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Media Tips from the Frontlines

My job was to get the Natural Law Party's message out, whatever the message may have been during a given day or week on the campaign trail-crime, Bosnia, soaring health costs, etc. Here are a few lessons I learned over the past six years.

All candidates live and die by the press. It doesn't matter if you're a major-party candidate with a $30 million war chest in a race for U.S. Senate or a third-party candidate with (comparatively speaking) pocket change to run for the same seat. The difference is-and it's huge-Republicans and Democrats can use their $30 million to buy their exposure and craft their image any way they see fit. On the other hand, a third-party has to rely on the whims of the free media for exposure and credibility. And for that you actually have to be newsworthy. You need new ideas and new solutions to costly old problems that just won't go away (spiraling health costs, juvenile gangs, falling test scores.) You need substantial local voter support-good people who will stand up for you and your ideas. And you need to be persistent. For some reason, every minute of every news day something HUGE always seems to be happening-and that's your competition. So you have to be persistent, but not be a pain. Stay with your story, make friends with the press, and in time you'll get covered. Maybe not on this trip through town, but perhaps on the next.

Here's no surprise: Television makes the biggest impact. I always tried to get our candidates on the local evening news-one or two minutes at 6:00 p.m. or 11:00 p.m.-to make a splash. But for real impact on a national level, go for the Larry King Show, or even an hour on C-SPAN. (Obviously network television is the best, but third parties were shut out of that one. The closest John Hagelin and other third-party presidential candidates came was an interview scheduled with Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press, but Israel and the Palestinians got into a verbal skirmish and the interview was scrapped.) The returns from television are immediate. Hagelin was walking down a side street in the town of Westminster, Pennsylvania, when a woman in her thirties, with her two children at her side, walked up to him with a stunned look on her face. "I can't believe that you're campaigning in Westminster," she said. "I've been following you on C-SPAN and just love what you have to say." The morning after he appeared on the Larry King Show in Atlanta in late October, Hagelin got off a plane at Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C. and started heading for baggage claim. A man in a suit walked up to him and said, "Good job last night; I'm going to vote for you." There were many other knowing nods as he made his way down the hall.

Newspaper articles are okay, depending on their placement, and they do have a long shelf-life-you can make copies and send them to members of the media in other cities. The producer says, "Oh, the Los Angeles Times thought this was big news, so maybe it should be news here in Peoria. Let's have this guy on the show." But as far as content goes, newspapers are at the bottom. Space limitations. You do a two-hour interview, you spill your guts, and all that shows up the next day are three or four sentences of your words, a quote from someone who says you make sense, a quote from someone who says you don't, and maybe a few lines taken from an old newspaper article the reporter lifted off the Internet or out of the paper's archives.

Radio is better-although early morning, drive-time radio is a zoo. Chatter and banter, and nothing serious. ("What color socks does a Natural Law Party candidate wear? Our survey shows Republican candidates wear gray socks, Democrats wear blue.") Who wants politics at 6:52 a.m. anyway? The best shows are the issue-driven, hour-long phone-in talk shows. With a good host and an informed audience you can really get some substantive ideas out. A great example is the Ronn Owens Show on KGO in San Francisco. Of course, my opinion has been colored by the fact that Owens, the most listened-to talk show host in California, liked John Hagelin a lot and had him on his show several times during the '96 campaign. ("I'm going to have Bill Clinton and Bob Dole on my show because I have to. I'm going to have John Hagelin back on my show because I want to," Owens said over the air.)

The Internet is great-and getting better. The Natural Law Party's web page (www.natural-law.org) received hundreds of thousands of hits a week towards the end of the campaign, John Hagelin was interviewed several times live by Time online, CBS online, and ABC online, and we received a flood of e-mail from supporters. I'm sure other third parties had similar experiences.

But ultimately, nothing beats one-on-one, particularly if you want to build a strong grassroots organization-and not just be a vaporous, media-driven phenomena. For that you need to get out of the broadcast booth and onto the road. You need to meet people face-to-face to inspire them to become candidates, to collect petition signatures (a horrendous task), and to take responsibility for the party in their area. We would set up lunches or dinners for Hagelin or Tompkins with a handful of local movers and shakers, hold a living room talk for 15 or 20 guests, or rent a meeting hall or a ballroom in a hotel for hundreds of people. And that's where I am right now, at the Doubletree Inn in Houston.