If you haven’t noticed, media people are talking about the media again. At the dawn of a new presidential campaign, a debate is swirling over how to improve media coverage of a presidential campaign. Can the press deliver more policy substance and less of the salacious, conflict-based clickbait that drove so much media coverage in 2016? Versions of this conversation flare every four years, usually too late and to little effect, but in the wake of the mainstream media’s many blunders in the last campaign—including our national obsession with Hillary Clinton’s e-mails—this latest meditation carries a sense of urgency.
Frank Bruni recently admonished the press in The New York Times for lavishing too much attention on Donald Trump’s tweets and silly nicknames. Brian Beutler of Crooked Media rightly condemned the media’s “misbegotten habit of prizing partisan balance over its obligation to faithfully represent political reality to consumers.” Jay Rosen, the N.Y.U. media critic, made a similar point about the news media’s addiction to “cheap drama” and ESPN-style programming. Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post media writer, recalled how, when she was public editor of the Times, she examined a sample of the paper’s campaign coverage in 2016 and found that “three out of every four pieces of political journalism were horse race coverage.” Of course, the Times was hardly the only culprit. Virtually no outlet was immune.
Many political journalists choose to brush aside these criticisms, preferring to wash themselves of any wrongdoing, or just apologize and move along, despite the fact that trust in the media is at an all-time low. But one Times reporter, Nicholas Confessore, kindly engaged on Twitter, agreeing with Sullivan on the need for more substantive policy coverage, but lamenting how difficult it is to execute. “What’s really tough is integrating more policy reporting,” he said. “There’s a lot of policy reporting; but it’s mostly adjacent to campaign reporting. And candidate policy proposals are static; campaigns are not.”
There’s something of a false choice coursing through many of these arguments: that political reporters use their access to politicians to cover personalities, scandals, polls, and the “savvy” inside game. Sexy! And policy reporters cover health care, budget proposals, climate, criminal justice. Boring! These two brands of reporting are, to use Confessore’s frame, “adjacent” but cannot be conjoined. Is that right?
Not really. Many of Trump’s biggest controversies, during the campaign and in the White House, have been pegged to his policies. In truth, with Twitter operating as the water cooler of elite political conversation, it seems to be the case that policy reporting and political reporting are fused in a way they never were before. Social media and the ubiquity of the smartphone have allowed reporters to more easily attach human faces—actual stakes, not just charts and “dataviz”—to policies under scrutiny.
“The same social-media mechanisms that have poisoned the conversation have also elevated a sophisticated two-way policy conversation that includes experts and actual people affected by policies,” said Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. “The Internet has created communities of expertise and sophistication around everything from how labor law treats transgender employees to carbon taxation to economic policy. Political reporters used to bullshit their way through a discussion of the hard stuff. But you can’t get away with that anymore. Which is good! Both professional journalists and the people who don’t get paid to do it for a living and are in the same centralized conversation, mostly on Twitter, about policy.”
Trump’s policy conduct since taking office, a noxious gumbo of secrecy and audacity, has also been a forcing mechanism for good reporting. His brazenness has prompted newsrooms to grind out some of the best journalism in years. Trump’s secrecy around policy-making has prompted reporters to dig even deeper into the budget cuts and decision-making at his Cabinet agencies. His audacity around policy-making has sparked mass public convulsions and impressive media coverage of family separations at the U.S-Mexico border, the impact of a trade war on farmers across the country, the threat of coastal communities sinking into the rising and warming oceans, the real-life impact of the ongoing government shutdown. These are all policy stories—and they frequently top your feeds, your podcasts, the evening newscasts, the front pages of news sites. Because Trump’s policy agenda is high stakes, and so is coverage of those policies, which ensures that people actually watch and read when the news feels big enough.
So, reporters are covering policy. They are also covering the drama and personality of politics, which is valuable, too. That kind of reporting tells us much about a candidate’s fitness for office. But like a lot of journalist-on-journalist combat these days, this debate about horse-race reporting versus policy reporting feels too small. It obscures a larger point about the world we live in, which is decidedly not the hallowed journalism universe of yore. The conversation that should concern everyone, in both media and politics, is not about what gets covered. It’s about what gets attention.
At a time when technology is transforming voter behavior at unprecedented speed, this is a problem that the mainstream media, even on its best behavior, cannot possibly solve without a drastic reimagining of what journalism is and how it reaches contemporary audiences. But not all hope is lost. If we think about policy journalism as simply the impact of governance on the American condition, the real human consequences of decisions made in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals, then policy journalism isn’t actually “really tough.” It’s just journalism. And in the Trump era, the best of it has grabbed us. So as we search for clues on how journalists can repair the forever broken state of campaign reporting, it’s useful to sort through the moments when meaty policy fights have overtaken the national political conversation, to understand how attention works in today’s media.
