Campaign 2008: The Media Pushes the Stone Up the Hill One More Time
Mainstream news media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign is turning out to once again be the same dreary affair that it is every four years: The candidates manipulate the media. The media obliges and manipulates back. There are recurring story lines that bear only coincidental resemblance to what’s really going on. The focus is almost entirely on the horserace and rarely on the issues. And there is far too little introspection or self criticism.
There is one important difference this year — the thousand of blogs, ranging from a handful of widely-read biggies to little blogs like Kiko’s House, that will be all over the MSM’s campaign coverage like one big cheap suit.
You can bet your computer hard drive that these blogs will put heat on the MSM stalwarts when they get caught out, as CNN did in its crass manipulation of the questions that the Democratic candidates were spoon fed at its Las Vegas “debate” last week and the MSM as a whole did post-debate in peddling the ridiculous story line that Hillary Clinton had “rebounded” without explaining why the frontrunner and increasingly prohibitive favorite to win the nomination had to rebound in the first place.
Blogs will not have made a big difference in how the MSM covers the campaign by the time Election Day rolls around. Sure, they may leverage some story or another to the point where the MSM is forced to pay attention. But they at least will be a reminder for voters that they are being diddled. And that in the end they make up their minds about who they should vote for and not allow Lou Dobbs, David Broder or some other co-opted insider do it for them.
I know of what I speak. Beginning in 1972 with the Nixon-McGovern race and mercifully ending in 2000 with the Bush-Gore debacle, I was involved in covering eight president campaigns and was in charge of coverage of two campaigns for a major metropolitan daily newspaper.
There were three discernable trends over this 28-year slog.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.
13 Responses to “Campaign 2008: The Media Pushes the Stone Up the Hill One More Time”
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An ecttemely important post, Shaun!
I nearly scolled past without reading it, because I’ve become so dissilusioned iwith campaign coverage, and political coveage in general. I’m glad I stopped to read this.
Despite the time and words devoted to this, so cricitcally important campaign, It’s shocking to realize how little has been devoted to matters of substance. The media, and many blogs, are treating this like a horse race where the riding costumes of the jockeys get more attention than the abilities of the horses they are are riding.
While digging up colorful minutae with which they can hype their own imporatnce, the things that matter most are left ignored. There is no meaningful background information, the kind that used to be part and parcel of political, as well as regular news coverage. How many words have been spoken, for instance, about Hillary’s job performance at the Senate, aside from her votes on controversial subjects like Iran and Iraq? We know more about her dress style than her work at her job.
The debates are covered like boxing matches: who hit whom and who lost balance. The jab to the jaw is the headline story as an end itself, not the policy differences which elicited the punch.
The way the not-front-runner candidates are ignored is a dsgrace. They have to befiend UFO passengers to earn attention. At the same time, the coverage is playing right into the hands of the GOP strategy, by making everything, I mean everything, about Hillary. Her brand of toothpaste can get more attention than Biden’s analysis ot the situation in Iraq.
The more is said, the less we know. The media create a mirage which many voters will use to make voting decisions. At this critical time, tha scares me through and through.
BTW. the more I see of these debates, the less value I see in them. PBS ran a series of single candidate interviews which provided more actual information than all the debates put together.It turns out that a capable interviewer can ask tough questions and elicit a broad range of information without being combative or overshadowing the subject of the interview.
Bah, humbug!
It’s all about money, of course, obscene amounts of money. News outlets, and personalities like Russet and Mathews ,use this to peddle their own shows instead of offering thoughtful coverage as a public service.
Excellent post, Shaun. What’s old is new again, and so on.
The best stuff is below the fold, so I hope people click… Shaun, I’d love to hear from you why you think the reporting system broke and what, if anything, can be done to correct course. Given media and societal evolution, it’s certainly a complicated issue — but IMHO a critical one.
Idiosyncrat:
I think that individually, many reporters strive to break the mold. But the pack mentality — and the mentality of editors who are more interested in matching the competition story for story than allowing their reporters to do offbeat and incisive stuff — dumbs down the whole process.
In fairness to those reporters, very few have the luxury of a Joan Didion to pick and choose what they write about, let alone relaxed deadlines. With the news cycle pretty much a thing of the past in today’s 24/7 world, that is even more true than usual.
You’re right that campaign coverage is “a complicated issue” and I am inevitably painting some very good reporters with a very broad brush. But I was involved in the game far too long to not see the problems — and incestuous relationships — with an increasingly jaundiced eye.
