Persuasion industry and media join in manipulating public.

Judd, Dennis R. ; Hellinger, Daniel

Despite their claims to "neutrality" and "objectivity," the media today are embedded within the cultural and political structures of society to a greater degree than ever before. The ramifications of this are far-reaching. The traditional safeguards provided by the press are endangered.

Yet, no one seems to notice. Media critics continue to reinforce the myth of objectivity by their constant charges of "bias." In a real sense media critics have become part of the problem.

Debates over bias, however, are shallow and uninteresting. It is far more important to understand that over the past 25 years the media have become a full-time partner in a political management industry made up of a complex constellation of institutions and interests: media specialists, public relations and advertising firms, consultants, pollsters, professional campaign managers, fundraisers, reporters, columnists and media corporations.

The media's role in the manipulation and management of opinion has thoroughly eclipsed their historic reporting function. How the media perform this role should become the focus of media analysis.

Approximately since the presidential election of 1968, the manipulation of public opinion and of the electoral process has become a significant growth sector of the American economy. Campaigns and elections constitute an increasingly significant segment of this sector, so much so that it now makes as much sense to treat campaigns and elections as segments of the free-enterprise system as it does to treat them as public-choice or public-policy mechanisms. Campaigns return high profits to their investors in the same way that other markets do. The political management industry sells candidates, access to politicians and public policies.

Within the persuasion industry, campaigns play a specialized but critical role as the mechanisms for securing allegiance and acquiescence from the public; they legitimize the political system. If the New York Stock Exchange is a system of arbitrage to decide stock prices, it may be said that the modern political management industry is an arbitrage system that establishes the rules and structures within which the sellers and buyers of opinion, policy, and access can interact with one another to determine product lines, pricing, and advertising strategies. Profit-making media corporations are nested at the center of this growth industry.

The 1968 Nixon campaign

The persuasion industry began maturing during the 1968 presidential campaign season. As described by Joe McGinniss in his classic work, The Selling of the President, 1968, Richard Nixon's pollsters and media specialists made innovative use of survey and marketing techniques to remedy negative public perceptions about Nixon and to reinforce negative impressions of the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey.

Nixon's campaign pioneered the use of focus groups to supplement the information yielded by polling. By first screening spot ads in front of focus groups, campaign managers were able to find ways to reliably push voters' emotional buttons while avoiding concrete policy proposals. Discovering that focus groups reacted strongly to law-and-order themes, Nixon's media consultants prepared a series of spot ads that framed the campaign (and launched the modern era of professional campaign management). The spot ad, the spiritual parent of MTV, ushered in the era of sound-bite politics.

One of Nixon's ads was composed of a collage of rapid-fire images - a policeman at a call box, a bullet-shattered automobile window, a rifle and switchblade, all interspersed with the faces of anxious Americans. Another ad that showed scenes of urban riots carried a Nixon voice-over calling for "some honest talk about the problems of order."

Another round of technological refinements unfolded in the 1980 and 1984 campaign seasons. It is worth describing those campaigns in some detail because in the intervening years the techniques pioneered then have become routine. Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign relied on polls and focus groups, test marketing, and various public relations techniques already honed by Madison Avenue product advertisers.

Daily canvasses

By using polls and focus groups virtually on a daily basis, Reagan's handlers found that, above all, what the public wanted in a candidate was "sincerity." Though the Reagan team accordingly avoided slick-looking ads as a way to project an image of sincerity, the costs were staggering.

The 1980 campaign witnessed an escalation in both overall campaign and media advertising costs. Reagan's 1980 campaign spent $18,476,000 on television advertising, and $18 million more was spent by "independent" PACs and by the Republican party. Overall, the Reagan campaign machine spent almost twice as much as Gerald Ford had spent in 1976.

In 1984, Reagan's handlers framed their candidate within a vision of a resurgent, optimistic America. There was little need and no desire to raise issues. Day by day the president reiterated a brief litany of themes that had been echoed in previous four years of standard commercial product advertising - national chauvinism (framed as patriotism), militarism (presented as response to aggression) and order (depicted as rugged individualism and adherence to the work ethic).

The campaign was directed by a group of professionals from the advertising industry called the Tuesday Team. The best and the brightest image makers - top executives and copywriters from the most successful firms on Madison Avenue - took paid leaves of absence to work for the Reagan effort. Star ad men on the Tuesday Team included advertising gurus responsible for the Gallo Wine commercials, the Meow Mix singing cat, and Michael Jackson's Pepsi-Cola videos. Pepsi ads inspired an 18-minute video, which premiered at the Republican convention. Pepsi sales had soared after its commercials associated it with images of ordinary, happy people at work and at play. Drawing on this motif, a series of "Morning In America" spots conveyed the same bubbling optimism. In early ads Reagan rarely appeared - a striking contrast to the 1980 strategy, in which ads showed him addressing the audience simply and directly.

