The United States and the 2004 Election

On the evening of October 29, 2004—just a few days before Americans went to the polls in that year’s presidential election—the Qatari-owned broadcaster Al Jazeera aired segments from a videotape of Osama bin Laden. In the film, bin Laden addressed the people of the US and condemned American involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was widely speculated at the time that the release of the video was timed to influence how Americans would vote.

The following day, the speech was reported as “In Video Message, bin Laden Issues Warning to US” (The New York Times), “Bush Wins Boost From Terror Tape” (The Guardian), “Bin Laden, on Tape, Reveals Sept. 11 Motive” (Los Angeles Times) and “Bin Laden Video Threatens America” (BBC).

The events of September 11, 2001, had already ensured that national security would play a central role during the 2004 election. Although the US had not seen a successful attack on its home soil since 9/11, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, revealed a year earlier, were fresh in the minds of American voters, and the specter of Al-Qaeda terrorism loomed over the 2004 primaries and presidential campaign.

This section argues that security and terrorism was the predominant issue throughout the election cycle of 2004. For both media and politicians, it was manifest in two distinct forms: fears of another attack like 9/11 and unease over the war in Iraq. Both President George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry pledged to make America safer. The election focused on persuading voters that each candidate had the most suitable traits and the experience necessary to accomplish this goal.

There emerged a clear pattern in 2004 that voters threw their support behind Bush in light of his hard line on terrorism against a backdrop of external threats. This contradicts the approach of Peres in Israel in 1996, who campaigned on a platform of peace and trade deals with neighboring states—and lost. One examination of terror warnings issued by the US government between February 1 and May 9, 2004, shows statistical evidence that warnings led to an increase in support for Bush. In one mathematical model, each terror warning from the previous week corresponded to a 2.75-point increase in the percentage of Americans expressing approval for Bush. The warnings even had a similar effect on voter evaluation of Bush’s handling of the economy.

The years after 9/11 had seen a gradual and steady erosion of Bush’s poll ratings. For example, the percentage of Americans reporting approval of the president’s job performance climbed from 51 percent in the Gallup poll of September 10, 2001, to 86 percent in the next poll released on September 15.25 In contrast, in the week before the election in 2004, his approval ratings stood at 48 percent. The rising death toll in Iraq was also an anxiety. According to The Lancet, over 100,000 Iraqi civilians—half of them women and children—had died since the war began. By Election Day, around 1,100 US soldiers had been killed in Iraq and 8,500 wounded.

Campaigning was dominated by a focus on the security credentials of Bush and Kerry. Bush had responded to 9/11 with two wars, the opening of a detention facility on Guantanamo Bay,26 the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the PATRIOT Act,27 and the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.28 Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, had voted for the war in Iraq in 2003. But by 2004, he was highly critical of how the war had been executed and accused the President of mismanagement. During the first presidential debate, Kerry said: “And he rushed the war in Iraq without a plan to win the peace. Now, that is not the judgement that a president of the United States ought to make. You don’t take America to war unless you have the plan to win the peace.”29

The election cycle was marked by a renewal of media interest in the so-called “War on Terror.” In the days after the events of 9/11, CNN called the ongoing crisis “America’s New War” and MSNBC described it as “America on Alert.” Fox News, which had already seen considerable gains in its audience share since 9/11, was the first to adopt “War on Terror,” picking up the phrase from the Bush administration.

One study, “Framing the War on Terror: the internalization of policy in the US press,” examining the appearance of “War on Terror” in both USA Today and Associated Press stories, shows that while the occurrence of the phrase dramatically declined throughout 2002, it had significant prominence during the 2004 election. While neither Bush nor Kerry offered majorly conflicting visions for a post-9/11 world, Kerry stressed the administration’s pre and post-war planning failures in Iraq and said he would restore America’s standing by building international coalitions. Bush pledged to continue the course against Al-Qaeda. Kerry, meanwhile, found himself criticized by Bush over his changing stance on Iraq and attacked by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group about his war record in Vietnam.30 In the end, Bush won the election by a margin of 3.5 million votes.31

The election of 2004 had multiple disruptive events. The most significant of these was bin Laden’s video.32  In his speech, bin Laden outlined the failures of the “War on Terror” NS condemned two decades of interventionism in the Middle East and US support for Israel. Issued just four days before polls opened, bin Laden’s video was intended to hold up other recent events like the terrorist bombings in Madrid and violence in Iraq as warnings of what might happen in America.

