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March 9, 2004
Players: Toward a More Honest Job Description For the Political PressGiven all the different roles the press has taken on since 1960, it's time to retire the old job description for the campaign press, and write one more honest, more nuanced, more effective— more true. My essay from the new CJR.Originally published in Columbia Journalism Review, March/April, 2004. What is the proper job description for a journalist during campaign season? You don’t find much discussion about it. Whether the press is doing its job consumes our attention, as it should. But we cannot know how well the press is doing unless we know—and sort of agree—on the job to be done. I am not sure we do. I know this: The standard job description needs work. It does not point to all the tasks the press has accumulated since 1960, when the modern media campaign began. Horse race handicapper is not in there, but the press does it. (And not very well, either.) Press language needs to stay current, not only with trends “out there” in the world, but with roles and responsibilities journalists themselves have taken on—sometimes without announcing why, or thinking it through fully. David Shaw writes in the Los Angeles Times: “When political journalists predict the future, their predictions often seem to eclipse — and at times substitute for — the reporting they’re supposed to be based on. Worse, those predictions can become self-fulfilling prophesies. Look at the coverage of Howard Dean’s post-caucus speech in Iowa.” I would go further than Shaw. There are ethical reasons for leaving the future to itself, for not turning it into a probability statement or a handicappers’ ball in hopes of a generating more news buzz today. There is no bigger cliché in journalism than “time will tell,” but under the cliché is a moral proposition: don’t play god, don’t pre-empt the future. Whenever we re-describe what journalists do new problems arise in what they should be doing—and perhaps quit doing. New questions of accountability spring up. A conventional, common sense description of the job during campaign season would look like this:
That’s how you cover a campaign, right? Right. Except that more is involved when the press gets going; and this has been known for some time. “Somebody had to prune the field, to ‘get rid of the funny ones,’ as one 1988 campaign manager put it.” Paul Taylor, formerly of the Washington Post, wrote that in his book, See How They Run (1990). “With the party bosses out of the equation, there was a huge vacuum at the front end of the process. Who would screen the field? The assignment fell to the press — there was no one else.” Screening the field is rather different from covering it. If the press actually announced, “once again, we’ll be screening the field for you,” it might have to say how, why, when. It might have to defend its practices, or at least explain them in terms the public can grasp. There are costs to that. There are costs to letting it slide too. Taylor reflected on those costs after years on the reporters’ bus for the Post. He noted that with the decline of the political parties as screeners with the final say, “journalists have increasingly become players in a political contest in which they also serve as observers, commentators and referees.” One of the ways they influence things, he said, is through a “journalistic master narrative built around two principal story lines: the search for a candidates character flaws, and the depiction of the campaign as a horse race.” This helps explain why the Dean Scream grew to such proportions as a news event from January 20th on. Yes, the scream really happened, and it really did turn people off. It is not implausible to say it crystallized public doubts about Dean, for some. But we also know that the master narrative favors a search for the candidate’s character flaws. The Scream said to reporters: search over, flaw found. Beyond screening the field and maintaining a master narrative, there are other recognizable tasks not in the official description:
Then there’s everything the press does during those strange episodes that have come to be called frenzies. Here the news cycle feeds on itself, overwhelming all other news, and bringing a sense of siege or crisis to the stricken one’s camp. (The scream aired 700 times in the week after Dean released it.) Producing frenzies isn’t an official part of the job. But it happens and journalists know they are involved. In fact they tell us. Around the time of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, Tim Russert, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said that when he and his colleagues focus relentlessly on a single story, “we may find ourselves driving the story.” Event driver is not in the job description, either. It happens. The people the national press assigns to campaign coverage are smart and able, and they work extremely hard. The experienced ones know a great deal about politics, the people in it, and what drives them. It is inconceivable that reporters at this level would fail to notice there are times (like the news frenzy) when, without plan or purpose, the press is “causing” things to happen. And there are other times (such as the “expectations game”) when journalists are fatally mixed up in the action, which would not be happening this way without them. Comparing the declared and de-facto roles of the press, E.J. Dionne, columnist for the Washington Post and a student of American politics, put it this way: No one elected the press, yet the press is now an intimate part of everything having to do with elections. The press is not there to make political decisions, yet everything the press does helps shape those decisions. The press does not exist to represent the citizenry, yet in fact reporters do believe they represent citizens (or at least their interests) when they probe and question and analyze and pontificate. Now if journalists know all that—and by the evidence in these quotations they do—then they also know their professional codes don’t cover these other roles the press has assumed. The profession has an observer’s code, a watchdog’s code, possibly a critic’s code, but nothing beyond that. What does the code book say about the proper way to handle yourself in a frenzy? It is silent, stumped. What do newsroom codes say about the expectations game and how journalists should play it, so that citizens benefit? They say nothing. If all of a sudden you realize you are driving an event, what should the wise, responsible and public-spirited journalist do? The codes don’t know. So then what? It’s time to rip up the old job description for the campaign press, and write one that’s more honest, more nuanced, more effective—and more real.
