If you haven’t read Jay Rosen on media and politics, this speech is a great introduction to three of the most bankrupt characteristics of of modern political journalism:
1. Politics as an inside game.
2. The cult of savviness.
3. The production of innocence.
I thought the last sentence of this quote from another Rosen interview was spot-on:
Horse race journalism is a reusable model for how to do campaign coverage in which you focus on who’s going to win rather than what the country needs to settle by electing a prime minister.
And it’s easy to do because you can kind of reuse it sort of like a Christmas tree every year and it requires almost no knowledge either.
Kathy in St. Louis
“And it’s easy to do because you can kind of reuse it sort of like a Christmas tree every year and it requires almost no knowledge either.”
That’s sort of what most of us have seen if we’ve followed the presidential races for very many years. The country’s problems get bigger and bigger and the people sent to cover the candidates ask fewer and fewer questions. They all just seem to be so happy to have a seat on the bus/plane, that they just take the morning press handout and go with it. They either have no knowledge, or suppress what knowledge they do have in order to keep the cushy position of covering a major candidate. The worst was Candy Crowley during the McCain campaign. She might as well have stayed home for all she added, but that wouldn’t have helped her career or earned a paycheck.
Davis X. Machina
It’s an inevitable outgrowth of our hankering after a monarchy: No king without a court, or courtiers. Or a court circular. That includes pretenders to the throne.
Villago Delenda Est
They’re lazy.
It’s because they are lazy. They don’t want to find another model, because, in their view, this is the one that has the best payoff in terms of ratings (which is their god, nothing else is more important, because the MBA beancounting asshats are watching them).
Besides, they’re too busy getting prepped for the next soiree at Sally Quinn’s place. Tiger shrimp!
PeakVT
I think that’s Rosen’s piece is a good take on the mindset of a lot of reporters, but he’s looking at effects, not causes. That’s why the “what do we do?” section is so weak. You have to look at things like corporate control, declining ad revenue, the corrosive effects of Faux and the rest of the Murdoch criminal organization, etc. to figure out what to do. (Rosen was obviously time-limited in that speech, and he may very well have addressed the issues I listed elsewhere).
Samara Morgan
But Jay DISAGREES with one of your favorite most cherished and beloved eumemes, mistemix.
He says we are not all just the same.
Shlemizel - was Alwhite
@Villago Delenda Est:
Its more than just lazy. The horse race part can be made to sound exciting so you can draw viewers or readers in and increase your revenue. Discussing issues is hard and often complicated with no perfect ending. Those sorts of talks drive viewers away. When we only had 3 or 4 choices on TV and 2-3 papers in a city there was more space for thoughtful pieces on issues. Now only flash sells.
bystander
Thanks for flagging that speech, mistermix. I’d likely have missed it otherwise, and I find Jay Rosen to be particularly insightful. I’m familiar with his criticisms; the three characterizations you’ve identified in this post. What I’d not seen before was his four quadrant system: appearances, realities, arguments, and facts. It occurs to me that this thought experiment of Rosen’s isn’t a bad way to think about and categorize the blogworld (columns and comments) in the election to come. If I couple Rosen’s observations with Krugman’s recent Arguments From Personal Incredulity, I might have just found a way to survive the next GE. In it’s own way, I expect the divides in the blogworld to be just as sharp, and just as bitter. Rosen + Kurgman might be a tether to sanity. Thanks for the flag. Much appreciated.
Dennis SGMM
Give it another election cycle or so and political coverage will descend to something like this:
Host: And now for our panel’s take on tonight’s presidential debate. Well start with you, Bob.
Bob: Obama’s severely cut gray Armani suit conveyed a sense of seriousness and authority. His American flag lapel pin, which we now know was given him by a quadriplegic Boy Scout, demonstrated his sympathy for the disabled. Michele Bachman’s gingham dress and coal scuttle bonnet, on the other hand, showed her commitment to traditional American values. Bachmann had the advantage of being able to accessorize and she pressed that advantage home with a necklace of crucifixes. Big points from Christians on that one…
ThresherK
As I say every time:
They’re too lazy to even do horserace journalism right. I don’t know that I could call all those races wrong, right up until the returns come in, and still have a job at Saratoga.
cleek
@Shlemizel – was Alwhite:
and, it runs the risk of having to point out that someone is … wrong.
so, they segregate the “fact-checking” to little two-minute segments where a reporter delicately points out that this or that statement from Politician X might be a little un-true; but don’t forget, Pol X’s opponent also said something false! so, both sides do it!
