Q: Looking back at Geraldine Ferraro's run as Walter Mondale's vice presidential nominee, was the issue of sexism part of the discussion then as well?

Rosenstiel: Absolutely. People may not remember, but Barbara Bush said of Geraldine Ferraro, she is something that "rhymes with witch." And George Bush said after the vice presidential debate, "I kicked a little ass." There was no predicate. This wasn't a matter of Sarah Palin using the word "lipstick" and Barack Obama echoing it; Ferraro had not said, "I'm going to kick George Bush's ass," or something like that. There was so much overt sense of talking down about Ferraro because of her femininity and also because of her Italian-American background, and there were questions about whether her husband had mafia ties. We have not seen anything, to be perfectly blunt, in 2008 that would come close to the antics that we saw in 1984.

Q: A recent PEJ news index showed that gender was a focus of only 1 percent of the stories in the coverage of Palin from Aug. 29 to Sept. 15.

Rosenstiel: It's very small. That doesn't mean, by the way, that there couldn't be sexism in the coverage. The discussion of whether it's appropriate for Sarah Palin to try and raise a family, including a baby with Down syndrome, and run for vice president may, in some people's minds, be inherently sexist and in other people's minds isn't. But it would probably not be a discussion of her gender, it would be a discussion of her personal life, and the same question might theoretically -- although I think it's unlikely -- be raised about a male candidate in the same position.

My own view is that those discussions in the media, when they've occurred, are inherently sexist. But women are as likely and perhaps more likely to engage in those conversations as are men, and that sexism is sort of just there. I think it's part of our culture, in the same way that women are more inclined to say that women play a larger role in raising families. It shouldn't be that way, but it is; it's the nature of the way that men and women act differently in our society. Whether that's by nature or nurture, it's just the way it is.

Q: After Palin's selection, the McCain camp accused the media of having a gender bias against her. How valid do you think those claims were?

Rosenstiel: When Palin was first picked, the overriding question was her inexperience. And as the press began to ask questions, the initial questions were: How good a job had McCain done in vetting her? Not only is she inexperienced, but what do we know about her, what about this Troopergate, what else is in her past, and did McCain know about these things? That led the McCain camp very quickly to accuse the press of bias.

That accusation occurred almost instantaneously. It was leveled in very passionate terms by midday Monday, and she was selected on a Friday.... It's very hard to know whether this was a tactical smokescreen or pushback against accusations that there were things about Palin that had not been fully vetted by the McCain camp....

Now, trying to sort out, is there an element of truth to [the claims of sexism]? Well, if a new person emerges, whether it's Barack Obama, Sarah Palin or the governor of Arkansas, who kind of came out of nowhere, it's pretty basic that the press has a scrubbing job to do. "Who is this person?" And that is to be expected and perhaps even to be desired by the American public, that the press is going to do this.

There will be excesses. There will be questions asked that go too far, and that, in a way, is how the press finds the limits of the discourse, what's appropriate. Someone will ask a question in a press conference, and that question will be beyond what anybody else will want to ask, and people will cringe and say, "OK, we're not going there." But I think by and large, while there have been some questions on cable, I think the main thread -- our research would certainly suggest that the main thrust of coverage has not been out of bounds.

Q: Do you think there were lessons that were learned from Clinton's primary run?

Rosenstiel: Politics is combat. And the press are a form of referees. Did the Clinton campaign engage in race-baiting to beat Obama? Yes. Did the Obama campaign engage in trying to undermine Clinton by saying there was Clinton fatigue, and that she really was just the wife, and really wasn't qualified, wasn't that experienced, she was the first lady? Yes. Had the McCain people run against Clinton, they would have engaged in sexist tactics to undermine her in the same way that they are doing values stuff against Obama, and the Obama people -- although they're pretty hesitant about it, or at least some people -- are raising questions about Palin. This is what you do.

Unfortunately, I wish it weren't the case, but politics is partly the art of destruction.... The press is a conduit for some of this stuff, and political people try and figure out what sticks, what has, as they say, traction. In general, the press coverage of this campaign has not been very good, but it's not because sexism has overwhelmed it. The problems of the press coverage of this campaign are not that.

Q: What would you say the problems of press coverage are, then?

Rosenstiel: The fact the press has given over too much of its air time to campaign operatives who they label as analysts, media people. It's the naming of Paul Begala, and Karl Rove, and Dick Morris, and a countless litany of other people who are essentially not journalists but who play them on TV, and who really are doing talking points. That's one fundamental problem.

Another is an excess of focus on strategy, tactics and horse race, which we've seen for generations now in the coverage. Another is a kind of short attention span, almost kind of amnesic quality, in which the coverage and the narrative of the campaign sort of bounces from one episode to another, but there's no consistent coverage of what the country's problems are, or where the country is going.

I think the coverage of Obama has been insufficient. We don't know enough about him. There's a risk there. We didn't know enough about George [W.] Bush, and the day he took office I think we didn't have a sufficient understanding of how he might govern, and I think we have a risk of that with Obama. These are fundamental flaws. Can I point to examples of sexist coverage? Yes. Can I point to examples of racist coverage? Yes. But those are not the major issues that I see in the coverage this year.

Q: Looking ahead to the home stretch of the general election and the remaining debates, if you could tell journalists how to better do their jobs, what would you say?

Rosenstiel: We may be at a point now where finally an issue, a problem facing the country, is going to frame this election, and that's the economy. And I think that we need to focus now pretty hard on the economic philosophy, background votes, etc. of the two candidates. Obama has an advantage -- which is a challenge to the press -- which is he doesn't have very much of a record. And that's dangerous, I think, because he can pull one over on us, he can claim to be whatever he wants to claim to be. So I think we need to use these debates, and we need to use the coverage that surrounds them, to try and press how these guys will deal with this economic crisis that they're going to inherit if they become president.

I fear that what's going to happen is what typically happens, which is we do a sort of theater review coverage of the debates, trying to figure out who had the best theatrical moment, who got the better of the other in some exchange or other. That kind of coverage of debates goes back a long way.... I would probably venture that since 1984, most of our coverage of debates has been primarily focused on the performance aspects of it rather than the substantive aspects of what the candidates propose and are saying.

It's harder to examine the implications of what someone is asserting. For instance, the significance of Sarah Palin's interview with Charles Gibson wasn't whether or not she knew what the Bush Doctrine was, the significance of the interview was what she laid out as her own doctrine, but that wasn't the substance of the coverage.