J$P Instant Transcript! Larry Sabato on biased coverage at the RNC.

From Special Report with Brit Hume, August 30, 2004:

BRIT HUME: So who are these protesters exactly and what kind of coverage are they getting from most of the media? For answers we turn to Larry Sabato, Director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and a convention observer who had a particularly good view of yesterday's protests here in New York. Larry, welcome.

LARRY SABATO: Thank you, Brit.

HUME: So how is it you came to have so good a view of all these proceedings yesterday?

SABATO: Well, they simply all paraded by my hotel. So it was very convenient. You could watch all the signs, and all the people, and the obnoxious things they did and said.

HUME: When I picked up the New York Times this morning, I read about soccer moms and other nice people, middle class people, people like you and me, who had come to express and protest the President, and express their views in a peaceful way. I read complimentary things said about them by the police authorities in New York. And I thought, what a nice protest. What did you see?

SABATO: I saw a very different protest. I saw lots of obscenities, not just on the banners, but also hurled at almost anybody who looked like they might have been a delegate or somebody connected to the Republican convention. And, you know, I'll tell you Brit, I saw much worse on the other major networks. I watched the coverage. They did something called mainstreaming. They were very careful to pick out a couple of Iraq war veterans, a little old lady who had attended her first convention, and a married couple, a middle-class married couple who had moderate things to say. Now, that may have been 10 or 20% of the protesters but I can guarantee you, having watched a good portion of this demonstration, that was not representative of the demonstration.

HUME: What seems likely to you to happen, based on what you've seen of this coverage of these protests so far, if this gets ugly in the streets at night?

SABATO: The real threat for this convention is that these protesters will end up dominating the story. Now remember, the networks and others have a responsibility to give relatively balanced and equal coverage to the two major parties. What was the coverage on Sunday and Monday of the Democratic convention? Absolutely glowing coverage on every network and the major newspapers. Already we see a major difference. Suppose on Tuesday they do have this Civil Disobedience Day and it turns violent. The Bush people have to worry that their message will be drowned out. What we've seen suggests that the networks really won't cover what's going on inside the convention hall.

HUME: I guess we owe some of the credit or blame for that, depending to how you look at it, belongs to a judge here who would not allow the kind of level of restriction that was imposed on the protesters in Boston. But it's probably also the case that the protesters in Boston were not nearly so numerous.

SABATO: Absolutely. And it's a legitimate story to point out that this is a part of this convention, and the numbers are relatively large, although 250,000 in a city the size of New York, with 5-1 Democratic registration, with the city voting probably 65%, 70% or better against George Bush? I don't think it's a very impressive number.

HUME: And of course it's a number that's in some dispute. Protest organizers were saying a million, some would agree to 500,000, other estimates place the number as low as 120,000. It's very difficult to tell.

SABATO: Sure.

HUME: And nobody does official crowd estimates any more. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, Larry, was some weeks ago in remarks made in Alabama, you, as I recall, said that this race had gotten to a pass, in the aftermath of the Democratic convention, where you thought it would take kind of a Harry Truman-like comeback, come-from-behind miracle for Bush to win the race. Does the race seem to be in a different posture now to you?

SABATO: It has. In fact, I think that may have been Bush's low point. I do think that Bush has been doing better because of the swift boat veterans, but also because people are starting to get to know John Kerry better, and seeing some of his flaws. They didn't see those during the Democratic convention, again because of the extremely positive coverage, which is contrasting already with the coverage of this convention.

HUME: It appears, I've said to others on this program, that I thought that convention speech that Kerry made--I've known him a long time--was the best I had seen him give. It appears not to have gone over well with the public. Why do you think that is?

SABATO: Well, because they were still asking a basic question: Who is John Kerry? And they knew instinctively that John Kerry was not the four months he served in VietNam. That's a piece of it. Where's the last few decades? That's a big part of what he's done--20 years in the United States Senate. They wanted to know who he was and what he did, and they never learned it at the Democratic convention.

HUME: And it appears now that the swift boat veterans, despite somewhat minimal coverage you might say in some of the major news outlets, have made a dent. Are you surprised at the effect that has had?

SABATO: I absolutely am. Although veterans have a special place in the hearts of many Americans. But Brit it's also a tribute to the internet. It's not that television isn't important, or newspapers are no longer important. But people get a lot of their news now from the internet, and you can have a story spread from coast to coast and have a major impact in a matter of hours. And this was an internet story.

HUME: It was for quite a time. We worked it, some other news organizations worked it, the Washington Times, a few others, not many. Does it not, a story have to eventually have to break into some of the main news organizations for it to really have an impact?

SABATO: Absolutely. It has to, but it also has to be true. And there are at least major pieces of this story, like Cambodia, like the first Purple Heart, and like the 1971 testimony to the US Senate by Kerry, that are true.

HUME: All right, Larry Sabato, great to have you. Thanks very much.

Addendum: According to the Associated Press, "CNN plans to have more crews outside of the convention than the network had for the Democrats in Boston".