ANCHESTER, N.H. - There are two wars being waged in the wintry tundra and towns of New Hampshire these days.
One is a political battle to decide the winners of the presidential primary. The other is a contest for hegemony between two powerful media institutions. It pits New Hampshire's only statewide paper, The Union Leader of Manchester (63,000 daily circulation) against what until recently was the state's only commercial TV station with its own news, WMUR-TV (Channel 9), which attracts 109,000 adults to its 6 p.m. newscast.
The Union Leader is an outlet famous for its sharp-edged conservatism and attacks on political foes. WMUR has no obvious ideological tilt, but tends to cozy up to those in power. In one corner is a newspaper that reached its peak in the '70s by helping elect loose-cannon conservative Meldrim Thomson as governor. In the other is a TV station that has really only flexed its political muscle in the past decade.
While The Union Leader embraced Pat Buchanan in the 1996 Republican primary, WMUR gave his pitchfork populist campaign a pretty cold shoulder. Union Leader publisher Joe McQuaid dismisses WMUR's news as ''formulaic TV stuff.'' Last April, WMUR ran a story discussing the paper's declining circulation.
The battle extends to presidential debates. While WMUR is sponsoring a number of them, this week's candidate forums are hosted by a consortium that includes New England Cable News, New Hampshire Public Television, and The Union Leader. In the past, WMUR has failed to cover consortium debates, something McQuaid attributes to the station's desire to be ''cock of the walk.''
''Everybody in New Hampshire takes presidential politics phenomenally seriously. Just as the voters do, so do the media,'' says Carl Cameron, a former WMUR political director who is now at Fox News. ''WMUR and the Union Leader are the only statewide media. ... They compete for statewide dominance - first to the story, first to the dollar, and first to the candidate. Candidates know there's a tug of war and they're the rope.''
Given the power of television and the long, slow decline of print, it's no surprise that WMUR has been winning this battle of 800-pound gorillas.
''I think the candidate perception is that WMUR is the most important media outlet in the state,'' so candidates ''will bend over backwards to give them access,'' says Mike Pride, editor of the Concord Monitor.
And even though McQuaid denies it, some observers believe 'MUR's dominance is even forcing The Union Leader to do the unthinkable - modulate its hard-right voice.
WMUR news director Karen Brown wants to clear up a myth about the impressive, 80,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art headquarters the station has occupied since 1995.
''Contrary to those who think it is the house that Steve Forbes built,'' she says, ''we built it and paid for it before the [1996] New Hampshire primary.''
Presidential candidate Forbes may not have built the station with his advertising dollars. But the station is ''like a political ATM machine,'' says media buyer Tobe Berkovitz. ''The bottom line is that they are the heart of any political media buy in New Hampshire.''
WMUR's rise to power
Station officials won't discuss ad revenues, but according to a recent Globe report, presidential candidates dropped about $1.17 million into WMUR's coffers between last Nov. 9 and Dec. 20, alone. The Concord Monitor reported that WMUR took in around $2.6 million from political ads during the 1996 campaign.
WMUR's attentions are so crucial to presidential hopefuls that Brown says the 2000 campaign actually began in January 1997, when GOP contender Lamar Alexander dropped by to chat about his future ambitions. The station is so hot that it was featured in a story in Tina Brown's new Talk magazine with the subheadline: ''Candidates bow down to Granite State TV gatekeeper.''
''A lot of young journalists want to work here because of the presidential primary,'' says WMUR's Brown. ''We probably get more access to these candidates than you might if you work for a major national news organization.''
It was not always this way. For years, WMUR was a ramshackle operation overshadowed by The Union Leader. When he arrived at the Monitor in 1978, Pride says ''WMUR seemed like something that was run out of the closet.'' He vividly remembers one incident when the station's camera actually fell during an interview, but kept on rolling.
Things began changing when the station was sold in 1981 and when general manager Larry Gilpin - the behind-the-scenes power at WMUR - came aboard in 1985. Brown traces its emergence to the moment in the 1988 campaign when Democratic candidate Joseph Biden marched through a thick crowd of reporters on a Manchester street and made a beeline for the WMUR microphone. ''He made a statement with that gesture,'' she says.
