Millions of Americans are jaded about politics. But nowhere is this sentiment more potent and multi-faceted than in Washington, where the press corps brings an odd mix of malaise and gleeful fascination to political coverage. This is not a healthy concoction and it does not make for great journalism, as was shown recently by the strange story of Ed Rollins at the Sperling breakfast.

Rollins is, or was, a Republican political consultant. The Sperling breakfast is a Washington institution of sorts -- held some 2,600 times over the past twenty-seven years -- in which journalists, hosted by The Christian Science Monitor's Godfrey "Budge" Sperling, gently question figures like Rollins and report the responses they find newsworthy.

At a November 9 Sperling breakfast, Rollins, boasting about how he had just helped win a governorship for New Jersey's Christine Todd Whitman, said the campaign had spent about $ 500,000 to suppress the black vote. He said GOP operatives had made payments to Democratic precinct workers in black areas on condition they sit on their hands on election day. And he said the Whitman campaign had contributed to church charities in return for black ministers keeping mum on the virtues of Democratic incumbent James Florio.

Paying off black clergy? Suppressing the votes of a group that had fought a bitter, protracted struggle to secure the franchise? These were explosive assertions.

How did the reporters react? A person unaccustomed to the ways of Washington might imagine a mad dash as the session broke up, reporters elbowing each other to get through the doors and grab the phones, hell-bent on double-checking Rollins's claims, eager to file big take-outs for the next day's editions.

This was not exactly how things went, however. Of the fourteen to twenty daily newspaper reporters at the breakfast (estimates vary), at least nine did not file on Rollins's suppression remarks that day -- including representatives of the McClatchy newspapers, the St. Petersburg Times, Hearst, Media General, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Steve Berg of the Minneapolis Star Tribune said he didnt realize that Rollins's remarks would create such a sensation. Even the journalist representing Sperling's own Christian Science Monitor reported on an entirely separate topic (ROLLINS SAYS KEY TO NAFTA IS CONGRESS, NOT TV DEBATE). Monitor reporter Linda Feldman said she did not mention the vote suppression comments because she had only fifteen minutes to file and did not have time to clarify various questions raised by the statement. This was a bit like filing a review of Our American Cousin while delaying a report on that little disruption involving Mr. Lincoln.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today each kissed the story off in a couple of paragraphs. The Los Angeles Times buried a truncated 344-word version of a Washington Post account on page A21.

It was later reported that Rollins had made similar statements about vote suppression three days prior to the breakfast -- in conversations with GOP spinmaven Mary Matalin, who co-hosts a CNBC political talk show; semi-retired columnist Rowland Evans; and MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour reporter Margaret Warner. None of the three had seen fit to report Rollins's assertion prior to the breakfast. (Warner told The Washington Post that, after she read the breakfast stories, "In general, though not in every specific, I had the feeling I'd heard it before.")

Reporters who did not leap into the Rollins fray have their rationales. For instance, Gil Klein of Media General, who writes for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, said that he had been assigned to write another piece with a strong local angle.

Even so, it is hard not to conclude that some deeprooted cynicism was behind the lethargic response. According to Webster's New World Dictionaary, being cynical implies "a contemptuous disbelief in human goodness and sincerity." That outlook is prevalent among many of my colleagues, for whom elections are essentially contests in skullduggery and moral outrage an unfamiliar sensation. What-else-is-new cynicism is an old problem -- recall that journalists knew candidate Reagan had been prepped for a campaign debate in 1980 with the help of a purloined Jimmy Carter briefing book but sat on the story for months -- but it may be getting worse.

Torpor was not universal. Some reporters rushed to get Rollins's remarks into print. But with them another form of cynicism was at work, an attitude that might be called cynical gullibility. Political reporters tend to regard campaign operatives as hucksters. But, at the same time, they cannot resist buying some of the hucksters' merchandise. Preoccupied with tactics over substance, they feel compelled to report how the "game" is played from the inside, and this cannot be done without inside sources. Consequently, as Meg Greenfield suggested in a recent column, they lean heavily on the Ed Rollinses of the world, using statements of veteran manipulators even though such statements often have more to do with self-promotion than reality. (Adam Clymer of The New York Times wrote that one explanation of Rollins's breakfast bombshell was that he wanted his remarks to be construed by potential clients as an ad.)

