Michael Marshall, moderator: We’re very happy to have with us today Michael Steele, who’s currently the chairman of GOPAC, Republican political action committee. He is someone from this area, born in Prince George’s County, graduate of Archbishop Carroll High School, which I’m sure many of you know, and he got his law degree at Georgetown University, which of course is a very excellent school, as both my children graduated from there.
Michael Steele in 2003 was elected lieutenant governor of Maryland and he was the first African-American elected to statewide office in Maryland. I know he’s a passionate conservative and has very strong and vivid ideas from his experience of the role of the media in politics. We’re very happy to have him here to give us that politician’s perspective. Please welcome Michael Steele.
Michael Steele: Thank you, Michael. I want to thank the Washington Times and certainly thank all of you for coming out. My apologies for sneaking in late.
But I really appreciate being here and spending a little bit of time because this is something that certainly from my perspective as a state party official, a county party official, as a candidate and as an elected official I have some views on the media, certainly have some views on some of the polls that I have been on the short end of, which kind of make you chuckle from time to time.
I think I want to start off of with a general thought and premise and then get into a couple of examples and some specifics and then shut up. My mom always taught me, you know, at some point you’ve just got to shut up and listen and that’s what I hope to do. But there’s no doubt, and it’s certainly no secret, that the role and function of the media in the 21st century is vastly different than it was some 8, 10 years ago, let alone 20, 30, 50 years ago. And I think when you see the advent of the Internet, you see the advent of blogs, you see the advent of the 24-7 news cycle, people have now found ways to engage themselves and to get information and to make determinations on their own, without the help of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather and all the other folks who every night at 6:30 would tell us what we should know, or in some cases what we should think. And then you wake up the next morning and you pick up your newspaper and that would kind of get you started for the next day until you got home at 6:30.
Well, now you’re driving to work, you’ve got your XM or your Sirius radio going, you’re all over the channels, you’re at your desk, you’ve got a little icon there that’s beeping at you that’s flashing news to you. You’ve got all these toys and mechanisms to capture information and to make yourselves more intelligent. And the reality, I think, quite frankly is, and the danger that I’ve seen is particularly with some of the mainstay media operations, starting with the New York Times, is they’ve gotten out of the business of reporting the news and into making news. I think certainly during the Bush administration we’ve seen some examples of making news as opposed to reporting news. I think the whole big flare-up with Dan Rather is a very good example of where a little bit of information without the proper sourcing gets blown up into a full-blown story that tries as hard as it might to get its own legs and move and become news.
I think that to what Ben was saying in terms of the response that the typical viewer, voter, reader is having to today’s environment. They are getting more sophisticated at what to turn off and what to turn on, what to listen to, what not to listen to. But there are other traps out there, and blogs are a good example of such a trap because they become a bastion of free-flowing information, some of which is very accurate, others of which your mama don’t want you to read because it’s just loaded with a lot of poisonous stuff.
The challenge that you have, whether you are a party organization or a candidate or an elected official is navigating through that maze. That 24-hour news cycle continues to churn. It’s churning about you and it’s churning about what you’re doing, and you’re at home in bed and there’s stuff floating on the Internet saying that you’re right now at a club somewhere in D.C. and you’re not. But that’s the reality for a lot of folks right now when you look at it.
So when it comes to polling and to all the other little gadgets that you do to try to capture the sentiment of individuals, I find, given all that’s out there, polling, and my buddy Mr. Rasmussen will probably cringe when I say this, is not as reliable or as much of a barometer as it once was. I can cite you a very good example in Maryland, where when I ran for the United States Senate we did a lot of focus groups and my team would come back and they were telling me all this stuff, and I’m looking at this information. I’m like, this is not Maryland. They’re telling me that this is going to be an easy race for me. This is not Maryland.
So I said, all right, next poll I want two questions in the poll and I want them back to back. First question, would you vote for an African-American for the United States Senate? The result came back 78 percent yes. Second question immediately after it, would your neighbor vote for an African-American for the United States Senate? Forty percent yes. That was a more accurate representation of my reality, and it was not a trick so much as it was a way to draw the truth from the respondent. We saw it in Virginia when Doug Wilder ran. Doug Wilder was supposed to win that race by double digits. He barely squeaked by. Why? Because people weren’t telling the truth. Bill Bradley’s race in California. And even we saw it most recently in New Hampshire with Barack and Hillary and the rest of the team.
