John Stoehr’s tweetstorm linked in the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup includes a link to James Fallows’ brilliant 1996 article, “Why Americans hate the media.”
I had read that essay before, but re-reading was well worth my time — and yours too. Seriously, read the whole thing.
It all applies today, and is even more pronounced now than it was 20 years ago.
Some key takeaways (emphasis mine):
1) The big disconnect: Citizens care about what politicians and government will do for them, reporters focus on what politicians will do politicians will do for them.
In the 1992 presidential campaign candidates spent more time answering questions from "ordinary people"—citizens in town-hall forums, callers on radio and TV talk shows—than they had in previous years. The citizens asked overwhelmingly about the what of politics: What are you going to do about the health-care system? What can you do to reduce the cost of welfare? The reporters asked almost exclusively about the how: How are you going to try to take away Perot's constituency? How do you answer charges that you have flip-flopped?
After the 1992 campaign the contrast between questions from citizens and those from reporters was widely discussed in journalism reviews and postmortems on campaign coverage. Reporters acknowledged that they should try harder to ask questions about things their readers and viewers seemed to care about—that is, questions about the differences that political choices would make in people's lives.
2) An elite perspective: Covering politics as part of a game played by political elites, not from the perspective of the reader.
The natural instinct of newspapers and TV is to present every public issue as if its "real" meaning were political in the meanest and narrowest sense of that term—the attempt by parties and candidates to gain an advantage over their rivals….
...Midway through the interview Bradley gave a long answer to the effect that everyone involved in politics had to get out of the rut of converting every subject or comment into a political "issue," used for partisan advantage. Let's stop talking, Bradley said, about who will win what race and start responding to one another's ideas.
As soon as he finished, Woodruff asked her next question: "Do you want to be President?" It was as if she had not heard a word he had been saying—or couldn't hear it, because the media's language of political analysis is utterly separate from the terms in which people describe real problems in their lives.
3) It’s all about predictions: Reporters are more interested now in predicting the future than reporting the news.
we can ask why reporters spend so much time directing our attention toward what is not much more than guesswork on their part. It builds the impression that journalism is about what's entertaining—guessing what might or might not happen next month—rather than what's useful, such as extracting lessons of success and failure from events that have already occurred.
4) Laziness: Political reporters see themselves as stenographers and don’t do the hard work of learning about issues.
What they lacked was a sense that their responsibility involved something more than standing up to rehash the day's announcements when there was room for them on the news.
5) Lack of accountability and transparency: Reporters demand to know every detail of a politician’s life, but despite significant power, they aren’t held to the same standard:
When politicians and pundits sit alongside one another on Washington talk shows and trade opinions, they underscore the essential similarity of their political roles. The pundits have no vote in Congress, but the overall political impact of a word from George Will, Ted Koppel, William Safire, or any of their colleagues who run the major editorial pages dwarfs anything a third-term congressman could do. If an interest group had the choice of buying the favor of one prominent media figure or of two junior congressmen, it wouldn't even have to think about the decision. The pundit is obviously more valuable.
Neither in his column nor on the show did Will disclose that his wife, Mari Maseng Will, ran a firm that had been paid some $200,000 as a registered foreign agent for the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, and that one of the duties for which she was hired was to get American commentators to criticize the tariff plan. When Will was asked why he had never mentioned this, he replied that it was "just too silly" to think that his views might have been affected by his wife's contract.
6) Out of touch: Reporters care about the game of politics and don't really understand what resonates with voters.
The point is not that the pundits are necessarily wrong and the public necessarily right. The point is the gulf between the two groups' reactions. The very aspects of the speech that had seemed so ridiculous to the professional commentators—its detail, its inclusiveness, the hyperearnestness of Clinton's conclusion about the "common good"—seemed attractive and worthwhile to most viewers.
7) It’s all a game: Reporters aspire to be celebrities famous for their opinions, not ‘just’ reporters who serve the public interest. They don’t take their role as pundits seriously, so the public doesn’t either.
This is why the most depressing aspect of the new talking-pundit industry may be the argument made by many practitioners:the whole thing is just a game, which no one should take too seriously. Michael Kinsley, a highly respected and indisputably talented policy journalist, has written that his paid speaking engagements are usually mock debates, in which he takes the liberal side.
Since the audiences are generally composed of affluent businessmen, my role is like that of the team that gets to lose to the Harlem Globetrotters. But Ido it because it pays well, because it's fun to fly around the country and stay in hotels, and because even a politically unsympathetic audience can provide a cheap ego boost.
The crazy thing is that this still-prescient 20 year old article was written before the rise of Fox News and the Internet. Changes in the media landscape have only exacerbated these trends, including:
- With the rise of Fox News and partisan media, reporters see their roles even more as being about repeating partisan talking point for partisan consumption — and keeping political factions happy — not about getting to truth or fact.
- There has been a significant escalation of the financial and career incentive for reporters to play the game and rise in the media. The sums of money for celebrity pundits/reporters is even greater than ever. That means there’s more incentive not to be seen as biased, not to try to be the arbiter of facts, and not to rock the boat.
- 20 years ago, the media still at least claimed to value objectivity. But today, there’s no pretense at all. Today, it’s all about balance — the need to be ‘fair’ to both sides, to cover both sides equally no matter what, even if that means balancing truth with lies.
- As the credibility of the media continues to erode, the emphasis is even more on conflict and accusations to generate hyper-partisans to click on websites or tune in to hear about the latest outrage. Because they have stopped trying to cover what politics means to people, the only way for reporters to remain relevant is to constantly ratchet up the outrage as a way to get partisans to pay attention.
As a sidenote, the far right discredited the media long ago for their partisans. It’s now happened on the left, too. Few people under the age of 70 trust the media anymore.
I personally gave up on cable news in 2004 — after watching Dana Bash spend several minutes before the Republican Convention telling viewers what Republicans hoped to accomplish politically, not whether their messages were truthful (they weren’t) or what any of it would mean for their viewers. I had known for a while that watching cable news was a waste, that I might as well just read Republican press releases if all their reporters would do is tell us what Republicans are spinning, but at that moment, I decided I was done. I’ve barely watched CNN since.
I used to get laughed at for deriding fake balance in news coverage and the career incentive of reporters to prove to conservatives that they weren’t biased by repeating all Republican spin, no matter what. My in-laws in particular used to think I was just some crazy liberal. But today, they completely get it. They understand that the political reporting has changed and that it’s not what they grew up with.
I know this is long, but I’ll conclude with one thing I think can be done to regain some dignity in the profession of journalism: start holding politicians accountable for transparent bull.
We aren’t going to get reporters to value objectivity again or to cover the news from the perspective of the reader — but maybe they can finally provide a disincentive toward lying.
I’m not talking about calling them out — we’re way past an Edward R. Murrow moment because the Rudy Giulianis of the world don’t care what some discredited journalist says.
I’m talking about stop inviting liars onto the airwaves. if Rudy wants to say there was no terrorist attack on 9/11 or Marco Rubio wants to claim on air that Obama is deliberately trying to harm America, that’s their right. But the media can stop them by simply not inviting them back on the air and not letting them be a source for print stories.
It’s really simple. partisans care about access to the airwaves, not about what a journalist or an opposing political figure says. You take away their access and, to paraphrase a deranged fascist, they’ll stop the BS so fast it’ll make your head spin.
It’s the only they can recapture just a modicum of dignity and respect, while serving their audience’s interest.