Papers couldn't resist Schwarzenegger
Bay Area newspapers favored actor in front-page headlines, even before he became the front-runner. Did attraction to his celebrity bias the race?
By Michael Stoll
Posted November 24, 2003

It wasn't just entertainers Jay Leno and Oprah Winfrey who lavished attention on Arnold Schwarzenegger in his bid to replace Gray Davis as governor of California.

Four major Bay Area newspapers gave Mr. Schwarzenegger far more headlines on their front pages than any other replacement candidate in the recall race, a Grade the News analysis shows.

The imbalance was evident even before Mr. Schwarzenegger became the front-runner.

Percentage of front page photo space and headlines identifying Davis and top recall contenders

The newspapers mentioned Mr. Schwarzenegger in 43% more headlines than Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante between Sept. 1 and Sept. 27 -- the date when published opinion surveys first suggested Mr. Schwarzenegger was leading Mr. Bustamante. The ratio of headlines devoted to Mr. Schwarzenegger versus his rivals understandably skyrocketed once he became the voters' clear favorite.

The extraordinary focus on the actor raises the question of whether the commercial value of a movie star on the front page overpowered one journalistic standard underpinning democracy: balanced and neutral coverage of political campaigns.

In response to the findings, editors at the papers said the unusually compressed nature of the campaign and the appearance of a movie-star candidate made it tough to distinguish celebrity from politics. Some editors said that in retrospect, they might have handled the recall election coverage differently.

The Grade the News study examined headlines and images of the gubernatorial contenders and the incumbent on every front page in the five weeks before Election Day in the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times and Oakland Tribune.

Photography in the newspapers was more balanced, the study found. Mr. Schwarzenegger did not pull ahead of Mr. Bustamante in square inches pictured on the front pages until 11 days preceding the election, when his jump in poll numbers raised the news value of his candidacy. Before that date, Mr. Bustamante edged out Mr. Schwarzenegger by 7%. Mr. Davis got 8% more photo space than Mr. Schwarzenegger in that period.

In the final 11 days of the campaign, however, Mr. Schwarzenegger's image covered nearly as much of the front pages as all other candidates in the race combined. During that time, the actor occupied about 96% more photo space than Mr. Davis and 550% more space than Mr. Bustamante.

During that final stretch, Mr. Schwarzenegger also trounced his rivals in headlines, capturing 31% more than Mr. Davis and 523% more than Mr. Bustamante. With the vote fast approaching, the newspapers seemingly dismissed the idea that Mr. Schwarzenegger's momentum could erode, and focused nearly all their attention on him.

Did coverage amplify celebrity?

A similar study of the early campaign, in which University of California, Berkeley, Professor Bruce Fuller studied the content of articles, likewise pointed to what he called "lopsided" media coverage of Mr. Schwarzenegger.

"Californians were bombarded with messages about Mr. Schwarzenegger's candidacy, cast in positive or negative tones, during the first month of the recall campaign," wrote Prof. Fuller in a paper released last month by his think tank, Policy Analysis for California Education. "Soon thereafter his support rose from 22% to over 40% of those polled."

Some journalism critics have said Mr. Schwarzenegger used the press to get elected as much as the press used his personality to sell papers. Richard C. Wald, the Fred Friendly professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, calls it "the image game."

"Arnold Schwarzenegger became an instant contender for governor of California not because he had policy ideas but because he was an idea -- strength, command, heroism, celebrity," Mr. Wald wrote in the most recent issue of Columbia Journalism Review, in an article titled, "The Triumph of the Image."

Journalists, Mr. Wald wrote, "have to win a public vote of acceptance almost every day in order to stay viable commercially. And that means pleasing the public. We are caught in a dilemma that was a long time in the making: to win attention, we have sought celebrity and sensation."

One argument journalists have put forward regarding the heavy coverage of Mr. Schwarzenegger is that they were reporting on a mystery candidate whose policies needed to be explored. He was an unknown.