The effect was immediate: The video raised awareness of Bush’s signature campaign issue of the threat posed to America by terrorism, especially on home soil. Overnight, terrorism command centers throughout America were put on high alert. An initial poll from Newsweek magazine claimed that Bush jumped to a six-point lead as a result of the reaction to bin Laden’s message.33

Coverage of the video differed across the media. The New York Times analyzed the speech; The Washington Post additionally provided a full transcript of the message. Fox News, meanwhile, reminded viewers of Al-Qaeda’s role in the attacks of September 11, 2001, with a more emotional “Bin Laden Claims Responsibility of 9/11.”

“The election became a one issue election about security,” said Sarah Oates, Professor and Senior Scholar at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, in an interview. “In that sense, the election of 2004 stands very much alone. Say what you will about Americans, we are a practical people in that most of our elections are about economics. There was a sense that people were being manipulated into constantly thinking about security.”

A backdrop of terror warnings and the coverage of the bin Laden speech, continued Oates, persuaded many voters to be more sympathetic to Bush’s harder line, despite warnings from some critics that they were accepting the move from an open liberal democracy to a more securitized state. “I think those years deepened the trauma for everyone. There were administrators and bureaucrats who were concerned in that they didn’t want another attack to happen. We were already traumatized by Guantanamo Bay. So we accepted the erosion of our rights as citizens.”

In the same report, one examination of a sample of news during the campaign—ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, CBS’s Evening News with Dan Rather, and NBC’s The Nightly News with Tom Brokaw—43 percent of all news stories were related to the election and 22 percent of them addressed terrorism.34 After Iraq, terrorism was the subject mentioned most often.

Oates’s study, “Comparing the Politics of Fear: The Role of Television News in Election Campaigns in Russia, the United States and Britain,” also shows that despite the frequent appearance of terrorism in news stories, TV channels failed to explain the difference in policy proposals from the candidates. While Bush and Kerry often mentioned terrorism, the candidates held opposing views on a number of issues like the death penalty, abortion, tax cuts, healthcare, and job creation.

The same study also reveals that around half of the news stories in the sample mentioning terrorism included negative statements from both Bush and Kerry. In several instances, Bush criticized his opponent for being too “soft” and lacking a coherent plan. Kerry usually responded with a pledge to “not waver” and “hunt down the terrorists wherever they are.”

“The tenor of the press coverage in 2004 during the campaign was heavily influenced by the administration’s implied message that if you weren’t supporting their approach, you verged on being unpatriotic,” said Philip Seib, co-author of Global Terrorism and New Media: The Post-al Qaeda Generation,35 in an interview. Seib is Professor of Journalism and Public Diplomacy and Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “That period from 2001 to 2004 is marked by the tone taken by Fox News. I think that helped foster the idea of patriotic news coverage.”

“Whenever terrorism is primed, the incumbent does better,” said Jennifer Merolla, author of Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public, in an interview. “There was a concerted effort to put terrorism front and center of the 2004 campaign. Terrorism was the one issue which was a salient factor for voters. I’d describe it as pointing to the pack of wolves in the forest. Anything dealing with national security is a challenge for Democrats. We are seeing the same thing in 2016, where Trump is both assertive and bombastic on security.”

The evidence of an increasingly partisan media was a hallmark of the 2004 race. In one study, “Unbalanced media coverage and the 2004 Presidential election: The New York Times vs. The Washington Times,”36 researchers evaluated 173 news articles, columns, and editorials covering the last two weeks of the election. The New York Times published 96 election articles during this period; The Washington Times printed 77. When analyzed, the Washington Times favored Bush by 64.9 percent, The New York Times tilted favorably towards Kerry 56.3 percent of the time.

Analysis of editorial content from both newspapers shows the main topics were the election and the “War on Terror.” The Washington Times discussed the election in 66.6 percent of its coverage, with 25 percent devoted to the “War on Terror.” In contrast, The New York Times covered the election in 33.3 percent of its coverage, while the “War on Terror” featured in 50 percent of its editorial coverage.

Previous statistical analyses of media partisanship indicate the problem is worsening. Negative commentary regarding the biased agendas of news organizations has been documented since the mid-1960s. A survey released in June 2005 by The Pew Research Center found that 60 percent of Americans viewed news organizations as politically biased, an increase of seven percent from 2003.

