campaigns, I couldn't tell the difference between CNN's "Inside Politics" and ESPN. This book explains why, and what we might do about it.