Posted by Jay Rosen at March 9, 2004 2:30 PM
Comments
That is an excellent piece of writing, Jay. There are three points I might add, or quibble with: (1) You failed to excoriate jounralists' overuse of anonymous sources, including the verbal construct, "Many experts believe that ..." Why won't the journalist name these experts, I wonder. If not, why should I believe these unnamed experts? (2) Establishment journalists' failure to criticize each other by name. I can see no reason not to do so politely, except for the unwritten rule that Establishment journalists do not upbraid fellow members of The Guild. (3) This Master Narrative business -- is it all that innocent and unintended? Or do many journalists knowingly parrot the master Narrative of Democrat or Republican HQ, or of some think tank? Posted by: David Davenport at March 9, 2004 4:18 PM | Permalink I would say the press is actually an intentional influencer - they have someone they want to win, and they slant th coverage to try to help out. By their own book of ethics, that's unethical. Of course, that's only the book of ethics they SAY they follow, primarily for show... there isn't one they ACTUALLY follow (or even think they do). They know what they are doing - it may once have been side effect, but it is now the goal. Posted by: Deoxy at March 9, 2004 6:07 PM | Permalink [ They know what they are doing - it may once have been side effect, but it is now the goal.] That's a succint way of putting it, Deoxy. The "Master Naarative" hypothesis is a bit too deep psychocultural rootsy. There is a more parsimonious theory: that many journalists are knowing political partisans, not innocents. Posted by: David Davenport at March 9, 2004 7:08 PM | Permalink I doubt it's as much an innocent by-product of the evolution of the political process as it is deliberate and calculated. Call me cynical. Posted by: Susan Robbins at March 9, 2004 11:12 PM | Permalink I know three working reporters and editors and they are conscientious and try to present a factual, balanced story. However, I also have experience as the subject of news stories and it's disappointing how sloppy reporters can be. Facts aren't important when a particular angle needs to be addressed. I had a copyright dispute with a major automaker over some of my embroidery designs and when the local daily did a story about it (at my encouragement - big guy picking on a little guy is great publicity) I stressed three points: 1) It was not a trademark dispute but rather a copyright dispute where the automaker was claiming exclusive rights to the images of its cars thereby jeopardizing fair use rights of photographers and other artists. 2)Though there were very real First Amendment issues, I was not claiming First Amendment rights to use such images but rather that my use was within the parameters established for editorial use by the automaker (in IP cases, First Amendment defenses are the kiss of death - courts don't like people saying that the constitution allows them to steal). 3) It was ironic that a company that recently paid $1 billion into a fund for Jewish slave laborers in the Holocaust was now picking on a company that made Jewish gifts. When the story ran, the headline said it was a trademark dispute, the story said that I was claiming a First Amendment right to use the images, and the story lead with the fact that I started out making Jewish gifts. One out of three isn't bad, I suppose. Fortunately, someone in Auburn Hills saw the story (good thing I live in the Detroit area) in their Sunday paper, and I'm guessing that the call to their licensing company to back off came about 10 seconds after they read the opening graf. Still, it was agravating to see the reporter get things wrong. Posted by: ronnie schreiber at March 10, 2004 12:11 AM | Permalink Do political reporters need to recognize their status as players, or do we need to get rid of the idea of "political reporters"? The NYT's recent appointment of David Kirkpatrick to something the paper calls the "conservative beat" is only the most absurd example of a flawed system of "beats" by which