As pellets of rain tapped against the windows of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy Saturday afternoon, four renowned print and broadcast journalists gathered to discuss the biggest news story of the past year: campaign finance reform.
The veteran reporters-Judy Woodruff, Al Hunt, Susan Tiftt and Alex Jones-explained why they think stories pertaining to campaign finance reform are newsworthy, and assessed their respective media organizations' coverage of the issue to date.
Woodruff, co-anchor of CNN's Inside Politics and WorldView, said the issue of campaign finance should continue to pervade the news because-despite his pre-election assertions to the contrary-President Bill Clinton has not only failed to reform the current lax laws, but has also blatantly used them to his advantage.
"It's unlikely, I think, that Dole could keep up with the audacity of the Clinton campaign," Woodruff said, addressing the common notion that members of both political parties violated current regulations. "The Clinton campaign was grasping for every dollar it could get."
A current University trustee and alumna, Woodruff said the amount of money involved with the scandals "stunned" her and her colleagues.
Jones, former media reporter of The New York Times and Tiftt's husband, delineated four tracks of the campaign finance story that are currently in the news: the Lincoln bedroom scandal, the China connection, the role of money in the electoral process and the prevalence of "soft money" and its tendency to induce corruption.
All four panelists who took part in the 12th annual John Fisher Zeidman Memorial Colloquium on Communications agreed, however, that soft money allows candidates to sidestep the current lax regulations that govern campaign finance.
"Of course, we cover what's illegal," said Hunt, executive Washington editor of The Wall Street Journal and Woodruff's husband, "but the real story here is what's legal."
Campaign finance corruption, he added, has infiltrated not only both parties, but also all sectors of government.
"Congress... to suggest that they're any better is ludicrous," said Hunt, who has been writing about campaign finance since 1973, the height of the Watergate scandal.
"The thread has come loose from the Democratic ball of yarn, and that's what the press is pulling on right now," said Woodruff, but agreed that both Republicans and Democrats have violated the law.
Countering media critics' claims that the press has exaggerated both the scope and import of campaign finance infractions, Hunt said he believes media coverage has not been extensive enough. "If money is as pervasive as it is, why do we only write about it periodically?" asked Hunt, who said that as late as February 1997 there were at least a couple of Washington fund-raisers every week.
Highlighting one way in which the media's coverage of this phenomenon could be more comprehensive, Woodruff said the press should focus on the history of campaign finance laws. "The information is just coming out in droves," she said, "and we can hardly keep from putting it on our front pages and in our newscasts."
Tiftt-a University alumna and former national writer and associate editor of Time magazine who worked for the Federal Election Commission when it was formed during the aftermath of Watergate-attributed episodic coverage to the incremental way in which the media has obtained information during the past year.
"It's not like this big bang, like Watergate, to focus everyone's attention on," Tiftt said, adding that information pertaining to recent campaign finance scandals has trickled in, causing the media to divvy out said information in a similar manner.
Tiftt and Jones-who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for coverage of the collapse of the Bingham family, which owned The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times in Louisville, Ky.-will begin teaching in the spring of 1998, when they are scheduled to complete an exhaustive biography of the Ochs and Sulzberger families, which founded and continue to own The New York Times.
The event, moderated by Ellen Mickiewicz, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism, was made possible by a gift from Philip and Nancy Zeidman, in memory of their son, a former University student who died in 1982 after contracting viral encephalitis while living in China.
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