BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Nine Democrats seeking the presidency debated earlier this month, and neither the debate nor the coverage was especially inspiring. Perhaps it's too early with such a crowded field to tease out the differences among candidates. That at least is the opinion of Ed Helms, a senior correspondent for Comedy Central's Daily Show. [TAPE PLAYS]

ED HELMS: Sure, as a reporter, I could have taken the time to learn the candidates' names, [LAUGHTER] studied their positions, what they stand for, but-- at the end of the day 8/9ths of that research is going to for jack all squat. [LAUGHTER] I mean-- Carol Moseley Braun?! [LAUGHS] Life's too short! [LAUGHTER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Veteran journalist Robert Shogan has pondered the problems that plague election coverage since he began reporting on them in 1968, first for Newsweek and then for the L.A. Times. His book, Bad News: Where the Press Goes Wrong in The Making of the President, takes readers straight through election 2000. He joins me now from his home in Maryland. Robert Shogan, welcome to On the Media.

ROBERT SHOGAN: Well thank you. Thanks very much for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now in the opening chapter of your book, Bad News, you write "The new reality of the campaign trail boils down to this: the media little too often have been reduced to filling the role of enablers." Does that mean you're enabling the spinmeisters and the candidates to control the agenda?

ROBERT SHOGAN: If you think of the handlers and the candidates as people who are addicted to power, then the press assists in their fulfilling that addiction. Now they don't do this deliberately, but they do it partly because it's difficult not to, because the candidates and the handlers really do set the agenda.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It hasn't always been the case then that the media were enablers. When did that start?

ROBERT SHOGAN: I think it started back in '68 as a result of Vietnam and the social and political upheaval of that year; you had a big change in parties; first in the Democratic Party that was dramatized by the chaos at the Chicago Convention - the blood in the street; that then spread to the Republican Party. What it was is the end of the old structure and ordered system of politics in which you had the bosses, so-called, who sat around in smoke-filled rooms and picked candidates. Well there was a little bit of exaggeration to that, but not all that much. So you had the death of the way both parties controlled the political system.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you saw the decline of the party bosses after a disastrous war and violence in the streets during the conventions, and then what happened?

ROBERT SHOGAN: Well-- it was sort of a free for all; all of a sudden the power seemed to be held in the hands of the public. Well how do you reach the public? You do that through the media. So it wasn't the media who had the power. It was in a sense the voters, but the media became important, because by manipulating and influencing them, you could get at the voters and turn them into followers.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The power went out to a much more drawn-out, state by state primary system, and it was during that drawn-out period where the media were able to interpret the candidate for the public.

ROBERT SHOGAN: I mean that's the way the media would like to see it, [LAUGHTER] or that's the way I guess I suppose it would be, but in fact the media's not all-wise or all-knowing. What the candidates do and their handlers is to influence the media so that they convey the impression that they want. The media really doesn't have its own agenda. I know there are people who think that the press is biased one way or another, but the truth is that the agenda for most reporters out there is they want to make a living and they want to get stories in the paper.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What is the worst coverage of a political campaign that you've seen.

ROBERT SHOGAN: I don't know that it's the worst but it's certainly the most recent. I think the press coverage of the presidential debates in the 2000 campaign was terribly one-sided, and the obsession with Gore's manner, his sighing and his smirking or whatever it was he did -- that that became a major force in the debate is wrong for two reasons. First of all, I mean Bush also told untruths and made mistakes and looked foolish at times, and that was sort of ignored, but I mean-- the other thing is that there were really substantive issues that had to be dealt with and could have been addressed and there were real differences.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you said the press ignored them.

ROBERT SHOGAN: You look at the stories and look at the tremendous emphasis on minutia and trivia as if it was -- I call a chapter in Bad News Ballots on Broadway because it w-- the press behaved as if they were theatre critics; sometimes it seemed they were, they were covering a farce.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What do you anticipate will happen this time around?

ROBERT SHOGAN: The real challenge in the campaign will be to cover George Bush as a candidate and not as the reigning chief executive. He will be photographed issuing grants or making announcements and doing other favorable things, and the press will be covering the Democratic candidate who will be out there running for office and scrambling for votes, and he will look like sort of a-- you know - a Willy Loman guy with a shoeshine and a smile. I remember something Dick Cheney told me back in '76 when he was running in effect Gerald Ford's campaign. Ford was not the most highly thought of president, but what Cheney said is hey, look -- he is the president. The other people are all pretenders. So the press has got a hard job, and they have to just try and write about the things that the president says as if they were writing about that of a candidate for political office. They have to wake up early in the morning and go to bed late at night and type very fast and make a lot of phone calls.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.

ROBERT SHOGAN: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Robert Shogan is author of Bad News: Where the Press Goes Wrong in the Making of the President. [MUSIC]