In the wake of another election cycle marked by horse-race coverage, the state of U.S. political journalism is once again a subject of fierce debate. Much of the criticism from the left of the national media – particularly The New York Times, Washington Post, and cable news – is centered around the concept of “access journalism,” which identifies the major problem as reporters getting too close to subjects.
While I wholeheartedly agree that the national political media coverage is abysmal, I think the focus on access fails to identify the real problem. What is that? In a nutshell, national political media write as if their audience is the people they write about and not their readers.
Before I explain, let me provide my credentials. I was a successful journalist for 25 years, going back to the 1980s, split evenly between newspapers and the financial press. I won national awards for my financial reporting and eventually got recruited into the industry I covered (where I still publish research regularly). My breaking news articles were regularly re-reported by major press, including Bloomberg, the NY Times and other major newspapers. I broke stories about Donald Trump’s business in the early aughts. I say this not to brag, but to establish my credentials for my critique. I know how it works – I did it for decades. I’m more comfortable with defending hard-working journalists than bashing them, and I know that a lot of criticism is unfair and/or ill-informed.
Access is Not a Dirty Word
Problems with political coverage usually are framed as issues of “access journalism” or bias. Maggie Haberman, the New York Times “Trump Whisperer” is oft cited a prime example of access journalism. I have many issues with the Times coverage, but to me this is the wrong criticism. For one thing, all journalists need access, they need to get sources to trust them. That frequently requires more than a purely “on the record” relationship. That means getting to know people, getting them to like and trust you, which often involves some level of interaction beyond pure business.
Getting information from people who have no incentive to speak to you is a skill. That way you learn information you wouldn’t otherwise know. The fact is that all reporters know lots of newsworthy things we can’t prove to the satisfaction of publication standards. Many potential great scoops of mine went unpublished because I didn’t have enough sources or many other reasons. But getting the tips to track down involved access. Most of my sources as a financial journalist would have gotten into hot water with the SEC or their companies by talking to me, but they trusted me, not only to not out them, but to get the information right.
People who have never done it might see it as nefarious, but it doesn’t have to be – provided it is used in the service of readers. Making sources is important, but it’s not the end goal, and that’s the trick. The goal is not only to find out what is going on but to present an accurate picture of the world to readers. If the only way to keep a source is to peddle misinformation or lies in your articles, that’s a bad deal, the source is using you, when you should be using them.
Another criticism of which Haberman is a prime example is that some of the national press holds scoops to use in books. Again, this is not the most important issue to me. The ethics of whether journalists save tidbits for books is between them and their editors.
There is a real problem with withholding information though, and Haberman is a prime example. From her book we know she knew about a lot of the chaos and criminality of the Trump administration, but the stories she wrote in real time time didn’t reflect what was going on in her beat. Despite what she knew about Trump and his staff, she wrote many dozens of stories that in real time reflected a normalcy that she and (I presume) her editors knew not to be true.
One specific example is when Mar-A-Lago was searched by the FBI this summer she wrote an article using Trump sources that implied that it was innocent because Trump was a sloppy record-keeper and like to hold harmless trophies to impress dinner guests. The truth – as she certainly knew – was that many of the documents sought by the National Archives were classified and pertained to national security – and Trump kept them intentionally as he very quickly and publicly admitted. To me this is like if I watched a house burn and then wrote an article that said, “police say there is no fire.” I couldn’t imagine doing that. I’d either refuse to print the lie or make clear in my article that the official account is a lie.
Of course, a journalist must at least try to include the side of all parties in stories. But Haberman/the Times went beyond that, framing the article in a way that purported the truth of something that she almost certainly knew was wrong. At the very least, Trump’s record of lying should ever present any journalist from writing in a way that treats his uncorroborated assertions as fact. Yet many of the stories about Trump are lies, not because the individual sentences are factually incorrect (though that happens, too) but because the perspective of the stories are false.
The Right Perspective
From my point of view as a journalist nothing was more important than getting perspective right. This is the hardest part of journalism. If it was easy, anyone could do it, and most can’t. What is perspective? It’s getting the tone, the narrative, as correctly as you get the facts. Now that I’m on the side of being interviewed by the press (as opposed to doing interviews) I’m struck by how often articles about my industry (sometimes quoting me) can get many facts correct but misrepresent the big picture narrative of what is happening in the market.
National political media (in general, certainly there are many excellent reporters) are great at writing stories that are true but the perspective sucks because they focus on topics that are irrelevant (but her emails!) introduced in bad faith (Democrats in disarray! Real Americans in Ohio diners! Are Dems pedophiles? etc.) or whataboutism (sure, Republicans incited an insurrection, but Biden was dishonest about a wedding invite). The recent Twitter files are a prime example, a bunch of mostly true facts that are being hyped to make ridiculous and blatantly false assertions about media bias. The Twitter bruhaha is an example of purposeful twisting of facts to feed the Fox frenzy, but it happens even when bias is not an issue.
There are a lot of theories as to why this is, including bias of liberal or conservative bent. I think, however, that for most of the national newspapers and media outlets something else is going on. To me, they’re gauging the quality of their coverage by how the partisans react. In other words, if both sides complain, editors at the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, etc., see that as proof they’re balanced and doing right.
It’s All About the Readers
To me, however, that’s the wrong standard. The test isn’t quoting each side 50% or getting an equal number of complaints from each side. As a journalist the first and only standard is whether your articles provide an accurate and informative picture of what’s going on in your beat to readers.
This is the media’s biggest fail by far. They are not giving readers an accurate picture of how politics affect their lives. If they did, they would focus on policy because policy directly affects the lives of readers. Instead, the media finds itself like a dog chasing shiny objects – look, Trump/MTG/Elon Musk made a crazy statement! A new poll! Diners in Ohio!
While I was never perfect, that was the only thing that mattered to me as a journalist. In my view, the national media political needs to take a good look at what they are doing and consider each individual article and the totality of their coverage through this prism. Because now they are failing the only stakeholders who should matter: their readers.