Is 2008 campaign “horse-race journalism” — the form of journalism that covers polls, tactical skirmishes, campaign ads, who’s (momentarily) up and who’s (momentarily) down — increasingly popular with journalists but ultimately not giving the public reliable and vital information?
That’s the question posed by Jay Rosen, the New York journalism professor who has a MUST READ media site called Press Think. And Rosen’s answer is YES. In an extensive piece written for TomDispatch.com and also carried on Salon’s cover, Rosen puts the issue under his always comprehensive and lively microscope. It’s worth looking at in detail here — with some comments:
Just so you know, “the media” has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not “get behind” candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. Nor does it “buy” this line or “swallow” that one. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.
TMV has several writers who had (and in some instances still have) careers in journalism. And we call attest that although the phrase “the media” suggests some monolithic beast, Rosen is correct: it just ain’t so. Editors and reporters don’t rub their hands in glee over who they will sandbag on a given day. Hillary or Barack or Mitt or John McC don’t give marching orders to publishers. Reporters don’t all converge at Starbucks sipping overpriced lattes to coordinate their questions and newspaper topics of the day.
Rosen then spells out the realities. They are:
1. The Herd of Independent Minds.
This does not mean you cannot blame the media for things. Go right ahead! Brainless beasts at large in public life can do plenty of damage; and later on — when people ask, “What happened here?” — it sometimes does make sense to say… the beast did this. It’s known as “the pack” in political journalism, but I prefer “the herd of independent minds” (from Harold Rosenberg, 1959) because I think it’s more descriptive of the dynamic. Mark Halperin of Time’s The Page (more about him later) calls the beast the Gang of 500. But gangs have leaders, which means a mind. That’s more than you can say about the media.
Now, the pack, lacking a brain, almost had a heart attack when Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary, since they had told us Obama would run away with it because the pollsters told them the same thing. The near-heart attack wasn’t triggered by a bad prediction, which can happen to anyone, but rather by some spectacular wreckage in the reality-making machinery of political journalism. The top players had begun to report on the Obama wave of victories before there was any Obama wave of victories. The campaign narrative had gotten needlessly — one could say mindlessly — ahead of itself, as when stories about anticipated outcomes in the New Hampshire vote reverberated into campaigns said to be preparing for those outcomes even before New Hampshire voted.
He notes that by “mindless” he means no one is really in charge; the process is in charge.
And bloggers? Their Our (we fell into the trap, too) record wasn’t too terrific:
Independent bloggers, who should have more distance from the pack mind (and often do) were not necessarily better on this score. Greg Sargent of TPM Media — the blog empire run by political journalist Josh Marshall — reported as follows on January 7th: “Camp Hillary insiders who have been with her a very long time, such as Patti Solis Doyle, are worried about the long term damage that could be done to Hillary if she decides to fight on after a New Hampshire loss, though there’s no indication they are yet urging an exit.” Doyle was said to be alarmed about damage to Clinton’s Senate career from staying in the race amid a humiliating string of defeats.
Campaign news in the subjunctive isn’t really news. And primary losses don’t especially need to come at us pre-reacted-to, especially when there is plenty of time to air those reactions once any “string of defeats” actually happens. But while an individual mind in the press corps is quite capable of realizing this, the herd is not.
Yes, you can see “pack” or “herd” journalism — and with each day you can see “pack” or “herd” blogging.
In fact, the whole concept of blogging can mushroom into a big, fat pack as one blog writes something then another links to it and soon bloggers are blasting other bloggers because they have differing viewpoints — and the actual issue gets lost in a sea of name calling. The result: blog firestorms (pegged to an issue, a candidate or a blog) and blogswarms (fits of indignation that spread from blog to blog and some blogs hoping to be noticed by bigger blogs to get links or blogs protesting or blasting someone en mass).
2. Convergence of Judgment
Because we have evolved a way of talking about the news media that fails to recognize this very basic fact — no mind! can’t decide a thing! — everyone is free to grant more intentionality to the organism than reasonably exists. Here are just a few samples from recent weeks:
Rosen then gives specifics with links of how journalistic and blogging bigwigs talk about “the media” as if it is some solitary beast rather than diverse strands. He adds:
And that’s fine, normal, human even. Nonetheless, it’s important to remember: The media has no mind. It might appear to decide things, but if no one takes responsibility for “Edwards must win Iowa,” then it’s not really a decision the media made, but a convergence of judgment among people who may instantly converge around a different judgment if it turns out that Edwards isn’t done after failing to win Iowa.
That’s pretty mindless. Strangely, though, the argument that the media has no mind serves almost no one’s agenda, with one exception, ably represented by Jon Stewart, but including all who satirize the news and the news criers, exposing their collective mindlessness and making it almost… enjoyable.
NAIL ON THE HEAD. Sometimes talk about “the media” fits someone’s agenda. One of the biggest offenders in talking about “the media” as being monolithic (although he leaves out Fox News) is talk show host Bill O’Reilly (who once worked in the media and was a fine reporter).
But most people who’ve worked in the news media (minus those who left embittered due to office political battles they probably won’t talk about) know that there is NO grand design, and NO one voice. News organizations remain highly competitive and are compartmentalized. The editors don’t do conference calls with each other deciding who they are going to “get” one day or “promote” the next.
3. “We have special insight”
A key point: “we have special insight.” The current generation of political reporters has based its bid for election-year authority on its horse race and handicapping skills. But reporters actually have no such skills. … Who cares if you are good at anticipating events that will unroll in clear fashion without you? Why do we need people who know how this is going to play out in South Carolina when we can just wait for the voters to play it out themselves?
