OpEdNews.Com
It is an open secret in political
journalism that the press is a player. But by not developing that
thought, journalists maintain the "view from nowhere." This
helps explain some of the familiar rituals in campaign coverage.
"Political stories don't just
'happen' the way hailstorms do. They are artifacts of a political
universe that journalism itself has helped to construct." --
Paul Taylor, former political reporter, Washington Post.
Here are seven interlocking parts in a
kind of contraption political journalists operate for us every four
years campaign coverage, as we have come to dread it. Recognize any of
the following?
The Gaffe: when a candidate on the
campaign trail takes a pounding in the press for something that just
isn't said to the press on the campaign trail.
The Expectations Game: when a
candidate "wins" by losing but doing better than the press
expected, or "loses" by winning but doing worse.
The Horse Race: when the press
centers its coverage around shifts in who's ahead, based on poll results
the press says are bound to shift.
The Ad Watch: when the press
converts political advertisements--and the strategy behind them--into
political news, and then analyzes that news to advertise its own
savviness.
Inside Baseball: when the press
tells the story of politics by going to insiders, the
"players" who know the game because they play the game and get
paid to know it.
Electability News: when the press
shifts from reporting on a candidate's bid for election in the here and
now, to the chances of the bid succeeding later on.
Spin Alley: when, after a debate,
the press shows up in the spin room to be spun by stand-ins and
spokespeople who are gathered there to spin the press.
The contraption makes it easier to report
on a presidential campaign. Also safer. With everyone using the same
"instructions," competition among journalists is reduced. Risk
is spread. If the press narrative breaks down (a fairly common event),
or brings twisted results (also common), if at critical moments reality
and reason escape it entirely, these failures will tend to be seen
uniformly across coverage. Coverage that is all made from the same
contraption.
This makes it possible for journalists to
stand back from the ritual, and comment on its absurdities, knowing that
other journalists will continue the ritual, and thus continue the
absurdities.
For example, here is Mitch
Frank of Time magazine on the expectations game this year:
"For a year Dean benefited from low expectations. No one took him
seriously, so his rise to the top was all the more dramatic. Now it s
the opposite. If he wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, it s not big news.
But if loses either one, even by a few votes, he leaves the door open
for more stories about how Democrats aren t totally comfortable with
him."
Now here's Chuck
Raach of USA Today on the spin room, from 2000: "The most
absurd exercise in American politics always takes place in the hectic
moments after a debate. It's 'Spin Alley,' where talking heads dispense
partisan patter in a roomful of hundreds of hectic, on-deadline
journalists."
And here's William
Powers of National Journal on the inside baseball approach:
"The class of true political obsessives is tiny, and the media feel
a little guilty about belonging to it, about behaving less and less like
everyday people and more and more like the political operatives they
cover."
But feeling guilty and changing your
behavior are two different things. Spin Alley is absurd, and called so
by journalists. (See PressThink, Raze
Spin Alley.) But Spin Alley is there after every big debate, and
it still draws the journalists. Why is this?
The answer, I think, involves an open
secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20
years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing
it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret
demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in
the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the
professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the
press could or should be playing for. So while the press likes
being a player, it does not like being asked: what are you for?
In fact, the instructions are not to think
about it too much, because to know what you are playing for would be to
have a kind of agenda. And by all mainstream definition the political
reporter must have no kind of agenda. The Washington Post, National
Public Radio, CNN, Newsweek, the Des Moines Register, and all similar
competitors, are officially (and rhetorically) committed to "no
agenda" journalism, also known as the view from nowhere. So while
it might be recognized that the press is a player, journalists also see
an unsolvable problem if they take one more intellectual step. So they
dare not.
Except that some do because it's patent.
"No longer are we just the messengers, observers on the sidelines,
witch's mirrors faithfully telling society how it looks," said Mike
O'Neill, former editor of the New York Daily News. "Now we are
deeply embedded in the democratic process itself, as principal actors
rather than bit players or mere audience." He made this observation
in a 1982 speech to newspaper editors.
Eight years later, Paul Taylor, once
considered David Broder's protege at the Washington Post, refined the
theme. In See How They Run (1990) he wrote: "The premise of
this book is that the political dialogue is failing because the leading
actors in the pageant of democracy--the politicians, the press, and the
voters--are bringing out the least in one another." Paul Taylor was
a superb reporter. He was also the one in 1988 who asked Gary Hart point
bank about adultery during events that ended Hart's bid.
Principal actor, leading actor. Those are
revolutionary words in an observer's mentality. But Taylor knew, like
Broder and many others knew, that changes in the political system and
culture at large had weakened the hand of the parties and created the
modern media campaign. And the press, at key moments, had made itself a
factor in events it was supposed to be merely covering. Taylor and
O'Neill went one step further: not just a factor, but a key actor.
And as other players in the game realized
this, they naturally began to incorporate the press into their contraptions,
embedding journalists further into politics every time the contraption
was run. Thus, the news stories we now expect out of Iowa wherein
candidates try to influence news stories about the
"expectations" in Iowa. ("Managing Primary
Expectations" was the headline Time chose for its January 9th
report.)
The seven artifacts on my list are part of
a "political universe that journalism itself has helped to
construct," as Taylor wrote. There would be no expectations game if
the press did not play in it. Inside baseball would not exist if
reporters went "outside" the political class more often.
Electability, the Gaffe, the Horse Race, Spin Alley, converting ads into
news-- each does its offense to common sense.
Yet these rituals persist because they do
one thing well. They preserve the fiction of a view from nowhere, which
is needed for ideological reasons (professional neutrality in
journalism) and commercial ones (agenda-less news is for everyone,
advertisers included). The press has power. It is an actor, of sorts.
But it is also a herd of independent minds, and in this sense it is
organized not to think. Spin Alley depends on that kind of thinking.
Horse race journalism does have an agenda.
It maintains the political universe of the press. "Trust us, we
take the view from nowhere" explains, I think, why the press can be
so blind.
Jay Rosen is chair of the Journalism Department at
New York University and the author of What Are Journalists For?
His weblog is www.pressthink.org
Jay Rosen is a critic and writer whose primary interest is the
press in a democracy. A member of the NYU faculty since 1986, he is
currently an associate professor of Journalism and chair of the
Journalism Department. He teaches courses in media criticism, cultural
journalism, press ethics and the journalistic tradition, among other
subjects.
Since 1990, Rosen has been a leading figure in the reform movement known
as "public journalism" (also called civic journalism) which
calls on the press to take a more active role in strengthening
citizenship, improving political debate and reviving public life. From
1993 to 1997, he was the Director of the Project on Public Life and the
Press, funded by the Knight Foundation and housed at NYU. The project's
goal was to further the movement for public journalism by holding
seminars for working journalists and researching their experiments.
Rosen's book on the subject, What Are Journalists For?, was
published in 1999 by Yale University Press.
His newest project is PressThink, a weblog about "the journalism we
have, and the journalism we need." It began in September, 2003 and
can be found at <http:// www.pressthink. org>.
As a press critic and essayist, Rosen writes frequently on media and
political issues. His work has appeared in the Columbia Journalism
Review, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Times, the Washington Post
and in online form in Salon, TomPaine.com and
IntellectualCapital.Com, among other venues. From 1993 to 1997, he was
the media editor of Tikkun magazine, where he was often
published.
In 1994 Rosen was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. In 1990-91 he held a
fellowship at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia
University, now the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center.
Originally published at TomPaine.com, Jan. 22, 2003.