NPR is the worst at this.
Amir Khalid
How many stories is a political journalist going to get out of covering candidates’ policy platforms? One story, and not a long one at that, would pretty much do it for the whole Tea Party gang. And how often would the journalist be able to revisit the story? Hardly if ever, and then only if a candidate were to modify his/her platform in some significant way. Candidates don’t modify their policy platforms much, partly because they don’t want to get accused of wearing flip-flops — or, worse in Tea party eyes, of heresy.
It should definitely be done, though, for any candidate who has released a detailed enough political platform. Or said enough to give some idea of it, or of some aspect thereof. I remember that at Swampland, Ana Marie Cox got her father, an actuary, to assess McCain’s healthcare policy in 2008. His report, which she posted, was both illuminating and devastating.
arguingwithsignposts
@PeakVT: For those interested in the causes, rather than the effects, I highly encourage you to pick up some texts by Bob McChesney. He actually makes the argument that the “free market” and press freedoms we “enjoy” are a) not free, but heavily regulated – even print, and b) not the ideal structure, or even the structure intended by the founders.
Corporate control of the media is the biggest issue outside the FIRE industry facing our democratic republic.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@PeakVT:
Bingo.
This bit in the article really made alarms bells go off for me:
Superficially he is of course correct; the reporter is avoiding the appearance of ideology by doing this. But we know that in practice these are intensely ideological choices with unavoidable ideological consequences. One of the first rules of politics should be that anybody who claims not to be ideological is lying, and the more they protest their innocence the more strongly we should dig to get at the ideology they are trying to hide. This so-called innocence that they in the press are manufacturing is purely cosmetic; in fact, they have made their choices and have picked their side, and they back that up to the hilt.
Jamie
It would be hard to design a system for selecting our leaders that is worse than the one we currently use.
arguingwithsignposts
@Jamie: Oh, i don’t know.
smintheus
In purely descriptive terms, it’s ‘journalism’ rather than ‘reporting’. A lot of what passes for political journalism is not about reporting what politicians say and do. Instead it appears to be about journalists passing themselves off as political insiders. This reaches its nadir when journalists offer advice to campaigns about what they need to do to win, though for reporters to focus on the future rather than the present/past is pretty absurd in general.
Seems pretty obvious that this trend has transformed political reporting since the 1970s, and that it’s heavily influenced by the rise of cable TV with its veneration of bobbleheads.
Jay Rosen
Thanks for this, Mix.
David Bernstein, a political reporter for the Boston Phoenix, said on Twitter. “If anyone cares, I’ve read Jay Rosen’s big politijourno speech and I think it’s idiotic crap.” I asked him to explain what he meant and he produced this post:
http://thephoenix.com/Blogs/talkingpolitics/archive/2011/08/26/jay-squawking.aspx
Stephen1947
James Joyner posted a fairly long meditation on this speech at Outside the Beltway this morning – he thought through some of the implications, but his conclusions were not very satisfying.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@arguingwithsignposts:
And this is
betterworse than what we have now in what way?OK, granted that “aquatic ceremony” may be a little too high-gloss a way of describing a small herd of so-called journalists (tasked with creating the conventional wisdom in which the masses will be instructed next week) mulling around a sofa in some Georgetown salon drinking Scotch and eating tiger shrimp, admiring the early edition Goya etchings (from Los Desastres de la Guerra and Los Caprichos, naturally) on the wall while discussing whether we should bomb Iran or just sit back and let Israel do the dirty work, and how stridently Mitt should emulate Rick Perry’s global climate change denialism is he really wants to be the next POTUS, but you have to admit that it certainly is farcical. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Amir Khalid
Prof. Rosen’s grid, which its axes appearance/reality against fact/argument, looks like an interesting way to analyze political coverage if you’re in his position. It’s certainly a good way for a news consumer to assess any story.