So the question then becomes for guys like Rasmussen and for guys like me, how do we elicit a truthful response? How do we get to the real core, what people are thinking and feeling about the issues out there? And for myself, one of the things I try to do is go outside the traditional and the mainstream ways of doing that, polling and focus groups, and to have a more direct face-to-face encounter with voters. I would do it through my commercials, I would do it in other ways that would then force them, if you will, to use that word, to respond. And they did. And then I got a better sense of the challenge that I had before me going into that race for the United States Senate, and I had a better understanding of what the expectations of the typical Maryland voter would be. Because I felt more connected to it. I didn’t have this, you know, this 24-hour news cycle that, you know, the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun – which their view of me was, I didn’t bring anything to my job as lieutenant governor except being black. So that was what they were telling the voters. So I couldn’t rely on that.
So for a lot of us now you’re beginning to find better, more creative, more interactive ways to message, if you will, directly with voters and the consumer. And sometimes it’s not just getting the polling right, but understanding what it is that people at the end of the day are really most concerned about.
Notice the flip in just, what, two months. Two months ago we were up to our ears and elbows in Iraq. Now everybody’s like, hey, baby, it’s the economy. What will it be two months from now? And how do you gauge that if you’re running for office? How do you flip back and forth and up and down? The consumer is more reactive when you’re going through that polling process, I think, as opposed to really being reflective and responsive to what their particular need or what they would like to see done.
So go and fill this whole thing out, it’s going to be interesting to hear, certainly from my buddy over here, how this all works. But I can tell you from my perspective, I’m about shaking it up and I try to go outside the mainstream techniques and the ways in which we do that and find innovative avenues to really draw people in. The Internet is one way to do that, but the challenge there is, again, there’s so much misinformation and disinformation that’s taken as fact and truth that that creates a whole other level of wading through and ferreting out.
I looked at my Wikipedia bio. I didn’t know I did some of that stuff, you know, because everybody can go in there and change it. So there are some enormous opportunities to really engage and to keep the media honest, whether you’re talking Internet or you’re talking traditional media like the nightly news or your local newspaper. But there are also some very daunting challenges if you’re going to stay true and honor the First Amendment to make sure that the truth is really the truth so that voters and consumers can be fully educated and aware of what’s out there for them. Thank you.
MR. MARSHALL: Thank you very much, Michael Steele. I should have mentioned in my introduction of course that Mr. Steele ran for the Maryland U.S. Senate seat in 2006.
He has raised for us the very interesting perspective of someone who’s commissioning pollsters and in that sense is a consumer of their information, and really the buyer beware element of that – what’s the expression, nonsense in, nonsense out – that unless you frame your questions right, you’re not only going to get information that’s not much use, it’s actually going to mislead you as to where you stand.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
The Honorable Michael Steele
GOPAC Chairman Michael Steele was born on October 19, 1958 at Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George's County and was raised in Washington, DC. He graduated from Archbishop Carroll High School, earned his bachelor's degree in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University in 1981 and his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1991. Mr. Steele also spent three years as a seminarian in the Order of St. Augustine in preparation for the priesthood.
In 2003, Chairman Steele earned a place in history when he became the first African American elected to statewide office in Maryland. He was the nation's highest-ranking African American Republican elected official and the only sitting African American Lt. Governor in the country.
In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed Chairman Steele to serve a term on the Board of Visitors of the United States Naval Academy. Other affiliations include the State House Trust, the East Baltimore Development Corporation, the Export-Import Bank Advisory Committee and the Prince George's County Chapter of the NAACP.
Among the distinguished awards and honors received by Chairman Steele, he has been named a 2005 Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellow in Public Leadership and was awarded a Bethune-DuBois Institute 2005 Award for his work in the ongoing development of quality education in Maryland.
Chairman Steele is a member of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Landover Hills, MD, where he attends mass regularly with his wife Andrea and their two sons, Michael and Drew.