Controlling the Fourth Estate

THEY COULD be "Boston's kingmakers." Insiders call them the "power-brokers," the "powerful force," the "most powerful actor" in city politics. They are Painstakingly cautious and years to be transparent, yet they are in everyone's mind and everyone's strategy. They are the Boston press, and though they rarely figure in their own stories. they almost certainly had more impact than they care to think about in yesterday's election.

"We seem to have a large impact in this community." said Matthew V. Storin. managing editor of The Boston Globe. "Things we do are magnified. Even the TV stations sometimes cover us more than the candidates. I'm not afraid to admit that at all. We have a big voice."

That voice was all the more compelling in this chaotic campaign. Nine candidates appeared on the ballot: seven were respected political figures. Unless you covered them for a living, or carried a scorecard. the rush to fill the White vacuum was dizzying.

"Reporters have come to me and said, "I don't know what to do. We don't know how to cover this race." says Carolyn Stewart, press secretary for Robert Kiley, who withdrew shortly before the primary. At the Globe, the large field spurred a sense of responsibility as the paper of the record. The Herald sensed an opportunity to be the paper with clout.

The solution. according to Kenneth O. Hartnett, a veteran Boston journalist and a Fellow at the Institute of Politics, is "a certain shorthand the media uses" to divine the action.

Out of the countless "candidates" forums" and campaign stops, the press picks out events in a narrative. A succession of events, controversies and polls narrow the focus of a crowded race. It may be artificial, but it's manna to the journalist who can't remember if he last talked to Flynnigan of Dikearney. Finnegan was the cagey. Irish pol. Flynn, the liberal "goo-goo". King, the leftist. Incidents become symbolic stories that don't connect," not proven patterns but isolated signals between the lines. Thus Finnegan took his desk home from his School Board office: read. he's a plunderer. Larry DiCara let an illegal loan slip in from an aide: He's no manager. Flynn gave out different brochures to Blacks and whites: He's a panderer. Most reporters agree these are petty incidents, but they provide drama and focus to the coverage.

Desks and loans matter." says Storin of the Globe. "They tell us something about a man's values." Wayne Woodlief of the Herald agrees. These incidents take you beyond the candidates' nights, beyond their stands on issues." But, argues Hartnett, "It's a lazy man's way to report. They should follow up. They should go out into the street."

POLLS keep reporters off the streets too. A poll may come with endless hedges about margins of error and standards of accuracy. Nevertheless, it is an irresistibly instant cross-section of the electorate. "The Globe reporters were just salivating for the results of the polls." Stewart says. The magic percentages offer a sense of "momentum" in mid-race. Polls may be superficial; momentum may be an artificial constraint on the democratic process, which after all is not the race but the final tally. But it is something easy and cohesive to report.

Journalists defend the polls. "Sure, they're skewing the race," Woodlief said. "I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. They winnow out the candidates. They give a framework to the competition. At some point we have to look at the probable winners."

Several years ago, after an embarrassing miscall, the Globe decided to stop polling altogether. But the resolve didn't last long. "There's something exciting about the polls that makes a news event." recalls Hartnett, who spent eight years at the Globe. "How good they are is beside the point. This is felling you who's gonna win the Pats game before they play." Sure enough, the polls returned, but fitfully.

In this particular race, one candidate who may have been dearly hurt by the vacillation was Dennis J. Kearney. A first poll commissioned in early August--which the Globe wouldn't publish--showed Kearney a contender at 12 percent. That good news, at that point, "could have made it a four-man race," muses the Herald's Woodlief. But by the time of the Globe's second poll, released September 20. Kearney had slipped into single-figure obscurity.

Why did the polls sneak back? "It's part of politics," Storin says. Or more bluntly, from Woodlief: "Everybody's doing it. We're gonna look like asses if we don't compete."

EDITORIALLY, the Globe's failure to endorse a candidate suggested an equally limited vision. DiCara, Finnegan, Flynn, Kearney and King all have "the experience and intelligence necessary to lead this city capably," their editorial read. they might just as well have said. "Don't vote this year. It doesn't matter." The election is too important for such apathy, but if the Globe can't choose on the basis of its own coverage, how can anybody else?

The Herald endorsed David Finnegan. "The overriding concern is who you think would be best for the city as a whole." Deputy Managing Editor Allen Eisner said of their choice. But according to one participant in the Herald's deliberations, the endorsement was "not just a discussion of who would govern the city best, but who has a reasonable chance to win and who would most benefit the Herald, He said editors asked. "Would he owe us? If we endorsed now, would we have impact. and which candidate would the endorsement help the most?" Why?.

"Newspapers in competition want to be perceived as having clout and impact. The perception of clout might add to readership." That kind of endorsement sounds like reason enough to forget Finnegan. And the Globe. despite admirable restraint, is guilty of a similar small view Clout and influence. playing the percentages, all the pragmatic technicalities of politics have been the obsession of both papers.

WHY CAN'T a paper dig deeper? The Herald's style and format won't allow it. At the Globe, Storin contends, there's no time to investigate everyone, and it's not fair to challenge only some candidates. The Globe is so powerful that a good expose can come off as partisan crusade. The paper's "proper role" is to report each candidate's positions along with telling incidents in the campaign.

There are journalists who see their work as a semi-official responsibility in a democracy, like another branch of government. On the inside too long, they become bureaucrats, watching that everyone meets certain rules of conduct, distributing each candidate's publicity fairly in their pages, pigeon-holing the latest events in their columns.

But, a newspaper is not a bucket to fill, but a shovel to dig with. By seeking convenience, reacting day-to-day. Boston's press ignores critical issues below the surface of the campaign. The city is defining itself. King is the first Black with a shot at the mayoralty in Boston's history. The papers cover endorsements by out-of-town mayors Andrew Young and Harold Washington. They report dutifully when candidates pledge to fight racism. But this is Boston, after all, with its historic racial tensions.

"Personally, I feel almost a squeamishness about getting into what could be a very ugly subject," Woodlief says. "The whole prospect of not reporting white backlash, the seamier side, has been not wanting to throw the first stone. It hasn't been there so far. I don't want to generate it, or even appear to be generating it."

"Everybody's afraid of confronting something so troubling and emotional that they can make it worse." Hartnett agrees. "But it's the biggest issue in Boston."

If Kevin White had run again, unsavory reputation and all, corruption might have been the loudest campaign refrain. But White stepped down, and the other primary candidates, anxious not to alienate his supporters, rarely mentioned this central flaw of city government. The patronage machinery may be one of the biggest prizes of the contest. But the press follows along. No one asks what is future of machine politics--and why so few of the candidates feel the need to run against it. Boston is losing the chance to know itself.

"The dawn of revolution," said Carlos Fuentes in his Commencement address at Harvard last June, "reveals the total history of a community." An election is the ritual revolution of democratic government, a revolution more telling when it follows 16 years of one man's rule. In naming a new leader we reveal what in us that leader represents. For a newspaper that sees itself as another cog in the bureaucracy, it is enough to cover the candidates. It would be more difficult--and much more critical--to stand back and cover the city.