Jack Heath, the former WMUR news director who is now vice president of news at WNDS-TV (Channel 50) in Derry, recalls his anger when Bill Clinton announced his 1992 candidacy in New Hampshire during an interview with a Boston station. ''I called him in the next day, and I showed him the numbers and said, `if you want to make news in New Hampshire, we're it,''' Heath says.
Today, no one disputes that sentiment. ''If you are not on [Channel] 9, if you are not watching 9 ... you are out of touch in this state,'' says Republican National Committee member Tom Rath, who is advising the George W. Bush campaign.
Union Leader's glory days
Across town, in a low-slung building on William Loeb Drive, McQuaid is fondling a ball in the shape of a globe that reads, ''The Union Leader: We Mean the World to New Hampshire.''
Asked whether WMUR is now the undisputed king of New Hampshire politics, McQuaid, a man with a ready wit, feigns surrender. ''They're it,'' he declares. ''We've been eclipsed. We're dead in the water.''
A clearer answer may lie in collection of Union Leader front pages on McQuaid's desk. There is the infamous Feb. 27, 1972, headline - ''Muskie Calls Loeb Liar'' - in which a distraught Edmund Muskie unleashed an emotional attack on the late Union Leader publisher William Loeb that helped derail the Maine senator's 1972 Democratic presidential bid.
Back in the '70s, when Loeb was maiming Muskie, touting Meldrim Thomson, and romancing Ronald Reagan, the commie-bating, liberal-hating paper emerged as the state's predominant political force. It also instituted a ''no tax pledge'' that remains an article of faith for New Hampshire governors.
''Perhaps not since William Randolph Hearst had a publisher used his paper so forcefully and colorfully to get his way,'' opined the Concord Monitor in a profile of Loeb.
Today, the paper is still a serious player in conservative politics. And when it recently got exercised about a hike in the salaries of Manchester aldermen and school board members, it launched an energetic ''Give It Back'' campaign that forced the aldermen to rescind their raises. But Loeb is gone and so is a chunk of the paper's influence.
Rath says ''reports of the demise of The Union Leader are greatly overrated.'' But ''whether they were the kingmakers they once were, I don't know that any newspaper can be.'' And the paper's Dec. 3 endorsement of Steve Forbes seemed tepid and late, in contrast to the fervent support for Buchanan four years ago.
McQuaid admits this presidential field doesn't make his pulse race. He calls Bush ''governor smirk,'' and sees Senator John McCain as the ''Harrison Ford `Air Force One' candidate,'' running on image instead of substance. While stating that Forbes's endorsement was not a ''hard call,'' McQuaid adds that ''he's dry as toast.''
Pride, whose Monitor has emerged as a liberal editorial counterweight to The Union Leader, says several factors have eroded that paper's ''ability to control and dictate events.'' Loeb's death in 1981 robbed it of a unique voice; a number of New Hampshire dailies have started Sunday papers in recent years; and the paper seems out of touch with the state's more moderate political profile.
''New Hampshire has never been as conservative as The Union Leader would like it to be,'' acknowledges McQuaid. ''The Union Leader advances a political philosophy. We want to influence people, but we don't want to sell our souls doing so.''
But like others, Carl Cameron believes ''WMUR's success has begun to push The Union Leader to the middle.'' The lack of real enthusiasm for any GOP contender, McQuaid's image as a less fierce breed of publisher, and the hiring of 26-year-old Bernadette M. Connolly as editorial page editor are viewed in some quarters as signs of a strategic tack to the middle.
''Yeah, I awakened one day and moved the paper to the left,'' says an obviously annoyed McQuaid, debunking that view.
Whether Loeb would have liked it or not, these days, The Union Leader is viewed as something of a feisty underdog while WMUR is, in the words of one analyst, ''the definition of arrogance that comes with a monopoly.''
''I know what we are here to do,'' says Brown, responding to criticism that WMUR is too powerful. ''We are very focused on comprehensive, balanced, and objective coverage. And we're aggressive about it.''
This week, however, The Union Leader returns to center stage as an organizer of last night's and tonight's candidate face-offs moderated by Peter Jennings and Tim Russert.
''I will make a prediction,'' ventures the combative McQuaid. ''This time around [WMUR] will cover our debates.''
