The excellent piece from Drew Magary in the diary post by liar on the front page finally helped to get the dime to drop for me. For those unfamiliar, Mr. Magary got his start in sports writing, and was involved in a comedic take sports website several years ago of which I was a fan and frequent commenter on the site itself. But that affiliation got the circuits in my brain firing, and two of them have made a connection they make from time to time, and this felt like the time to shout about it.
The legacy media coverage of elections is too often treated by them and others as some kind of sporting event. I’m not even really discussing the elections themselves, but rather the coverage itself is the sporting event. A bad week of media coverage gets stories about ‘How Can the <whomever> Campaign Turn This Around?’, which is often a cover to run negative points about the opposing campaign. Media complains that a campaign isn’t providing enough details on some policy point, ignoring the fact that no politician has provided actual details on policies since at least before any of us were born. Oh, here’s a ludicrously out of line ‘shock’ poll that doesn’t line up with the other 5 polls in the field at the same time, how might this hint that the race is totally different than people expect, writes the legacy media. The best part of all this comes in the fact that its a sporting event that no one knows the score of until after November 5th, so they can claim the score is whatever they want it to be.
They fancy themselves ‘the referees’ of politics. They’re here to tell us whats fair and whats foul and they’ll be the ones keeping score. The problem is that as referees, they’re about as trust worthy as a certain former NBA ref. They have an agenda, and sometimes its not even a political one. The ones with political agendas are actually less of an issue, honestly. They wear their politics on their sleeve, and you know to fact check everything they tell you. The other common agenda is generating attention, and that is where things have gotten out of hand. They have every incentive to create narratives of close races, invent gaffes or cover for bad behavior with sheer contrarian coverage. It is not the job of the referee to create an interesting game. It is the referee’s job to provide accuracy and integrity to the proceedings.
For approaching a decade, DJT and his political...I struggle to call it an ideology but no other word works, has presented the news media with an unprecedented challenge. His strategy has involved relying on the media to do the heavy lifting for him. To normalize statements that should be marginalized, to sow doubt where there is clairty, and to create questions where there are only answers. He has relied on the legacy media to create a version of him that is palatable to their readers and viewers, because if they don’t, there will be no interest in their stories of the horse race.
Some media have been up to the task of calling out this behavior and refusing to enable it. Others have been more up to the task of being unpaid public relations agents for his campaign. Simply put, we’re in this situation that has knotted our stomachs and kept us awake at night worrying because they have an agenda that is less about telling the facts to their readers and more about creating the most interesting horse race they can.