The same study also examined the tone of stories placed on the front pages of both newspapers. In the case of The Washington Times, 70 percent of the stories published on the front page, regarding the election, were in favor of Bush. In the case of The New York Times, researchers found that 50 percent of its front-page stories supported Kerry. Both the election and the “War on Terror” were the two most popular topics in the two weeks studied.

In one notable instance, the media spent the better part of a month analyzing the errors contained in a CBS 60 Minutes Wednesday report, broadcast in September 2004, which charged that Bush received favorable treatment from the Texas Air National Guard. The investigation centered around memos from 1972 and 1973, suspected to be inauthentic. While host Dan Rather apologized for the report and CBS defended the story for ten days, coverage lasted weeks. That time could likely have been used more relevantly in many voters’ minds to cover the policies of the campaigns in their closing months.

The same media dissonance is on display during the current election. After terrorist attacks in Nice and Paris, Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized President Obama for being weak in fighting ISIS. Using little more than a Twitter account, Trump has received, according to The New York Times, the equivalent of $1.9 billion in free television coverage. He has spent only $10 million on paid advertising and received 62 percent of all coverage during the Republican race.

TV stations have, for the most part, reacted to Trump’s social media statements with opinionated discussion panels and polls. The candidate’s evolving ban on all Muslims entering the US is a strong case in point. From Time’s “Donald Trump Pushes for Muslim Ban After Orlando Shooting” to the Vox explainer, “Donald Trump’s ‘new’ Muslim ban plan is just as scary as the old one,” each iteration of the policy has been given its due analysis. The consequence of this has been to formalize terrorism as a key election issue as well as to stigmatize a vulnerable American minority.

The media’s focus on terrorism is not warranted by the facts. While future incidents of terrorism remain likely, other forms of violence kill more Americans each year. According to figures from the US Department of Justice and the Council on Foreign Affairs, 11,385 people died in firearm incidents on average annually in the US between 2001 and 2011. In the same period, on average 517 people were killed annually in terrorism-related incidents. Accounting for 2001, the annual average drops to 31.

But Trump’s tactic of creating a media response to his warning of terror attacks has largely proved successful. While his more outlandish accusations—that President Obama created ISIS, for example—have been widely dismissed and mocked, they have still dominated news cycles and forced terrorism to the top of the news agenda.

Trump’s campaign benefits from this in terms of forcing the election to be fought on territory it deems favorable—just as the Bush campaign did in 2004. A recent Pew Research Center survey showed if voters were moderating a 100-minute debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton, across ten issues, they would allocate fifteen minutes to hearing the candidates’ plans for keeping the US safe. Economic growth, healthcare, the budget deficit, and immigration all polled behind terrorism. 

Brigitte Nacos, journalist, author, and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, said security is playing a similar role this year to the one that it did in 2004—in contrast to the elections of 2008 and 2012 where the economy occupied a central space. “I am worried that a major attack in the election would benefit Donald Trump,” she said in an interview. “There are already about 40 percent of the public who consistently believe that Trump can cure all of the problems the US has. He speaks at nearly all his appearances that he has a plan to wipe out ISIS. Torture for him is not enough. He says he is going to wipe out the ISIS people and kill their families. In the larger picture, Clinton might be more willing to get involved in foreign wars. But Trump tells his crowd that ISIS is a Clinton creation.”

This research finds two vital differences between the media coverage of terrorism during the 2004 and 2016 Presidential races. Most obviously, the widespread use of digital journalism and social media has quickly attached human narratives to recent hate crimes like Orlando or terror attacks such as Nice and Paris. Hashtags such as #MuslimsAreNotTerrorists and #NotInMyName have highlighted human stories with long online contrails which have proved effective in correcting both erroneous reporting and Islamophobia. Much coverage was given to the Union of Muslims of the Alpes-Maritimes’ findings that a third of the people killed in Nice were Muslim.

More significantly, the American media has also had to adapt to the major challenges of real-time coverage of the presidential race. Fact-checking websites such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, as well as instant fact-checking departments at newspapers like The Washington Post, have all had an impact on the election process. Studies have also highlighted its success: more than eight in ten Americans having a favorable view of fact checking.

As an unconventional Republican candidate, Trump’s aggressive nature has had a profound effect on the pace of news coverage in 2016. Media organizations have seen the 24-hour news cycle turn into a minute-by-minute sprint. News isn’t dependent on editors or experts as filters. It exists in the full glare of millions of social media accounts, broadcasting on the nation’s mobile devices.

results matching ""

    No results matching ""