Editors at all the papers said they were taken aback by Mr. Schwarzenegger's deft use of non-news media, starting from his candidacy announcement on "The Tonight Show."

"The fact is, we and most others were writing up until 'The Tonight Show' that Arnold was not going to run," said David Satterfield, managing editor of the Mercury News. "When he made that announcement on Leno, it was a bit of a bombshell.

"Schwarzenegger certainly got more attention because of his celebrity, without question," Mr. Satterfield said. "He was a different kind of candidate. However we were very much aware that this was a political race and not a race for the Oscar. We never referred to him as Arnold. It was one of the largest challenges we had going into it."

Trying to rise above the chatter

The Mercury News was perhaps the most methodical of the papers, preparing at least one in-depth profile on each of the major candidates. The paper produced a special pull-out section that included interviews with each of the 135 candidates in the race, and investigated all three top candidates. Mr. Schwarzenegger, the paper said, had abused his visa decades ago to open a business. Mr. Bustamante was tangled up with Indian casino money. Mr. Davis was doing last-minute land deals with campaign donors.

The Contra Costa Times also did admirably by sponsoring the first televised debate among the major candidates. But Mr. Schwarzenegger refused to play by the newspaper's rules, and skipped the event. That action, or lack thereof, itself unleashed another torrent of coverage. "Recall candidates take swipe at Schwarzenegger's absence from first meeting," the Times noted in a headline on Sept. 4.

"We tried to get him to it," said Chris Lopez, managing editor of the Times. "We tried and we tried, and we kept reporting that other candidates had signed up and he had not. And by all accounts it was a worthwhile forum. But he didn't attend and it didn't hurt him at all. He was able to take his campaign and message directly to the electorate."

Beyond the basic civics lessons, the editors said, they had to be prepared for the unpredictable, and Mr. Schwarzenegger provided lots of that. In fact, his expert showmanship caught some journalists by surprise.

"I don't think anybody understood what this election was about," said Jim Brewer, political editor at the Chronicle. "It was more of a circus. If everyone had just ignored him, kind of like Gary Coleman, they would have had to make that kind of a conscious decision. It would have taken more of an effort not to cover him. He was just incredible. He was just doing crazy stuff all over the place."

Part of the burden should fall on the candidates and their campaign staff to perform if they want solid media coverage, Mr. Brewer added. "Bustamante was right on the border of incompetent campaigning. There would be three or four days when he wasn't releasing anything, doing any events. You had to track him down sometimes."

Mario Dianda, editor of the Oakland Tribune, agreed. He compared Mr. Schwarzenegger to H. Ross Perot, the mystery candidate who appeared out of nowhere with a well-financed, unorthodox campaign. Mr. Perot, too, ended up getting newspaper ink far beyond his popularity with the voters, Mr. Dianda said, and rightly so.

"Our responsibility is to be fair," he said, "but it's also to put in what people are talking about."

Smiles suggest papers' politics

Grade the News examined the candidates' facial dispositions in the photos, and whether the headlines could be perceived as positive or negative toward individual candidates.

The newspapers gave Mr. Schwarzenegger more photo space to smile than any other candidate, although he did not lead in grins on a percentage basis. That's because there also were many large pictures of him looking dour, particularly in the day or two after the Los Angeles Times printed a damning story about allegations that he had groped and harassed several women.

Despite his reputation for cheerlessness, Mr. Davis was smiling and otherwise portrayed positively the most out of the top three hopefuls, 66%, compared with 63% for Mr. Schwarzenegger and 61% for Mr. Bustamante.

The study revealed great differences in news selection among the newspapers. Mr. Davis' positive-photo advantage came largely from the Chronicle, which portrayed him with a smile in 96% of his photo space. As did all the newspapers in the study, the Chronicle editorialized against the recall. The Chronicle also did not endorse a replacement.

The Contra Costa Times, in contrast, showed Mr. Davis smiling in 15% of his space. The paper endorsed state Sen. Tom McClintock, whom it pictured smiling 51% of the time, more than any other paper.

