Kelly '76 addresses media's role in politics

While the Republican Party claims to be weary of liberal coverage in the mainstream media, the right wing has done better in harnessing the power of radio and news networks to reach voters, Time magazine Managing Editor Jim Kelly '76 said Monday.

Kelly spoke to a packed Senate Chamber at Whig Hall about objectivity in modern journalism in a lecture titled, "Covering Politics in the World of Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh."

Kelly said, though Time will not support a presidential candidate in this election, there will still be a war of opposing media voices.

"The 2000 election was easier to cover — until the votes came in," he said.

Since then, he said, journalism has been complicated by developments such as well-funded interest groups, partisan news networks and politically slanted documentaries such as "Farenheit 9/11."

Kelly said the emergence of new voices has divided the media into two distinct camps: the "blue truth" and the "red truth," in reference to the colors generally used on election maps to represent Democratic and Republican majorities.

The "blue truth" is epitomized by Dan Rather, he said, whereas the "red truth" believes that Dan Rather represents what is wrong with the media.

On the whole, Kelly said the media clash is "illustrated very well by JibJab," referring to a popular website in which cartoons of the candidates dance and insult each other.

Kelly described the growing role of lay citizens and groups in political coverage, citing the recent release of anti-Kerry commercials by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Kelly said that while the Swift Boat Veterans spent "very little money" on the spot, the national media's drive for objective coverage "forced reporters covering the Swift Boat Veterans to include both pro and con" points of view. The media's attempt at objectivity gave the Veterans' claims a legitimacy they would not have otherwise.

"The Swift Boat Veterans have won, even if [their claim] all turns out to be a hoax," he said.

"The Bush campaign seems better than the Kerry campaign in figuring out how all this works," Kelly said, citing the Republican party's successful use of resources such as direct mail and television news networks.

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He also said conservatives have done better at making use of talk radio, and have started to become a better at using web logs, or blogs.

In contrast, "The Swift Boat stuff stuck to Kerry because he had trouble explaining his position . . . [in] a sound bite."

However Kerry solves his problems, Kelly said, the challenge for Time is to determine how best to cover issues when the overall tone of political coverage is shrill and accusatory.

Kelly insisted Time is a bipartisan magazine, citing polls that show Time subscribers nearly split between Democrats and Republicans — "although liberals have a better renewal rate than conservatives," he added.

But he also said the modern media's volatility has conditioned Americans to look for signs of bias in every news piece they encounter.

He described a recent reader focus group that was shown two alternate "Time" covers: one showing the face of Osama bin Laden with the words "Why Can't We Find Him?" and one showing a photo of Al Gore laughing and talking on the phone.

The focus group criticized the bin Laden cover as anti-Bush because it supposedly mocked the GOP's inability to find bin Laden, he said.

But the group found the same fault in the Gore cover because it thought Gore was happy because Bush had not found bin Laden.

One tactic in this environment, Kelly said, is to comprehensively cover broad issues as well as immediate events. A recent Time issue he was very proud of, he said, examined longstanding cultural rifts and developments in Islam.

Ultimately, he said, living in a JibJab nation makes people hunger for "deeper, longer coverage" of events, he said.