But editors are in charge of creating a product called news. Would an editor use the grid? When he’s putting a news section together, he wants to sell newspapers. Or gather as many hits on the website as he can. Policy, for all its undeniable importance, lacks the immediacy and excitement — the sizzle that sells news, if you will, rather than the steak — and that you’re more likely to get when you focus on politics as sports or as theater.
And that’s leaving out what PeakVT notes in #4, that media organizations are often themselves large corporate entities with political agendas and biases of their own. These agendas and biases aren’t always acknowledged, let alone overtly expressed like they are at Fox News.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Horse RACE journalism is close, but not 100% accurate.
@ThresherK: Absolutely.
Of course, I may be bitter because I’m a reporter (albeit on a very specific and rather dull topic). However, an error in one of my articles occasions a Category 5,000 shit storm that stops just short of my boss leaving me alone in a room with a loaded pistol.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Amir Khalid:
The way it looks to me from the outside of this business, the editors aren’t creating a product, if by “product” you mean something to be consumed by a paying customer. The paying customer is the advertiser. We the readers/viewers are not the consumers, we are the “product”. What the editors are creating is bait, which is used to lure in the “product” so it can be delivered to the customer.
ETA: the relevance of this little rant is that an editor’s approach to Rosen’s grid looks a little different if you think of them as having been tasked with creating bait. Bait needs to be attention-catching and enticing, so the fish notices it, swims towards it, and bites on it. What happens after that is not the bait-maker’s concern.
Amir Khalid
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Fair enough. But I think my point about what goes on in an editor’s head remains valid. It’s tuned toward attracting news consumers with sizzle rather than substance, because sizzle simply works better.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Amir Khalid:
Oh I agree. Not only is your point valid, it is crucial to understanding the situation. My contention is that in most editors are already using the grid, albeit perhaps in a somewhat less explicit and less intellectual form than how Rosen lays it out. It looks to me like they are already doing a damn fine job of picking the quadrants which best address the job they have to do which is to lure in viewers. They just aren’t using it in a way that we approve of or that appears to be in the broader public interest.
JRon
One of my favorite people (my sis) is a Washington political journalist on network news. She’s smart, informed, and interested. When she was made chief political correspondent I asked if she would be covering policy. (She knows how I feel about the dearth of policy discussion on tv.) No, she said, my job will be to cover politics. Other people report on policy.
And so it is. She’s covering the GOP horse race.
The Sunday shows: all politics, no policy except how it impacts politics. And that’s easy because you never actually have to learn anything new, or study anything. You’re expected to just talk and talk about how things look. If you take it further you risk making Stephanopolous (or whomever) look like they aren’t the leading expert, and you’ll never be asked back on the show.
(And for the record, the commentary on being invited back is mine, not hers, and is based on watching those shows.)
Amir Khalid
@Samara Morgan:
That’s all true, but not particularly relevant here. We’re not talking about liberal reaction to factual journalism versus conservative reaction.
Brachiator
The Jay Rosen piece is very, very good. The irony is that so many people willingly fall in line. Even Balloon Juicers enjoy being an echo chamber to the Village horse race line, with the endlessly empty posts that assume that Romney is the front runner, with Perry running strong behind.
Related to this is the prizefight nonsense that informs debate coverage. The question is always “Who won?” and “Who delivered a knockout punch,” and any other analysis is quickly dismissed.
@arguingwithsignposts:
I don’t think that the founders had any intent with respect to the press, and certainly no firm idea that government regulation would ensure a free press. To the contrary, one of the most noxious early cases of government interference with the press were the Alien and Sedition Acts pushed by Prez Number 2, John Adams.
I think I understand what you mean here, but the old regime in which newspapers were family owned did not assure good journalism and some of the most useless, predictably shallow boilerplate has come from Pacifica public radio.
Consolidation, which has included many alternative news sources (e.g. LA Weekly, Village Voice) has seen veteran journalists ousted as a cost-saving measure, severely weakening the quality of the reporting and analysis.
And there is a sad convergence and both audiences and journalists insist on shallow, sensationalistic news stories which satisfy existing prejudices, and avoid controversy, analysis, and context heavy news stories like the plague.
And you have the Twitter effect, where more and more people are convinced that everything they need to know, they can get in snarky 140 word bites.
