Abstract
One of the trickiest explanatory problems in social science is accounting for non-occurrences. In media analysis, explaining why what the analyst thinks was a newsworthy topic was neglected, in unskilled hands, easily becomes a querulous argument which shows the critic’s biases more than an enlightening analysis of how the media works. It easily degenerates into a vegetarian critique of the media’s carnivore consensus, or an argument that there ought to be more Marxist perspectives when covering political issues and so forth.
Explaining why some potential presidential scandals are stillborn while others gather great intensity is the difficult task that Robert Entman sets himself in this book. Much of the conventional wisdom pictures the American media as scandal hungry. Works about investigative reporting celebrate, most famously, the determined and courageous work of the Washington Post on Watergate (Downie, 1976; Protess, 1991). In a much more critical vein, commentators such as Larry Sabato (1991) picture the news media as in a feeding frenzy covering scandals. (Sabato’s detailed work is more nuanced than the general propositions at the core of his book.) But whether done with a positive or negative gloss, the picture is fundamentally misleading. As Entman demonstrates, the US media frequently shrink from pursuing contentious stories. Too often ‘the mainstream media are more concerned with minimizing pressure than clarifying truth’ (p. 106).
Entman takes as his key problem ‘why some accusations of misconduct receive high-magnitude attention whereas other charges of similar gravity do not’ (p. 129). To understand why some frames become dominant and others dormant (p. 13), why some scandals gain momentum and others do not, Entman deploys what he calls the cascading network activation model, which emphasizes the complex feedback loops between strategic elites (such as government and opposition party leaders), news organizations and the public – how each responds to the other.
His analysis of the vastly contrasting coverage of apparently similar scandals leads to interesting and pertinent observations. For example, he shows how Dan Quayle, Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1988, and Bill Clinton in 1992 both received very heavy negative coverage of the way they avoided the draft during the Vietnam war, but George W. Bush in 2000 escaped very lightly. The media had very strong evidence of adulterous behavior by several presidential candidates and hopefuls – George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, John Edwards and John McCain. By far the heaviest treatment of sex scandals in their election year was of Bill Clinton. According to Entman, a large part of the reason for this was that there was a woman, Jennifer Flowers, who was publicly accusing Clinton of having an affair with her. Republicans paid her around $100,000 for going public with her accusations (p. 59). Nevertheless, as Entman argues, the media had very strong evidence in several other cases, but had a ‘disinclination to pursue presidential sex scandals unless other forces in the system [promoted] that choice’ (p. 84). John McCain, in particular, was fortunate in not having his history of adulterous affairs exposed, and, in front of journalists who didn’t report it, abused his wife in crude terms that would have severely punctured his presidential prospects if it had become public.
Perhaps the starkest contrast in the book is between the coverage of the pre-presidential accusations of business scandals against Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. As Entman reminds us, the real estate dealings of the Clintons and their business partners in the so-called Whitewater scandal received intense coverage, and led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Republican zealot Kenneth Starr; but after an investigation costing $45 million, no prosecutions or adverse findings against the president’s business deals followed.
In contrast, Entman details the story of George W. Bush, who had been a director of Harken Energy Corporation, holding his shares because of loans from friends of his father. In 1990 Bush sold his shares for $850,000, which was the basis for his personal fortune. He invested it in the Texas Rangers baseball team, and later when the team was sold he made $16 million. Apart from the way family connections eased his path at each point in his business career, when he made the crucial sale in 1990 he was guilty of illegal insider trading. When Bush sold, he and other directors knew of financial problems that would have an adverse effect on the share price when they became public as they did two months later. Entman’s analysis shows that the only time this threatened to receive heavy attention was in mid-2002, when the collapse of Enron made it newsworthy, but it quickly disappeared. There was almost no media follow-up to the ‘smoking gun’ revelation by the Boston Globe that a lawyer had warned Bush it would be illegal to sell when he did. It was also clear that he had not made the proper disclosures and statements to the regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In contrast to Clinton, Bush, despite his far greater guilt, suffered virtually no political damage. The case ‘also supports the theme that media do not eagerly shift themselves into high-scandal gear’ (p. 155).
Indeed in Entman’s book, George W. Bush emerges as the main beneficiary of what he calls ‘blocked scandals’. Entman describes how in 2004, CBS’s Sixty Minutes and its star reporter Dan Rather carried a story about George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard, service which, thanks to personal connections, he undertook to avoid the draft. When he went to begin a course at Harvard, he was obliged to report for duty and serve out his last nine months in the Massachusetts National Guard. Dan Rather produced a memo which claimed that he never bothered to do so, but then conservative bloggers claimed that the memo’s typeface had been produced with more modern technology than existed at the time. Rather and his producer still maintain the documents were genuine, but under immense pressure, CBS disowned them. In any case, Entman states that no documentary evidence of any kind has ever shown that Bush actually did his Massachusetts service. However, the Bush/Guard scandal morphed into the Rather/memo scandal (p. 118), now recalled as ‘Rathergate’ and resulting in the veteran correspondent’s bitter exit from the network.
Entman concludes that part of Bush’s success here and in other scandals was the ferocity of his team’s attacks on the ‘liberal’ media. Are the media afraid of the liberal media charge? The term conservative media is rarely heard, and yet Entman shows quite a bit of evidence that the US media tend to cover Democrat scandals more assiduously than Republican ones. Similarly Entman thinks that ‘Democrats’ skill at manipulating the scandal process also seemed inferior to the GOP’s level of proficiency’ (p. 185).
In the last chapter there is a sensible discussion of normative standards that might bring more consistency and principle in what scandals are deemed to be reportable, although in my view, it is abundantly clear that such principles – especially in the age of Fox News and the Tea Party – will never impact on journalistic or political practice.
Scandals are politically important, and the media’s and the political system’s capacity to expose and root out corrupt practices is a central part of enforcing accountability. But the media’s treatment of scandals is erratic, and there are very few rigorous analytical studies which focus on this erratic role. The exploration of how news media coverage interacts with political processes is perhaps the central issue in political communication, but too many evade it by retreating into methodological safety. This book combines insightful theoretical analysis with interesting empirical research, and is a major contribution to the field.