Research to guide the media blitz consisted of a $2-million operation to monitor public opinion via a massive telephone survey research program implemented at both the national and state levels. Called "PINS" (Political Information System), the system permitted a simulation of various campaign themes in order that the most effective could be selected. Each morning of the campaign, beginning on June 1, reports were analyzed with as many as 300 tables of data generated by 21 specialists. Armed with reams of data, campaign staff could make day-to-day adjustments. As in 1980, television commercials always were test marketed and shown to focus groups before being cleared for broadcast.

The first step in the PINS system involved the purchase of a list of household names and telephone numbers from a consumer research firm. From this list four "waves" of 250 names were chosen. Telephone interviews of those comprising each wave began in June. In early October, the sample number in each wave was increased to 500, and in the last two weeks it reached 1,000. Toward the end of the campaign, instead of national tracking, the team focused the PINS system on 20 to 25 key states. The effort required to make all this work was astonishing; across the country 520 interviewing stations were used for seven hours each night.

The Reagan team took the use of focus groups to a new level of sophistication. Intensive, in-depth interviews were conducted with more than 50 focus groups to help them compose effective "issue development" messages and to search for the strongest "Unique Selling Proposition" (a phrase already well-known to product marketers). Additionally, the "TRACE copy-testing equipment/methodology" was used to measure audiences' second-by-second responses. In TRACE, people in a focus group register their reactions to what is being said or shown through hand-held devices that measure palm moisture and temperature.

George Bush's 1988 campaign relied on a similar level of technology. His campaign staff conducted a daily national poll supplemented with statewide polls and polls of special interest groups, as the basis for a new campaign message every morning.

The message, whether about crime or taxes, was then packaged into snappy lines and witty phrases; to create the sound bites that are useful for television news. Selected groups of voters that made up the Reagan coalition were assembled in theater like rooms and given hand-held meters to register their positive or negative reactions to various messages.

Democrats catch on

During the 1992 campaign season, Bush's well-oiled campaign machinery fell apart. We can understand Clinton's victory only by appreciating that Democrats had finally caught up with the Republicans in their sophisticated use of media and public relations. Clinton's lead advertising firm, Deutsch Inc. had made a name in the New York metropolitan area by hawking Pontiacs, athletic shoes and furniture.

Bill Clinton was able to situate his campaign within the themes being used that year by the advertising industry. As the economy lurched toward recession in 1990, advertisers shifted their sales pitches to link their products to consumer worries about the future and the need to economize in uncertain times. Insurance and investment companies used spot ads intended to convince potential clients that they could find financial security in troubled times; the communications giant, MCI, ran ads urging businesses to switch (presumably from AT&T) because the economic times demanded change.

It is essential to understand that the political management industry is not dismantled after each election and reassembled anew for the next. Even individual candidates do not have to start from scratch when entering politics, since they can call upon political consulting firms, media specialists, fundraisers, advertising agencies and pollsters with established reputations for winning campaigns.

Like the Pentagon, the political management industry is in a state of constant readiness, and it also has the additional advantage of being always at war. The industry relies on and makes possible a permanent campaign.

The permanent campaign industry

The Reagan White House virtually invented the permanent campaign as it is practiced today. After Reagan's second inauguration, the PINS technique and the "Strongest Unique Selling Proposition" were implemented on a week-to-week basis by a team of presidential advisors called the Blair House Group. Their job, in part, was to position the president against telegenic backdrops symbolizing the themes in his remarks.

Over the course of his eight years in office, Reagan's propaganda team carried out 500 national surveys of 500,000 voters. Monthly surveys of 1,000 to 2,000 interviews each were conducted, much more than the number reported by the leading polling organizations such as Gallup, Yankelovich and Roper and Harris. During 17 periods identified as crises, such as when Libya was bombed, daily "brushfire surveys" of 800 respondents each were done every two days. Profiles of voters in key congressional districts were undertaken so that effective campaigns could be organized to swing public opinion in those districts. Profiles of key celebrities, especially television news anchors, also were maintained (Tom Brokaw's file was 10 pages long).

It was this organization that later helped George Bush turn the tide of public opinion in support of the Gulf War. At the time of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990, polls showed that only 25 percent of the American public regarded the invasion as a problem. Two big public opinion firms, the Wirthlin Group (in charge of Reagan's 1984 campaign) and Hill & Knowlton were charged with the task of changing the public's mind. The campaign was waged using the same techniques and with the intensity of a presidential bid, at a cost of at least $15 million by December, when the Administration decided to go ahead with military action.

Invading the White House

The media strategists and pollsters who helped Bill Clinton win the 1992 election carried the permanent campaign into the White House. Pollster Stanley Greenberg was assigned the task of providing the new president with a system comparable to the PINS system used by Reagan's team.