Brachiator
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I suppose that this is true to a large degree, and certainly you can find all kinds of examples of this in American history.
But I don’t know that this prevents an editor or reporter from being honest, if he or she chooses to be.
This reminds me of a recent forum on public radio station KPCC An AirTalk Event – Is There Still a Place for Objective Journalism?.
One of the guests insisted that it was perfectly acceptable, even desirable, for progressive journalists to dismiss silly rules about objectivity, because they supposedly an awareness of a larger truth.
I think this is nuts. Reporters may have their biases, and some clearly are doing favors and serving other masters than the news outlets that employ them. But the better publishers, editors and reporters (and there are precious few of them) try to fight this tendency towards bias and can often succeed. A quick example that comes to mind are the newspapers that honestly covered the Civil Rights struggle during the 1950s and 1960s.
And always keep in mind that there are journalists who put their lives on the line to express inconvenient truths.
Ruckus
@Jamie:
The system is not all that grand but it works OK, when it is not corrupted.
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I’m chum!
Well actually I’m not because I don’t watch TV/read newspaper news. But your point is right.
Kay Shawn
Random comments:
The true damage of horserace journalism is that voters are now conditioned to “back a winner” rather than to vote for candidates with actual ideas that may benefit them.
Worse than horserace journalism is the outcomes-prediction spitting contest. Look how this affected President Gore’s terms in office. [This is currently on view with the hurricane coverage: “Irene is now a Cat 1, but it is still going to be a devastating event!”]
Lastly, does no one remember that journalism used to be a “calling” ? Reporting is the job, you could argue, but getting it right despite all the pressures and distractions is tantamount to a calling in this media age.
Samara Morgan
@Amir Khalid: My beef is that Jay Rosen knows better, even if mistermix does not.
the media’s position…is TO SELL PRODUCT.
thus the major eumeme they all embrace is both sides are just the same.
mistermix and Cole and DougJ promote that eumeme here in the name of “discussion”..
Professor Rosen is ignoring it in his horse race line and his political quadrants, even though he knows better.
Some memes are simply bad, wrong, stupid and illformed.
But they get promoted as “reasonable ideas” from the other side of the aisle, because a horse race with only one horse is uninteresting.
its just the “freed” market in action, right?
Samara Morgan
@Brachiator:
not in America, dude.
Brachiator
@Samara Morgan: RE: And always keep in mind that there are journalists who put their lives on the line to express inconvenient truths.
Odd. I posted a story about a Syrian cartoonist, and you reply with “not in America.” Are you having a bad day, having trouble shaking the cobwebs out of your head?
arguingwithsignposts
@Brachiator:
I think you should read McChesney before you make a blanket statement like that. The press was enormously subsidized by the post office, for example (The Alien and Sedition Act was the exception not the norm) all the way down to the present with the auction of broadband spectrum.
I don’t think the Hearsts and Pulitzers were much better. But there are other models. Again, I can’t summarize an entire book in a post.
Most of everything else you say is spot on.
Samara Morgan
@Brachiator: not any more than usual.
free speech is part of the rule of law in America.
it is not in dictatorships and shariah law nations.
smintheus
@ Amir Khalid
What works are piranha-like fish.
Brachiator
@arguingwithsignposts:
I am definitely going to read McChesney and thank you for the recommendation, but he is going to have a lot of work to do for his book to put a new spin on much of what we know about the history of journalism.
To say that the press was subsidized by the post office is not close to saying that the press was regulated by the post office or the government in general. I will be interested in seeing how he deals with the huge number of pamphleteers (like bloggers today) pushing their stuff out to the public.
To say that the Alien and Sedition Act was not the norm misses a huge forest for the trees. Again, that the second president of the US would endorse such a law, with the Constitution still fresh, makes Adams’ actions monumentally important. This also clearly contradicts any easy idea that the founders had some uniform idea about the press.
Many of the founders also had no problems working the insider aspect of the press that Rosen writes about, using journalists to attack their enemies, as well as planting their own anonymous bombs. Thomas Jefferson was notorious for this, especially since he and Madison
opposed Adams and were doing everything they could do to subvert the Federalists.
How many of these models have been successful?