Kucinich's primary concern: the media
Dennis Kucinich was only about a minute into his remarks at Brookline High School yesterday when the M-word surfaced. In describing the dynamic behind his long-shot presidential bid, Kucinich told the assemblage: "I understood I had to challenge the White House, people in my own party, and the media."
Ideologically positioned on the left side of the thinning ranks of Democratic hopefuls, Kucinich made his appearance in Brookline yesterday on the heels of his best primary showing to date -- a strong second-place finish in Hawaii -- and was part of a whirlwind tour of Massachusetts that took him from Smith College to Harvard. While Kucinich is a harsh critic of the Iraq war and of Bush's economic policies, his campaign may be best known for its energetic attacks on what he calls "the corporate media."
"If corporations pursue their own narrow profit interests as a natural function, why wouldn't the media in covering campaigns?" he said in an interview with the Globe yesterday. "I don't see this as a conspiracy. I don't see it as unnatural." But he does see it as wrong.
For much of his campaign, Kucinich has complained that news outlets arbitrarily and prematurely winnow the field into front-runners and Don Quixotes. That effort then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the lack of media attention hampers the lesser-known candidates.
In November, Kucinich issued a press release 27 minutes into a CNN debate at Faneuil Hall stating that John Kerry had already received two questions while some others had received none. That disparity, he said, "violates the stated rules of the forum." At a New Hampshire debate in December, Kucinich rebuked ABC's "Nightline" anchor and debate moderator, Ted Koppel, for suggesting he might have to pull out of the race. The next day, when ABC redeployed staff who had been traveling with Kucinich, Al Sharpton, and Carol Moseley Braun, Kucinich reacted by saying the network has "proven my point, which is the media, and now specifically ABC, is now trying to set the agenda for this election."
Kucinich has also endorsed proposals to reform the journalism world, including mandating free air time to candidates, breaking up big media conglomerates, and expanding funding for public broadcasting outlets. His campaign website tells supporters how to be part of a "media response team," and encourages them to write letters when press coverage "excludes Rep. Kucinich or labels him a hopeless longshot."
Kucinich's targeting of the media has raised the chicken-and-egg question in political journalism: Does the amount of coverage a candidate attracts help determine how well the campaign does? Or does the health of the campaign determine how much coverage the candidate attracts? (For the record, the Factiva Media Visibility Index, which tracks the number of mentions each Democratic presidential candidate gets in 455 print outlets, found that in the week that ended Sunday, Kerry generated almost six times as many "media mentions" as Kucinich -- 2,386 to 414.)
"I'm not terribly sympathetic," said Alex Jones, director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. "I think it's been demonstrated you can be an obscure guy [and attract headlines], but you've got to catch fire. . . . It's easy for the candidate to blame the media for not giving them attention."
Kucinich himself has been in the business. In the 1960s, he worked as a copy boy for The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer and as a proofreader and fact checker at The Wall Street Journal. He set his sights on the police beat at The Plain Dealer but didn't get the job since he had launched a bid for the City Council.
"I do not view the media as a monolith," he said. "I know there are people . . . who want to do the right thing [and] others want to use their influence to achieve a certain outcome. I understand where that's coming from."
But he also can't resist returning to a familiar theme. "I also know if I had a fraction of the coverage these other candidates have had," he said, "I'd be running away with the nomination."