There are lessons here for presidential candidates, too, who deserve a fair hearing of their ideas in a media landscape that depressingly seems to prize re-tweets and ratings over depth and context. How do we have a presidential campaign that’s more about issues, and less about Beto O’Rourke’s dental cleanings or Elizabeth Warren’s beer selection? There are clues hiding in plain sight for both reporters and politicians. And like all conversations about political attention in the early days of 2019, this one begins with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
by Peter Hamby, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Xinhua News Agency/Eyevine/Redux
Frank Bruni recently admonished the press in The New York Times for lavishing too much attention on Donald Trump’s tweets and silly nicknames. Brian Beutler of Crooked Media rightly condemned the media’s “misbegotten habit of prizing partisan balance over its obligation to faithfully represent political reality to consumers.” Jay Rosen, the N.Y.U. media critic, made a similar point about the news media’s addiction to “cheap drama” and ESPN-style programming. Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post media writer, recalled how, when she was public editor of the Times, she examined a sample of the paper’s campaign coverage in 2016 and found that “three out of every four pieces of political journalism were horse race coverage.” Of course, the Times was hardly the only culprit. Virtually no outlet was immune.
Many political journalists choose to brush aside these criticisms, preferring to wash themselves of any wrongdoing, or just apologize and move along, despite the fact that trust in the media is at an all-time low. But one Times reporter, Nicholas Confessore, kindly engaged on Twitter, agreeing with Sullivan on the need for more substantive policy coverage, but lamenting how difficult it is to execute. “What’s really tough is integrating more policy reporting,” he said. “There’s a lot of policy reporting; but it’s mostly adjacent to campaign reporting. And candidate policy proposals are static; campaigns are not.”
There’s something of a false choice coursing through many of these arguments: that political reporters use their access to politicians to cover personalities, scandals, polls, and the “savvy” inside game. Sexy! And policy reporters cover health care, budget proposals, climate, criminal justice. Boring! These two brands of reporting are, to use Confessore’s frame, “adjacent” but cannot be conjoined. Is that right?
Not really. Many of Trump’s biggest controversies, during the campaign and in the White House, have been pegged to his policies. In truth, with Twitter operating as the water cooler of elite political conversation, it seems to be the case that policy reporting and political reporting are fused in a way they never were before. Social media and the ubiquity of the smartphone have allowed reporters to more easily attach human faces—actual stakes, not just charts and “dataviz”—to policies under scrutiny.“The same social-media mechanisms that have poisoned the conversation have also elevated a sophisticated two-way policy conversation that includes experts and actual people affected by policies,” said Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. “The Internet has created communities of expertise and sophistication around everything from how labor law treats transgender employees to carbon taxation to economic policy. Political reporters used to bullshit their way through a discussion of the hard stuff. But you can’t get away with that anymore. Which is good! Both professional journalists and the people who don’t get paid to do it for a living and are in the same centralized conversation, mostly on Twitter, about policy.”
Trump’s policy conduct since taking office, a noxious gumbo of secrecy and audacity, has also been a forcing mechanism for good reporting. His brazenness has prompted newsrooms to grind out some of the best journalism in years. Trump’s secrecy around policy-making has prompted reporters to dig even deeper into the budget cuts and decision-making at his Cabinet agencies. His audacity around policy-making has sparked mass public convulsions and impressive media coverage of family separations at the U.S-Mexico border, the impact of a trade war on farmers across the country, the threat of coastal communities sinking into the rising and warming oceans, the real-life impact of the ongoing government shutdown. These are all policy stories—and they frequently top your feeds, your podcasts, the evening newscasts, the front pages of news sites. Because Trump’s policy agenda is high stakes, and so is coverage of those policies, which ensures that people actually watch and read when the news feels big enough.
So, reporters are covering policy. They are also covering the drama and personality of politics, which is valuable, too. That kind of reporting tells us much about a candidate’s fitness for office. But like a lot of journalist-on-journalist combat these days, this debate about horse-race reporting versus policy reporting feels too small. It obscures a larger point about the world we live in, which is decidedly not the hallowed journalism universe of yore. The conversation that should concern everyone, in both media and politics, is not about what gets covered. It’s about what gets attention.
At a time when technology is transforming voter behavior at unprecedented speed, this is a problem that the mainstream media, even on its best behavior, cannot possibly solve without a drastic reimagining of what journalism is and how it reaches contemporary audiences. But not all hope is lost. If we think about policy journalism as simply the impact of governance on the American condition, the real human consequences of decisions made in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals, then policy journalism isn’t actually “really tough.” It’s just journalism. And in the Trump era, the best of it has grabbed us. So as we search for clues on how journalists can repair the forever broken state of campaign reporting, it’s useful to sort through the moments when meaty policy fights have overtaken the national political conversation, to understand how attention works in today’s media.
There are lessons here for presidential candidates, too, who deserve a fair hearing of their ideas in a media landscape that depressingly seems to prize re-tweets and ratings over depth and context. How do we have a presidential campaign that’s more about issues, and less about Beto O’Rourke’s dental cleanings or Elizabeth Warren’s beer selection? There are clues hiding in plain sight for both reporters and politicians. And like all conversations about political attention in the early days of 2019, this one begins with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
by Peter Hamby, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Xinhua News Agency/Eyevine/Redux