A very informative article. My own opinion is the lack of substantive reporting can be laid at the feet of the takeover of the media by multinational corporations. At one time, the news departments of TV & radio stations & networks were a public service that were expected to perform as part of their licensing responsibilities. Newspapers & magazines were free standing companies who were answerable to their subscribers first, & then their advertisers, period. Now most of our major media are parts of conglomerates whose primary business is not even related to news or entertainment. Often the “competition” of the various outlets are part of the same controlling company. Since the interests of these corporations are in opposition of the average Joe or Jane, & it is these corporations who sign the checks, they dictate what is covered, how it is covered, & the political slant of that coverage. Any journalist who fights the system effectively will find themselves out of a job. Remember what happened to Dan Rather? Whether you liked him or not, the treatment of him by CBS, which is a small part of Sony/Viacom, is a good case study.
These same conglomerates also are masters of spin, which comes from the accumulation of over a century’s experience in making advertising work. One of their successes is the myth of the “left wing mass media”, which they effectively control. While these so-named outlets will cover stories that selectively bash individual people, corporations, or parties, you seldom or never read or hear stories that oppose corporations & their practices as a whole,, or stories that would really harm the individual owners of a particular network. NBC will never air a story or op ed that would gravely injure GE, their owner, for example.
Similarly, the various parts of the MSM slant their political coverage according to their interests. We are seeing a lot of Clinton press lately, more of it positive (or neutral) than negative. Meanwhile, Edwards & Obama receive more negative than positive. It is not coincidence that that she is also the top recipient of all candidates of corporate donations. Of the Democrats, she poses the least threat to their interests. Since the odds are our next POTUS will be a Democrat, they line up to get on her good side. OTOH, it would surprise me if they are not consistently donating primarily to Republicans in the lesser races.
The writer makes the point about a parallel truism: When surrounded by alligators, it is difficult to remember that the original intention was to drain the swamp. The MSM is really good at creating alligators, & getting better all the time. The gator creation by them is now bleeding through to the blogs, but some are doing a good job of focusing on the original intent.
I like the comment by
bob in fla.
Installing corpoeate interests at a lighter level than public service responisbilites has definitely changed all of news coverage, and not for the better.
News has become an advertisement for business, siguised as entertainemnt.
bob in fla does indeed make a good point, but the corporatization of the media has merely accelerated negative trends and not caused them.
To take a stand on campaign issues visit http://www.mitchellinteractive.com its a great site!
Bob and domajot, I agree this has something to do with it, but it’s way to easy to jump on this bandwagon and leave it at that… Here’s my take — it started off as a short response and then I got a case of bloggerhea, so please excuse the excess
I think the idea that news was ever impartial is a delusion. Information is nothing if not propaganda. There’s better presentations and worse, better reporters and worse, but it’s always been filtered through a lens of some sort. A lot of the cognitive dissonance now, IMO, is that we simply have easy access to infinitely more sources of information that present viewpoints which both challenge our individual worldviews and also champion them. The barriers to entry are almost nil… Anyone can put up a blog and present their views for the world to see. Most of it is total shit — but it doesn’t matter. There’s something for everyone! This has created chaos in the marketplace of ideas and with the digital age fostering a society afflicted with ADD, we want our info immediately and we sure do like multimedia.
The biggest sin of corporations, IMHO, isn’t their structural biases so much as their structuring of news divisions to efficiently generate revenue. News content is simply a vehicle to sell advertising, and advertising is about quality and quantity of eyeballs. As a result, news budgets have been gutted. In depth reporting — the good stuff — is expensive and simply doesn’t attract the eyeballs nor the advertising to support its expense. Overseas bureaus are also expensive. Therefore media companies are spending less on such endeavors — the REAL investigative reporting if you will, in favor of the inexpensive flash that we now criticize as fluff. The days of having a reporter on payroll who spends months working on a single story are by and large over… It’s simply more cost-effective to rely on wire agencies such as the AP, Reuters and AFP and stringers who viciously compete in the field for the next best-selling tidbit or image.
But we the eyeballs are also to blame for this because we buy the very products that we love to claim to loathe. Tabloids around the world sell like hotcakes. Stories about Britney Spears move papers and generate webclicks that soldiers in Iraq and Bengalis washed about by cyclones can only dream about. Might not like it, but the numbers are staggering. And we as consumers are to blame for this.
