What We Love
by DavidNYC
Sun Mar 02, 2008 at 09:10:01 AM PDT
I submit the following:
Science reporters love science
Sports reporters love sports
Political reporters hate politics
These are broad generalizations, no doubt. But I think there's a lot of truth to them, truth which can teach us about ourselves, about the traditional media, and about the relationship between us.
I think I'm on pretty safe ground when I say that science reporters love science. They thrill to the genome, the Hubble Deep Field, exobiology, exoplanetology, the Large Hadron Collider, stem cells, Schroedinger, Hawking, Wiles, Lake Vostok and coral reefs. Love of the subject is why they went into science reporting in the first place.
And a love of the subject is, I don't doubt, why science bloggers write about the topics they do. I think that makes for a lot of common ground between science bloggers and science reporters. That doesn't mean that science reporters don't face their fare share of criticism - here you have one reporter who doesn't debunk "intelligent design" sternly enough, here another who doesn't think educating the public about flu epidemics is in his job description.
But in the end, I have to imagine that if you hosted a conference for science reporters and bloggers, they'd have a damn good time together, swapping stories & trading jokes. And that's because they are passionate about the same things.
So too with sports. Sports reporters delight at the crack of the bat, the the triple, the triple-double, the hat-trick, the trick play, the Hail Mary, the home-run record, Musial, Mikita, Marino, the perfect bunt, and the perfect game. Of course sports reporters chose their profession out of love of the subject.
And the passionate sports fans who become sports bloggers, same thing. Once again, there's always the knuckle-headed reporter who insists that OPS is newfangled non-sense, or the embarrassing "homer" who can't bring himself to criticize the local team. But again, if you rented out the bleachers for a crowd of sports reporters and bloggers, they'd have a hell of a time at the game together, swapping stories & trading jokes.
But oh - the political reporters. They are a breed apart. They like politics-as-theater: Hillary's pantsuit, Obama's turban, the Clenis, the flight-suit, America's Mayor, dead-or-alive, he-said, she-said and all the world's a stage.
But they hate what we identify as politics: winning elections because they matter; ensuring our judiciary respects the Constitution; passing legislation to help the disadvantaged, the middle class, the environment, the world.
They hate all this because our brand of politics is about caring, and there is nothing more un-cool, more gauche, more unacceptable than caring. Like the astrophysics geek (of course), or the armchair sabermetrician, we politi-philes are nerds at heart - nerds who care about our chosen subject, and nerds who care about outcomes.
I think we all know that political reporters, on the other hand, are the ultimate post-ironic kool kidz, snickering in the corner at us propeller-heads who wear our hearts on our sleeves. Sports writers understand that, in the end, what they write about really almost always is just a game. The problem is that political reporters think the same way about their beat as well.
And this, I think, explains the antagonistic view many political reporters have toward bloggers. I think it almost boggles their minds that there are people out there - normal, ordinary people - who care about politics and aren't paid to do so. At the same time, we despise the Maureen Dowd-style obsessions shared by such a wide swath of the political reporting class, and we have a hard time respecting anyone who doesn't take politics as seriously as we do.
Put another way, political reporters hate what we love and love what we hate. This stands in stark contrast to the science and sports worlds - examples which I picked in part because these are other interests of mine, but also because I think they are good stand-ins for just about any other topics. Sports & science reporters & bloggers have plenty in common; political reporters and bloggers share little.
I'm not sure, though, that political reporters could really have any other m.o. The twentieth-century invention of "objective" reporting all but prohibits reporters from caring about political outcomes. This means that the kind of people attracted to political reporting almost necessarily have to find politics appealing only as some sort of grand kabuki.
It wasn't always this way - the slavish obeisance to "objectivity" replaced what used to be sharp-elbowed partisanship in American print media. But could our frayed modus vivendi with the political press corps actually be preferable to the alternative? In a future essay, I'll take a look at an illustrative episode from an earlier and very different media era - and then you can decide.
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