In the Mercury News, Mr. Davis was smiling in 69% of his space. The paper did not endorse a replacement.

In the Tribune, Mr. Davis was smiling in 51% of his space, about the same as Mr. Schwarzenegger, whom the paper endorsed.

Other notable differences among the newspapers emerged from the study. The Contra Costa Times never photographed Mr. Schwarzenegger with a frown, whereas nearly half the photo space showing the actor in the Mercury News portrayed him with a negative expression.

Mr. Lopez said he had not noticed that. He did say, "We do a pretty hard edit on photos."

Ron Riesterer, director of photography and photo editor at the Tribune's parent, the Alameda Newspaper Group, said part of the problem was that the newspaper's limited budget precluded sending its own photographers. ANG relied on photos sent by the Associated Press, which Mr. Riesterer said were skewed toward Mr. Schwarzenegger.

One carefully groomed candidate

Anecdotally, it is clear that Mr. Schwarzenegger's engaging physical presence, and the staged events he conducted in the final days of the campaign, helped solidify his active image. In the last days of the campaign, he was photographed repeatedly in action shots throwing T-shirts into crowds, grasping a broom symbolizing a government cleanup and holding a microphone at a town-hall-style meeting. His handlers made sure he had a consistent image -- a white button-down shirt with no tie under a black windbreaker emblazoned with his logo.

Not all of the headlines and photographs of Mr. Schwarzenegger could have been considered good for his campaign, however.

He tried hard with his charismatic poses to present himself in pictures as governor material, but many headlines about him were negative in tone. In fact, there were as many negative headlines as positive ones (47% each) as the papers were reporting the last-minute harassment charges.

Academics disagree about whether photographs or headlines matter more, and whether it's better to get a mention in a headline, even if the tone is negative, than no mention at all.

"This is an under-examined area of the media," said Dennis Dunleavy, an assistant professor of journalism at San Jose State University. "We know that everything about the candidates is photo-ops. The power of pseudo-events is proven. The question is, How does this influence voters?"

Catching readers' attention

Studies have shown that in newspapers, a color photograph is the first thing to attract the attention of readers.

One recent experiment for the Poynter Institute, a journalism foundation in Florida, found that when color ink is used, photographs draw in newspaper readers far more than any other element on the page. In "Eyes on the News," design consultant Mario Garcia used eye-tracking techniques to show that 49% of readers "entered the page" through a color photo. Next were promotional lines above the headlines, at 36%. Only 4% started with the upper right-hand story, traditionally the starting point for important stories in broadsheet-size newspapers.

Whoever was technically leading, what is clear is that newspapers saw Schwarzenegger's candidacy as an exciting development worthy of coverage. What is not clear is whether or how he might have sustained that popularity with the press if it had been a campaign of the normal length -- 160 days, versus the 75 for the recall.

Larry Gerston, a professor of political science at San Jose State University who is finishing a book about the recall election with colleague Terry Christensen, said the compressed time frame of the campaign made voters gravitate to the personalities they knew best.

"Schwarzenegger spent a ton of money hiring the best and the brightest from the Wilson campaign," Mr. Gerston said. "These guys know their stuff. They've been around. They really contributed a rich fabric to the Schwarzenegger cloth."

But he said that he was still unsure whether the press saw its role as following the candidates' movements or exploring who they are.

He asked, "Does the media explain public opinion, or lead it?"

The fine print

Because all newspapers in the study period were analzyed, there was no margin of error in the findings. A second analyst independently examined 10% of the newspapers to check the reliability of the categorizations. Agreement between analysts was 90% or above for all classifications except the valence of photos (smiling, neutral, scowling/anxious/dour) and whether headlines were positive (good news for the candidate), negative (bad news) or neutral. The two analysts agreed on valence of photos and headlines for Schwarzenegger 86% of the time; for Davis 77% of the time and for Bustamante, 80% of the time. Agreement of 80% is the usual standard of acceptibility, therefore exercise caution on the Davis generalizations.

Posted Nov. 24, 2003