The Well-Balanced Fight Card

By Thomas Griffith

Reporters sometimes think of themselves as fight promoters, setting one news source against another. In election year 1980 the press has become much more than that. Since no one else seems in charge--state and national chairmen of the two parties count for very little--the nation's news organizations have assumed the role of matchmaker for the campaign, much like an oldtime boxing impresario.

The press weighs and sets the odds (ready with instant polls, so a candidate can't poor-mouth his chances in advance). It reproves any candidate who isn't making his weight. It admonishes a candidate who steps out of line. It tries to see that every contest is evenly matched and proclaims the winner of each round. No fight promoter ever did more. This may not be the press's job, but by default the press has taken it on. This role may be more important than any press bias.

Actually, there's little talk so far about bias. Unlike the days when Nixon and Agnew breathed enmity upon the press, today's candidates are too busy trying to catch its eye. Watch John Connally attempting to prove what an amiable fellow he is by jovially first-naming Mike Wallace all through the 60 Minutes program in which Wallace skillfully cuts him up. The first important dustup over press bias has come from Tom Shales, the Washington Post's usually acute television critic. He accused all three networks of having had "a field day playing Get Teddy." He also discovered an unnamed "veteran political observer" to explain it: "There's been so much garbage about how the press loves the Kennedys in recent years that the reporters feel they all have to establish their neutral credentials by knocking him around." Perhaps some of the boys on the bus have too much time for self-analysis.

Bias certainly doesn't explain the hectoring tone in the press when a candidate doesn't perform up to his potential. It's more like a fight promoter's attempt to ensure a well-balanced card. Thus David S. Broder, contrasting Howard Baker's inept campaign in Maine with "the Howard Baker that Washington knows," concludes censoriously: "The man on the stump in this presidential campaign is a double who invites ridicule." James Reston reproves the voters themselves because John Anderson of Illinois, "a good man in a bad time," doesn't fare better: "Most of the American voters are now out to lunch, and won't be listening until later ... By that time the Andersons are usually eliminated and broke." William Safire admires Kennedy's speechifying more than Kennedy's programs and demands of his own side: "Why can't Republicans make decent speeches?"

The press has now discovered the biggest campaign imbalance of all, the power of the incumbency. There is Carter, gravely attending to affairs of state in the White House while candidates on distant hustings are often caught out by reporters for not being up-to-date on the latest news. Sometimes the candidates even use their ignorance as a defense. Ronald Reagan, for example, urges a bolder foreign policy line than Carter, but when pressed for details, lamely protests that he does "not have all the information a President has at his disposal."

In eras past, the press expected a President to campaign from the Rose Garden for as long as he could get away with it, and left it to rival candidates to smoke him out. In Maine, Kennedy effectively ridiculed Carter for hiding in the White House. The press, in its new role, has taken up Kennedy's argument.

Not that Carter ever escapes press criticism. He has permanent antagonists among such deep-think columnists as Joseph Kraft and George F. Will (who believes Carter "may be the most dangerous President since James Buchanan"). To them, whatever Carter does in foreign policy is apt to be wrong, or if right, too late, or in any case erratic.

The new reportorial criticism of Carter is less concerned about his policies. Columnist Broder recalls that the press got "unshirted hell--and deservedly so" after the 1972 campaign for letting Nixon get away without having to defend his policies in the rough-and-tumble of debate. Broder is not happy with the defense that "our work is to cover a campaign, not to stage it." As Andrew Glass, Washington bureau chief for Cox newspapers, puts it: "We must not let Carter 'Nixonize' us." The smoke-him-out brigade is gaining some influential press volunteers.

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