Several recent media reports have addressed the role post-debate spin played in the 2000 presidential campaign. On September 29, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz recalled how Republicans succeeded in shifting the media's focus after the first debate; one day before, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted that “after a few days, Mr. Bush's defeat in the debate had been spun into a victory”; and on September 26, TIME magazine correspondents Karen Tumulty and John F. Dickerson wrote: “It wasn't until a day or two after the first debate in 2000 that the analysis turned to Gore's exaggerated claims and his patronizing sighs. ... A study by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center found nonviewers' opinions of Gore eroding as the coverage of his manner grew more negative.”

Evidence of the shift in coverage was abundant. The day after the first 2000 debate, Hardball host Chris Matthews declared that “I thought he [Gore] cleaned the other guy's clock, and I said so last night, and all four national polls agreed with that,” according to a September 29 American Prospect Online article; yet one week later, Matthews replayed footage of Gore's facial expressions and said: “You got to wonder about that facial manipulation. It's so, I don't know, condescending, like he's a teacher talking to the slowest first-graders.” Similarly, while The New York Times initially portrayed the first debate as a draw, in the eight days following the debate, four Times news articles, two columns, and one editorial discussed Gore's debate “sighs.” On October 11, 2000, just before the second debate, the Times asserted: “Now, the tables have turned. ... [I]t is Mr. Gore who faces the most scrutiny.”

Such a dramatic shift in coverage signaled the success Republicans had in the media in spinning the first debate to their advantage. Rather than focus on the issues, journalists instead opted to discuss what former New York Times correspondent and National Annenberg Election Survey political director Adam Clymer called “sizzle,” or “descriptions of candidates' manners and costumes.” In a September 27 Times op-ed piece, Clymer observed: “The press in recent years has spilled a lot more important ink over debate style than substance, with dutiful fact-checking relegated to inside pages.”

Will that trend continue this year?

It doesn't have to. Should the media avoid the trap of disingenuous labeling so successfully perpetrated by conservatives, it will recognize that terms like “flip-flopper” that have been applied to Kerry could just as easily, according to The Washington Post and many others, be applied to Bush. As the Post pointed out in a September 23 article, titled "Despite Bush Flip-Flops, Kerry Gets Label," Bush has reversed his position on many important issues, from free trade to the Department of Homeland Security to same-sex marriage. MMFA has also documented numerous examples of such reversals, most of which have gone largely unreported by the media (here, here, here, here, here and here).

Iraq is no exception. A September 29 San Francisco Chronicle news analysis article reported that “there is much in the public record to suggest that Bush's words on Iraq have evolved -- or, in the parlance his campaign often uses to describe Kerry, flip-flopped.” In contrast, Kerry's position on the war in Iraq -- which the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign has spun as inconsistent -- has recently been reviewed in detail in newspaper articles, as well as by Annenberg Political Fact Check. Their conclusions are unanimous: Kerry hasn't changed his position. On September 23, a separate San Francisco Chronicle news analysis article found that “an examination of Kerry's words ... does not support the accusation” that he has changed his position on Iraq. In another news analysis piece, Knight Ridder's Thomas Fitzgerald also reviewed Kerry's statements and concluded: “Kerry's position on Iraq for the past two years has been consistent and defensible.”

Paul Waldman, editor-in-chief of the online magazine Gadflyer.com, pointed out on September 28 that Karl Rove, Bush's chief political aide, has already begun to lay the groundwork for the Republican post-debate media blitz. Waldman explained how a September 28 Boston Globe article reporting that Rove suggested that “the [Bush-Cheney] campaign expects Kerry to come out 'flailing' at the president” actually reveals a deeper strategy; “Rove uses the word 'flailing' to describe potential Kerry attacks during the debate,” Waldman wrote, “in the hopes that reporters will see any criticism Kerry makes as desperate and ineffective, then write their post-debate stories that way.”

The media is on notice of what Rove expects of it. As Media Matters for America has noted, some in the media have already capitulated to Republican efforts to lower expectations for Bush in the 2004 debate or to raise the stakes for Senator John Kerry. When the debate ends, those efforts will continue; the question now is whether the media will be able to rise above the mistakes of 2000, to look past the Republican spin in favor of an objective post-debate analysis. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asked on September 28: “Will the press play Karl Rove's game by ... confusing political coverage with drama criticism, or will it do its job and check the candidates' facts?”