What is new to the 1990s is the ability of the opposition to also wage a permanent campaign. Behind the leadership of Newt Gingrich, Republican issue positions and image opportunities are well coordinated even though the party does not hold the White House. The contents of the "Contract With America" was decided only after careful polling. Over the next year, Gingrich's major problem will be to hold his troops together in the face of the intense competition for the Republican presidential nomination.

Among other effects, the permanent campaign presided over by the political management industry has succeeded in substituting image for substance. The average sound bite in political commercials shrank from 43 seconds(!) in 1968 to around 10 seconds by 1992. An industry that revolves around instant image-making and manipulation requires ever larger doses of organizational and bureaucratic coordination, a fact made obvious by the multiple faux pas that infected Bush's campaign in 1988 and that have bedeviled the Clinton White House.

Such expertise is becoming ever more abundant. Educational institutions recognize the potential for career opportunities in the political management field. The Graduate School of Political Management at the City University of New York, for example, offers "advanced certificate programs consistent with its stated objectives of providing students with the knowledge and skill base for professional work in political management."

The rise of the political management industry has coincided with the rapid consolidation of media outlets into fewer and fewer hands. Ten corporations earned more than half of all U.S. media revenues in 1984, and the consolidation of the media has proceeded apace since then.

Converting news into entertainment

Corporate ownership has made news programs into modes of entertainment. The 1980s saw massive firings of research staffs and a drastic reduction in documentary reporting. Staff reductions made news organizations more dependent on prepackaged information, coming in the form of photo opportunities, staged news events, and videotapes provided by government officials and public relations firms.

When Walter Cronkite retired in 1981, CBS News turned its news division over to its sports director, Van Gordon Sauter. In 1984, NBC's news operations were placed under the control of Lawrence Grossman, a career advertising man who had made his mark in the entertainment division. The recently proposed merger between ABC and Disney Productions is an appropriate punctuation confirming what has happened to the news.

News-as-entertainment has taken on a quality indistinguishable from political campaigning. A typical network news program is composed of a collage of soundbites overlaid with anchors' voice-overs. Since actual discourse is too complicated and takes too long, the utilization of code language is a necessary adjunct of soundbite news.

Coded language

Perhaps the most consequential example of this is the coded language signifying race. As Thomas and Mary Edsall have shown so well in their book Chain Reaction, the Republican Party led the way in the development of a distinctive American discourse that refers to race without ever mentioning it directly. The coded language denoting race includes such terms as taxes, big government, quotas, reverse discrimination, welfare, and family values. For three decades the Republicans have inserted crime and disorder into the code language on an as needed basis.

As it happens, crime has become the media's favorite code as well. Whereas the Republicans employ codes for partisan advantage, the media employ them because sound-bite journalism absolutely require codes of some kind, and racially coded language carries some of the highest entertainment values in American culture. Thus (mostly inner-city) crime has become the mandatory lead and the principal formula for local television news across the country. The O.J. Simpson trial, though, has become the big breakthrough because it seemlessly weaves news, entertainment, race, and celebrity gossip into a soap opera/morality play.

It is not particularly relevant to assert that the use of a coded language shows media bias. What it reveals, rather, is the degree to which the media help create and sustain the political and cultural environment on which they allegedly report. The media, nevertheless, blunder straight ahead as if nothing had ever happened to compromise their position as an independent set of institutions. When they do so, it serves up sometimes delicious entertainment, and sometimes knee-slapping farce.

Remember the Nightline program of Aug. 1, with Cokie Roberts reporting on the ABC-Disney merger? She led off by interviewing a media critic, who was given the job of pointing out the dangers of the merger. Then she went to the two CEOs. No Saturday Night Live skit could have improved on it when her boss, Thomas Murphy, started by pointing out that the merger would be particularly good for ABC's employees "including, you, Cokie."

As funny as it is, what the Cokie Roberts episode demonstrates is the degree to which the media have become intertwined with corporate America. This is the same corporate America that contributes so much money to political campaigns and the same corporate America that hires lobbyists to influence politicians. Media coverage of campaign finance reform (and many other issues) is exactly equivalent to the Nightline skit. The media surely receive more money from the campaign industry than everyone else combined. They also must derive a large proportion of their revenues from the continuing campaign. In the mid-1990s that is the story that needs to be covered.

The political management industry cannot be dismantled, nor can the media be disentangled from it. Even so, the media are not worse, overall, than they have ever been. Media objectivity was always a myth, and it is a relief to be rid of it. We have to accept the corporate news for the entertainment genre it has become. For actual news as we used to mean it, we can celebrate the rebirth of the partisan press; KDHX and its sibling radio stations elsewhere; The Riverfront Times and its kin; the magazines by the dozen.

Public radio? Yes, but it's so earnest, and the features are so long. We will get our news there, but for entertainment, you can't beat network news.

* Portions of this article are drawn from the authors' book, The Democratic Facade, Wadsworth 1994.

Dennis R. Judd is a professor of political science at University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Daniel Hellinger is a professor of political science at Webster University.