journalists all too often imagine they acquire a kind of authority. Immersion and depth are admirable qualities in an article; the chumminess and arrogance too often evident in the work of political reporters are not. Political journalists work their beats not like reporters but like cops, enforcing order and hardknuckling misfits like Dean off their streets. Posted by: Jeff Sharlet at March 10, 2004 3:07 AM | Permalink For the record, when Deoxy says, "they have someone they want to win, and they slant the coverage to try to help out," and when David says,"many journalists are knowing political partisans, not innocents," I believe they simplify and distort the political role of the press. There are third, fourth and fifth options beyond: 1.) "innocent" delivery of objective, factual news, or 2.) slanting the news for partisan reasons. No real discussion can be had with only these alternatives in hand. Jeff: should there should even be "political" reporters? is a question that never ocurred to me. I will have to think on it. How do you square all of the theories of a benign influence by the press (put out, of course, by journalists and j-profs) with the abysmal performance on the Bush-ad controversy. The withholding of information on just who was "enraged" by these ads amounts to a journalistic travesty. If "journalism" is supposed to get to the truth, then most of the mainstream press failed miserably in this instance. As several above have said, it can't be just happenstance. They knew what they were doing and that moves the dial from incompetence to corruption. Posted by: rivlax at March 10, 2004 10:34 AM | Permalink I once received a really stunning insight into press coverage. Someone who had suffered a particularly unpleasant bout of media exposure asked me to think about the following question: How many times had I, watching the press deal with a subject I was intimately familiar with, seen them come even close to getting the story right? My response, after some thought, was "almost never." The fellow I was talking to then asked me why I would think they would do much better on any other topic. It was a very eye-opening moment for me, especially when I considered that most reporters are seriously left-leaning political partisans and, where politics are concerned, large amounts of power and money are at stake. I've never trusted the press since. Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and Andrew Gilligan just drove the point further home. Posted by: Dan McWiggins at March 10, 2004 11:08 AM | Permalink We should teach reading newspapers in civics class. A lot of readers don't know a Editoral from a news article. Students should be taught critical reading skills. Letters to the Editor should follow bad writing. Posted by: Ron Schmidt at March 10, 2004 12:10 PM | Permalink Raises an interesting question, Ron: You said watch sites have made you a better reader of the press. Does the press try to make you a better reader of the press? Or not? Or is that impossible to begin with? [ A lot of readers don't know a Editoral from a news article. ] So, a lot of reporters and editors know the difference? Posted by: David Davenport at March 10, 2004 6:24 PM | Permalink [ when Deoxy says, "they have someone they want to win, and they slant the coverage to try to help out," and when David says,"many journalists are knowing political partisans, not innocents," I believe they simplify and distort the political role of the press. There are third, fourth and fifth options beyond: 1.) "innocent" delivery of objective, factual news, or 2.) slanting the news for partisan reasons. No real discussion can be had with only these alternatives in hand. ] There is also an axiom known as Occam's razor. Posted by: David Davenport at March 10, 2004 6:26 PM | Permalink You have a very thorough site. You are to be commended for all of the information you have made available to us the searchers. I didn't find any info on my ancestors, but I still enjoyed looking around Posted by: government grants at May 25, 2004 2:26 PM | Permalink |
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