After Senator Tim Johnson's victory in 1996, his media consultant wrote a piece in the June 1997 edition of Campaigns and Elections magazine under the headline "How to Beat an Incumbent; The Inside Story of the Hard-Fought Johnson vs. Pressler U.S. Senate Race in South Dakota." While discussing how the Johnson campaign fed its opposition research on Pressler to the press, the Johnson media consultant stated the following:
The press ate it up. Our campaign systematically doled out the information piece by piece to reporters in D.C. and South Dakota. The result was a series of damaging articles that accurately depicted a senator who had let his position go to his head and used his office for personal benefit. We used the headlines generated as validators for our ads.
(emphasis added) Yesterday, Argus Leader executive editor Randell Beck published an editorial headlined "We won't be caught in the middle." In it, Beck threatens to "blow the whistle" on any campaign that uses excerpts from the AL in their television ads. He claims to be "drawing a line in the sand."
With all due respect, Mr. Beck would be better off doing something about what he can control rather than what he can't control. In other words, Mr. Beck has the power to force his newspaper to report the news rather than trying to influence public opinion in South Dakota. It is because of the AL's efforts to influence public opinion through straight news stories that Democratic campaign consultants talk about using the headlines generated as validators for their ads.
SDP has documented many of the AL's attempts at influencing public opinion in its regular news stories. One of the more egregious items is a headline generated last November during debate on the energy bill in the U.S. Senate. The headline, on the front page and above the fold, read "Daschle lends clout to energy bill" (Nov. 20, 2003). The headline was a message that fit neatly into Tom Daschle's campaign theme. The temptation to use this headline as a validator in an ad would have been irresistible to the Daschle campaign if the headline had been true. But even the Congressional Quarterly in a recent report regarding the energy bill stated that Daschle "did not aggressively seek more Democratic support and the vote failed." Even the New York Times noted that Daschle did not exercise his "clout." The AL headline was a typically misleading pro-Daschle spin on the facts, not a mere recital of the facts. A factual headline would have read "Daschle to vote for energy bill." Instead, the AL editors, in their eagerness to cast Daschle in a positive light and reinforce his campaign theme, published a headline that simply did not conform with the facts.
Bob Kohn, in his book entitled "Journalistic Fraud" states the following about biased headlines (pg 76):
Biased headlines are important. Most people don't read newspapers, they scan them--that is, they read the headlines, and when a headline piques their interest, they may go on to read the lead sentence of the story. The lead might entice one to read on, but only a small percentage of people who read a headline go on to read the whole article.Thus, the vast majority of people who read newspapers gain their understanding of the news by glancing at the headlines and subheads. To influence the headlines is to influence public opinion.
(Emphasis added) Clearly, Randell Beck should worry more about the things he can control rather than the things he can't control. In his piece, Mr. Beck tells the candidates to "[t]ake your best shot at massaging your message to voters, but leave newspapers out of it." Mr. Beck first needs to get his newspaper out of the business of massaging its message to the voters, and start just reporting the facts. That will go a long way toward fixing the problem of Democratic campaigns using headlines generated in the AL as "validators" for their ads.
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