Last Thursday marked a homecoming of sorts for Stephen Labaton (LA '83), legal affairs correspondent for The New York Times. An editor of The Observer during his undergraduate days, Labaton returned to campus for the third time in four years to share his political expertise with students in a talk entitled "Election 2000: A View from the New York Times." He also guest lectured in two classes.
Stating that the job of a news organization is to travel the country and gauge public opinion about pressing issues, Labaton's lecture took on a question and answer format rather than that of a formal lecture. He responded to various election-related questions posed by the crowd of 30 students, faculty members, and staff.
One of his main themes was the surprising inaccuracy of political pundits' predictions surrounding the 2000 campaign, though he also addressed the unanticipated legal aspects of the ongoing vote count.
"Gore was supposed to be invincible, he was supposed to trounce Bush," Labaton said. "The last thing that anyone wanted was the involvement of the courts - but they've proven to be the most responsible parties in this whole situation."
Analysts also predicted that Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan would pose a major threat to Republican candidate George W. Bush during the primaries. However, ballot returns indicated that the former GOP stalwart had almost no impact on the election's outcome.
Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, although largely ignored during the primary season, did succeed in attracting a significant portion of the Democratic vote in key regions.
In light of the fact that his visit to Tufts was originally scheduled to take place before Election Day, Labaton joked that he preferred giving the talk after being able to see the outcome of the presidential campaign.
"This has proven that journalists are much better writing about what's happened in the past than pundits are [at] predicting what will happen in the future," he quipped.
After highlighting the areas where analysts had been proven wrong, Labaton went on to say that analysts had correctly anticipated that the election would illustrate a deep national divide - a populace more concerned about character than about issues.
"Battles were so fierce because there was so little to fight about, [a reason for the] regional and geographical divide," he said. "Since there were no hotly contested issues, [the election] is about the man. It was the style of the candidates in the debates rather than substance."
"Before this year, when else did you see presidential contenders on Letterman and Leno...? More than ever before, candidates are being marketed as products, as packages."
Regarding the Times' coverage of the campaign, several attendees inquired about their perceptions of uncritical reporting of Governor Bush's personal life, a history of drug and alcohol abuse. Also criticized was the comparably little coverage of Bush's 1976 DUI charge.
Labaton explained that most of the country assumed that Bush had had a wild past and regarded this as less important than his present character. Similarly, he said that his news organization does not aim to run sensationalist, damaging stories, particularly those that surface very close to the date of the election. Labaton claimed that he received damaging rumors about the candidate on a daily basis during the campaign but disregarded them as unsubstantiated and not newsworthy.
Regarding television networks' election night coverage, Labaton spoke about the Voter News Service (VNS), a polling service serving the bulk of TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. According to Labaton, despite the media's dependence on VNS's exit polls in predicting election outcomes, these statistics have proven notoriously unreliable in several states, including Florida.
Given the embarrassment experienced by networks after they recalled projections in various states, as well as the outcome of the election as a whole, one student asked if this was the end of the media's heavy dependence on VNS. According to Labaton, whose own organization printed 100,000 papers prematurely declaring Bush the winner, those serviced by VNS are reviewing its methods and data but will continue their usage of the polling service in the future.
A Times reporter since 1987 after his graduation from Duke law school, the Tufts alumnus has worked out of the paper's Washington, D.C. bureau for the past ten years.
