Print Journalism: Still Alive and Well in Presidential Campaigns

In the winter of 1972, Senator Edmund Muskie, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president that year, held a famous press conference outside the offices of the Manchester Union Leader, then--and now--the largest and most influential newspaper in New Hampshire. The senator was angry over what the owner and editor of the newspaper, William Loeb, had written about Mrs. Muskie. Some reporters noticed tears in Muskie's eyes; others thought it was just snowflakes. Either way, the story was that Muskie had lost his composure. The incident became a metaphor for his campaign, and he went on to lose the nomination that year to George McGovern. The Union Leader put up a plaque on the building saying, "Edmund Muskie cried here."

That story is a reminder of the transformation of media power in presidential politics. The Union Leader, a right-wing newspaper, no longer carries much weight even in the Republican primary; among its recent favorites have been such conspicuous New Hampshire failures as Phil Gramm and Dan Quayle. In Democratic Party politics, the newspaper is all but irrelevant. Instead of courting the Union Leader, as presidential candidates did for years, the first and most important stop for any campaign is WMUR-TV, the most-watched locally produced television station in the state. WMUR is as corporate and nonpartisan as the Union Leader is personal and ideological. What they have in common is that each, in its day, has exercised disproportionate influence over the New Hampshire primary.

It's tempting to see the supplanting of print by TV in New Hampshire as representative of national trends. Television is, unquestionably, more central to American politics than newspapers and magazines, and it has been for some time. The rise of the Internet threatens traditional print media even more.

But the reports of the death of print journalism in presidential politics have been greatly exaggerated. To understand why print remains important requires a working knowledge of what might be called the Great Media Food Chain--the way the hungry beast of media gets fed. Print journalism may be lower down on that food chain than in the past, but it's still an indispensable link. Without it, the rest of the media system wouldn't function.

So much of the Internet's role in politics, for instance, is about newspapers. Say that reporters, campaign operatives, and interested citizens in New Hampshire want to know what's going on in Iowa. They log on to the Des Moines Register Web site to see what star political columnist David Yepsen has to say. In the past, the Register was impossible to get outside of Iowa. If anything, Yepsen is read more now than he was before the Internet because he can be read all over the country. That's true of all of the other reporters and columnists, too. In the past, their work would filter out only through wire-service accounts and secondary citations.

Ironically, this greater audience doesn't necessarily make the print reporters and columnists more influential. Because there are now so many outlets, in so many different forms, no one pundit has the authority that a Walter Lippmann or a James Reston once had. The old media firmament has been fragmented almost beyond recognition.

A second irony is that print reporters and columnists are now simultaneously more recognizable and less famous than they once were. Almost all of the top one hundred or so routinely appear on television. That makes them vaguely familiar to the cable TV viewer. But unless they host their own shows (in which case they are, by definition, more TV hosts than print journalists), they rarely move beyond "vaguely familiar." This is probably for the best. It's bad enough that well-wishers on the campaign trail now sometimes greet TV reporters more excitedly than they do candidates. If that happened to print...