(Actually, Jay…then this blog would be out of business:)
Among the “bogus narratives” the campaign press has developed so far, the Politico editors chose three to illustrate their humiliation. John McCain’s “collapse” in the summer of 2007, which meant we could write him off; Mike Huckabee’s win in Iowa, where the candidate without an organization took a state where electoral success, we were assured, was all about organization; and Obama’s “change the tone in politics” campaign which, according to the Gang, was not going to be in tune with the voters’ rawer, more partisan feelings in ’08. All three were a bust, suggesting political journalists have no special insight into: How is this going to play out? What they have are cheap, portable routines in which you ask that kind of question, and try to get ahead of the race. This, too, is what I mean by mindlessness.
4. “Removed from the experience”
Rosen then discusses an insightful piece by Christopher Hayes of The Nation magazine that had this quote:
[The Nation’s Hayes]Reporting at events like this is exciting and invigorating, but it’s also terrifying. I’ve done it now a number of times at conventions and such, and in the past I was pretty much alone the entire time. I didn’t know any other reporters, so I kept to myself and tried to navigate the tangle of schedules and parking lots and hotels and event venues. It’s daunting and the whole time you think: ‘Am I missing something? What’s going? Oh man, I should go interview that guy in the parka with the fifteen buttons on his hat.’ You fear getting lost, or missing some important piece of news, or making an ass out of yourself when you have to muster up that little burst of confidence it takes to walk up to a stranger and start asking them questions.”
Rosen then writes:
Whereas he had once thought of it as a rookie’s experience, this year he learned that the fear never goes away. “Veteran reporters are just as panicked about getting lost or missing something, just as confused about who to talk to. This why reporters move in packs. It’s like the first week of freshman orientation, when you hopped around to parties in groups of three dozen, because no one wanted to miss something or knew where anything was.”
It is rare to find a campaign correspondent who is inner-directed, with a vision of how to report on the election season that sends her off on her own. Campaign reporters tend to be massively other-directed. The reality-check is what the rest of the press is doing — and the Web makes it far easier to check. Mindless.
And, indeed, anyone who worked on a newspaper knows that it’s often the fear of “Are we missing something?…What’s the latest twist on this story?…This story is still alive.”
And there is also the fact that when a story is alive reporters and editors want to advance the story — so the competition has to rewrite or match THEM rather then their organization doing the catch up or matching.
5. Under the influence.
Rosen notes that the idea begins: go out there now and find out who is going to win. He cites various reporter’s on this topic and stresses:
The only decent definition of “information” I know of states that it is a measure of uncertainty reduced. But voters are the ones who reduce uncertainty in elections. They can do it pretty well themselves, without the help of horse-race journalists…Let me say it again: Reporters have no special insight into how elections will turn out.
6. Less innocence, more politics.
He concludes:
Who’s-gonna-win is portable, reusable from cycle to cycle, and easily learned by newcomers to the press pack. Journalists believe it brings readers to the page and eyeballs to the screen. It “works” regardless of who the candidates are, or where the nation is in historical time. No expertise is actually needed to operate it. In that sense, it is economical. (And when everyone gets the winner wrong the “surprise” becomes a good story for a few days.)
But the biggest advantage of horse-race journalism is that it permits reporters and pundits to “play up their detachment.” Focusing on the race advertises the political innocence of the press because “who’s gonna win?” is not an ideological question. By asking it you reaffirm that yours is not an ideological profession. This is experienced as pleasure by a lot of mainstream journalists. Ever noticed how spirits lift when the pundit roundtable turns from the Middle East or the looming recession to the horse race, and there’s an opportunity for sizing up the candidates? To be manifestly agenda-less is journalistic bliss. Of course, since trying to get ahead of the voters can affect how voters view the candidates, the innocence, too, is an illusion. But a potent one.
Absolutely. This was noted by various bloggers about how the media drove the poll-driven narrative about Obamania sweeping the nation and obsolete Hillary Clinton but when Clinton won in New Hampshire… then it was about her surprise win…a surprise in a state she was originally favored to win until Obama won Iowa. then came the stories about it all being about “change,” how Obama was change and Clinton wasn’t etc.
Who’s going to win — and what’s their strategy — plays well on television, because it generates an endless series of puzzles toward which journalists can gesture as they display their savviness, which is the unofficial religion of the mainstream press.
And does Rosen have a suggestion on how it could be done?
Yes — which is why he’s always so compelling to read:
What a waste! Journalists ought to be bringing new knowledge into the system, as Charlie Savage and the Boston Globe did in December. They gave the presidential candidates a detailed questionnaire on the limits of executive branch power and nine candidates responded. This is a major issue that any candidate for president should have to address, given the massive build-up of presidential power engineered by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. We desperately need to know what the contenders for the presidency intend to do — continue the build-up or roll it back? — but we won’t know unless the issue is injected into the campaign.
Now, that’s both a political and a journalistic act. And where does the authority for doing such things come from? There is actually no good answer to that within the press system as it stands, and so the beast would never go there.
The Globe’s questionnaire grew out of Savage’s earlier reporting on the “unitary executive” and the drive to create an “unfettered presidency.” (See this PBS interview with Savage; also, contrast the Globe’s treatment with more of a throwaway effort from the New York Times.) Here, the job of the campaign press is not to preempt the voters’ decision by asking endlessly, and predicting constantly, who’s going to win. The job is to make certain that what needs to be discussed will be discussed in time to make a difference – and then report on that.
NOTE: Rosen’s piece is long and this only gives you the key points. His article MUST be read in full by anyone interested in the campaign and media issues — of any ideology or political party. Or news outlet.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.