The Rollins affair showed just how dangerous the consultant as news source can be. Reporters took at face value, or something close to it, his account of how he supposedly clinched a close race with vote suppression. Richard Berke's November 10 New York Times piece carried the unqualified headline WHITMAN FUNDS WENT TO CURTAIL BLACK TURNOUT. The article referred, without attribution, to "the effort to discourage black turnout," clearly assuming it had taken place.

Others made similar assumptions: GOP PAID 70 CURB NJ BLACK VOTE (Newsday); . . . CAMPAIGN PAID OFF BLACK MINISTERS (San Francisco Examiner); VICTOR PAID FOR SILENCE FROM BLACK MINISTERS (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). A November 10 Washington Post piece by Thomas Edsall touted Rollins's credibility, saying he "is well known as an unusually forthcoming political operative." To be sure, most of these articles quoted a Whitman spokesman as having no knowledge of any vote-suppression effort, and the Times also quoted a black minister to that effect. But, in the end, these reporters all but accepted Rollins's version.

Unfortunately for them, the "unusually forthright" Rollins immediately began talking out of the other side of his mouth. In the face of angry denials from Whitman and black ministers and denunciations from practically everyone else, he said he had fabricated his story. He insisted it had all been a ruse to demoralize his nemesis, Democratic consultant James Carville, who had worked for Florio. "I spun myself out of control," he wrote in a November 21 op-ed piece in The Washington Post. In that same edition, reporter Edsall acknowledged that "Rollins has revealed a character so captured by the competitiveness and cynicism of political consulting that his sense of obligation to the truth [was] lost."

Rollins had left papers that had carried his original claims in an especially awkward position: whichever Rollins version was true, the other was false; one way or another, they had been had.

Things got even murkier as the days passed. Rollins was required to give a deposition on November 19 in a Democratic party lawsuit seeking to overturn the election. He repeated his claim to have fabricated a story about payoffs. But then, under questioning, he reversed field again, saying he had indeed discussed efforts to strip black votes from Florio with a campaign official, Lonna Hooks, advising her to tell wavering black leaders: "Whatever their favorite charity may be, there are other ways of helping them besides state funding Florio has. . . . But I didn't authorize her to go commit resources." Rollins, it appeared, had unrecanted, at least in part. Oddly enough, The New York Times buried his statement on Hooks in the fourteenth paragraph of a November 21 article, itself buried on page 39, headed ROLLINS GIVES SWORN DENIAL ON VOTE PLAY. It was only after Hooks denied that Rollins had ever mentioned money for charities that Rollins's continued vacillation got the attention it deserved, in a frontage November 22 Times article, making clear to even the casual reader that the alleged vote suppression was no closed matter.

The main thing Rollins accomplished in his multiple contradictions (other than torpedoing his consulting career) was to muddy an issue more thoroughly than anyone had in recent memory. This does not mean that the reporters who heard Rollins's original claim but failed to write about it were in the right.

But it does mean that any political hired gun should be taken more skeptically than Rollins was by most of the journalists who reported his initial remarks.

More thorough reporting was in order before the breakfast stories were filed. The day was young when Rollins finished speaking. There was time to explore, in more depth than most managed to, the questions raised by Rollins's assertion -- to wit: Was there any solid corroborating evidence? (In its absence, skeptical reaction should have been quoted much higher in the stories.) Was Rollins standing by his story as the day wore on? (The New York Times did get back to him late in the day. It found him backpedaling, which should have been a signal that a different story emphasis -- a greater focus on uncertainty and conflicting claims -- was needed. Weren't many New Jersey blacks disillusioned with Florio? If so, would it really be a betrayal if a black minister refrained from singing Florio's praises on the pulpit? Would a campaign actually spend a halfmillion dollars to suppress a vote that seemed to be suppressing itself? (The Times touched on these last three questions in its November 10 piece, but onlyleetingly.)