Back to reporters, many of the greats who did such in-depth reporting are for the first time disillusioned with what their beloved profession has become. Some are being silenced by budget cuts, others are proactively jumping ship to more lucrative opportunities — in places like PR firms and corporate communications departments. With the profession a bit sullied and most reporter jobs paying crap, it’s probably of no surprise that many of our best and brightest youth opt to take their rhetorical talents to law school instead, yielding a broken talent pipeline.
But I’m not all doom and gloom… The marketplace of ideas is shaking out and this is exciting. The world is an incredibly conflicting and complex place and our awareness of that because of global connectedness creates a chaos that may just be the new normal. As people recognize this, champions will arise and consolidation around new structures will take place. The best we can do is plant the seeds to foster that taking place in a positive way… Get the right talent in place and the right stewardship. No, I don’t think corporations are going to be again running their news operations as a loss leader anytime soon, but who knows — there’s a lot of fabulously wealthy people out there who made their money in the digital age and might just see this as a cause worth championing with their dollars.
Those that are really interested in this topic should check out poynter.org. No easy answers out there…
Idiosyncrat:
Beautifully thought out. You are correct, and blogs are but a small part of this.
All but Fox will put on their predictable blue cheerleader uniforms. (Clinton News Network not only has its blue uniform on but has selected the next Democratic nominee for us already.)
The inter-party debates have been scheduled. All that remains are the agreements to be signed between the two parties defining what questions will be asked.
Presidential candidates:
09/26/2008 University of Mississippi, Oxford
10/07/2008 Belmont Univ, Nashville, TN
10/15/2008 Hofstra Univ, Hempstead, NY
Vice Presidential candidates:
10/02/2008 Washington Univ, St. Louis, MO
* * *
That never has stopped them from exuding their blatant liberal bias (nor for Fox’s being treated as a heretic for not doing this religiously enough), but it has affected journalists’ views of the industry. Pew did a report on this a number of months ago that is worth reading, here: (“Bottom-Line Pressures Now Hurting Coverage…”); also this (“Internet News Audience Highly Critical…”) is worth viewing.
Shaun and Idio,
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that the whole problem can be laid at the feet of corporations in a simplidtic way; it’s much too compkicated. For one theing, ;ike Idosyncrati syas, the eyeballs are also to bleme.
I don’t subscribe to the ‘consumer demand’ bottom line in making decisions of importance, however. To a large extent, the consumers of news (like the consumers of goods and services) are like lemmings. They are perfectly capable of, not only diving off a cliff, but of demanding the right to do so.
Those in positions of leadership and influence have a responsibility to rise above that mentality and tp point out the pitfalls in being a lemming. rather than to encourage being so even further. Remember the public service aspect of news, something which is rarely even mentioned these days?
There is responsibility at every level, not only the individual one. The disbursers of news are not there to simply mouth information bites, they have a responsibility to put the ‘facts’ in proper context.
Can anyone ever achieve perfect, unbiased pitch? I seriously doubt it. That it should be the goal of news vendors is of crucial importnace, however.Nothing has ever been perfect and nothing can be. Giving up trying to reach for perffection,is the death knell for hopes of having a rational majority in charge of the eyeballs. Right now, even the vigilant seem to be powerless, because they are outnumbered.
What the new technologies and their blog children will bring to the table is impossible to predict.
I’m not feeling optimistic, and I can only hope it’s a sign of having reached a crotchtey old age. What I have seen over the years, however, is repeated hopes in the next new idea, the next new develpment, the next change as the one that will deliver us from the troubles of the past. Each new hope has delivered change, but not necessaritly improvemtn Because human nature and the laws of nature never change, even as surrounidng tools and furnishings change.
When small and scattered news sources on the internet consolidate to produce more powerful leading voices, they will face the same problems of financing, backers and profitability as the MSM do today. The will become the new MSM, only in a medium other than printed pages.
The non-profit ventures financed by wealthy donors sound promissing. Should the first be successful enough to inspire emulation, however, will quality triumph over agenda driven vehicles? I keep hearing the footsteps of human nature behind the innovators, and I wonder.
I saw a documentry on the brief hisory of democracy in Greece. It reminded me of all had read about it in school and of all I have managed to forget since. We have lasted longer, and I hope we continue to do better. The similarites were gloom inspiring, however.