There was also the moral question: Is it defensible to pay or accept payment for holding down the black vote? This should have been a basic issue in the story, but some reporters gave it short shrift. As one anonymous Sperling breakfaster told Clymer of the Times: "Did we stand up in moral outrage, condemn him, and throw food at him? . . . No, we asked for details on how it was done." The Washington Post's Edsall reported laconically that "the legality of the tactics described by Rollins is uncertain"; The Wall Street Journal said such payments "were legal in New Jersey." And, in a front-page article on November 1O, the Times's Berke blandly termed the alleged vote suppression an "unusual tactical effort," part of a "gray area in campaign ethics."

The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, and other newspapers quoted a spokesman for Florio criticizing any attempt to suppress black votes. But these statements were not played very high in the stories, and were clearly self-serving. They came across as political counterpunches and did not reflect the intensity of outrage, especially among blacks, over the idea of paying money to keep African-Americans from voting. The outrage was waiting to be tapped and came pouring out the next day.

With more sensitivity to the implications of Rollins's statement, with a more strenuous effort to elicit comment, reporters might well have been able to uncork stronger, more detailed condemnations on November 9, giving readers a better sense, right from the start, of the issues and emotions at stake.

Those issues and emotions were aired to some extent in subsequent days.

On the other hand, some of the subsequent reporting and commentary diminished the significance of the alleged New Jersey operation, suggesting it was really little different from the longstanding practice of shelling out "walking-around money" to encourage voting for a candidate. New York Times columnist William Satire reported that he himself, as a 1960 Nixon campaign operative, paid walking-around money to black and ethnic news organs in a bid to purchase "editorial balance," and that Joseph P. Kennedy had paid "contributions" to black ministers to encourage them to get out the vote. Satire drew no clear distinction between inducing people to vote and inducing them not to vote, although the latter seems much worse if one regards voting as a civic virtue.

Another distinction lost in the coverage and commentary, observed Roger Wilkins, a former member of The New York Times editorial board and now professor of American history at George Mason University, was the distinction between suppressing black votes and suppressing white votes, given that blacks, after enslavement and Reconstruction, were deprived of the franchise in the South for close to eighty years. That history made efforts to discourage blacks from voting an especially egregious form of voter manipulation.

On the basis of Rollins's original assertions, the New Jersey Democratic party filed its suit to overturn the election. But it later dropped the effort, saying it would be impossible to prove that vote suppression efforts had altered the outcome. One can only hope that this retreat has not deterred news organizations from investigating vigorously in an effort to solve this New Jersey mystery once and for all.

One can also hope that reporters will take a New Year's resolution to stop celebrating the exploits of political consultants, starting with the 1994 congressional elections. As political scientist William Schneider pointed out on CNN, Washington journalists are cynical about election ploys but revel in them, whereas most other Americans are also cynical but despise the game. Articles on the Great Game of politics may simply increase the alienation of ordinary voters.

Unfortunately, such articles just keep coming. On November 26, for instance, The Washington Post ran a 46-paragraph, 154-line, l,667-word piece on the wedding of Carville and Matalin. It was the very model of cynical insider journalism, simultaneously spoofing and glorifying the two consultants: "They've been called the Romeo and Juliet of politics. And Tracy and Hepburn, Fred and Ginger, Punch and Judy, Lucy and Desi. . . . He's the 'Ragin' Cajun' . . . -- so hot that Republican Ed Rollins said he lied about the New Jersey governor's race just to play head games. . . . She's the street-smart, irreverent Republican self-described 'chick,' who . . . is the front-runner to replace the loose-lipped Rollins as the conservative political commentator on the Today Show. . . ."

Bring on the spike.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe