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March 10, 2004
If the Press Digs Where it Thinks There's a Story, Then it Matters How The Press ThinksWe are coming to a point in the election story when a larger portion of the news is triggered by the decisions of journalists. There's a break in the action with the nominations set. What will the press do with this greater freedom to define and shape the campaign narrative?A reporter I talk to often (he’s on the media beat) called me last week and asked what I thought the press would do with the upcoming “lull” in the presidential campaign: no big news anticipated, beyond Kerry’s choice of running mate and later the conventions. For much of 2003 and two months of 2004, it was clear what the press would be doing: covering the race. “So what are they going to do now?” the reporter asked. And together we speculated about it. The reason the question arises is not a general lack of eventfulness in politics, as if reality had slowed once Kerry emerged as the winner. After the nominating season is over, and before the conventions begin, is a stretch of reporting time where lots is happening, but the triggers for news aren’t as automatic. Debates, primary elections, candidates entering and leaving, intra-party attacks— all generate news that must be covered. This differs from news that must be uncovered. That kind, sometimes called enterprise reporting, depends more on the initiative of the journalist. Uncovering news is always an act of imagination, however. It is not just “digging,” although there is a lot to be said for just that. If the press digs into politics where it thinks there’s a story, then it matters what the press thinks. Imagination—how a journalist pictures things working—plays its part. This is especially so right about now, when a pause in the major narrative allows journalists to pick their spots, and develop more of their own ideas. And what will the press choose to cover and uncover, or just bring more fully to life for us, during an interval in the cycle when it has maximum discretion over what is news? From my point of view, that is a political question, properly put to the makers of visibility, the amplifiers in the public square. But it is hard to get a political answer from the mainstream press, which wants to avoid taking sides in all disputes. This stalemate is a source of tension in public culture, especially for the most politically active class as it talks back to elite journalism, which it both needs and attacks. (The bias wars reflect all this.) But until the job description changes, that tension will remain. Maybe some day journalists will be seen on all sides as players, who trigger things in the race and, yes, help shape it, but who do not cook the books for one side or another. We are not there yet. One of my favorite acts of political reporting is a campaign book by the writer Jonathan Schell. Few people seem to know about it: History in Sherman Park (Knopf, 1987). Schell, on assignment from the New Yorker, spent the 1984 election in one home in a Milwaukee suburb, Sherman Park. “An American Family and the Reagan-Mondale Election,” is subtitle for his sojourn into the ordinary of politics. He collected a lot of facts, conducted hundreds of interviews and went digging, as all enterprise reporters do. But the journalism part began with an image of politics that Schell had rotated in his mind. If campaigns had become targeted message delivery, why report on campaigns from the delivery side of the message? Would it not make sense—for politics, for journalism— to station a reporter on the receiving end, with the people who are the targets of all this? Schell: In every election season, the candidates, the candidates’ supporters, the reporters, the commentators, and others in and around the campaigns pour forth their messages—speeches, political advertisements, press conferences, leaks, articles, editorials—hoping to cast light (or to obfuscate), to clarify (or to muddle), to inform, to argue, to persuade, to charm, to dazzle: to win. There’s the rotated image. In “our system it is the citizens who decide,” Schell writes. So if in going to Sherman Park to talk to Gina and Bill Gapolinsky I was in one sense seeking out people at the bottom of the political hierarchy—people far from the centers of influence and power, on the receiving end of the government’s decisions—I was in another sense seeking out the people who, under our system, are at the very pinnacle of power. In another sense is the part I especially like, because in that thought (“seeking out the people who…”) political philosophy and journalism are as close as the two disciplines get. Sometimes when I bring up these examples, journalists and NYU students will say back to me: “Sure, it’s great that Jonathan Schell can get paid lots of money by the New Yorker, spend months on an assignment with a typical American family, and then do a book for Alfred A. Knopf; but this has nothing do with the daily political reporter who files from the campaign trail and has to cover the governor’s announcement because his boss said so and the competition will be there.” (Hmmmm.) Which is true. Long form journalism is not a good set of instructions for daily reporting. For most journalists, the virtue of Schell’s example lies elsewhere. It’s always possible to rotate an image of politics in your mind, just to see what looks different. For example, it would have been possible to report on the campaign stretch just completed, The Democrats Choose Their Guy, as a two-front war: here the war for the nomination, and right over there… the war between the Dean Forces (or forces unleashed by his strange candidacy) and the establishment normally in charge of the Democratic Party. Without changing any of their rules of objectivity or newsworthiness, reporters could have filed daily from both fronts: Who’s ahead for the nomination, plus, “Who’s ahead, Dean’s Troops or the establishment forces, the strange or the normal pattern in presidential politics?” Both contests deserved plenty of news coverage. Sure, the story frames overlap, but life is like that. And we could have had two—maybe more—winners this way. (For background, this piece from the Washington Post on Dean vs. the party establishment, and my take on it.) It’s impossible to prove the case, so I leave it as a question to readers. Suppose the image got rotated and the two-front model was put in charge of the narrative. Using it, would the campaign press have come closer, in its week by week accounts, to what actually transpired in politics on the Democratic side? Would it have done any worse with it? Which is the more accurate frame? And if you don’t mind one more puzzler… Which is the real story? Hit the comment button if you like. More from PressThink on the campaign press and its narratives: Players: Toward a More Honest Job Description For the Political Press (March 9, Columbia Journalism Review). Off The Grid Journalism. (Feb. 29) What Time is it in Political Journalism? (Feb. 22) Psst… The Press is a Player (Jan. 22, from TomPaine.com) Interesting Theory, But Journalists Don’t Do Theory, Do They? (Dec. 18, 2004)
Posted by Jay Rosen at March 10, 2004 4:40 PM
Comments
Save for a holistic and objective frame, none can really be complete or even satisfactory. Of course, this is all but impossible given the needs of short form daily reporting. Hence the need for numerous media outlets. But even if a variety of campaign reporting were available, very few people would have time to read/view it all. This raises some important issues, given that most viewers get all their news from the same source. Either each media outlet could do their best to acknowledge multiple causality, or they could continue to let editors and reporters try to confirm their own beliefs through selectively reporting what they think we should think. Now, ignoring multiple causality will always lead to bias in reporting, but bias really is inevitable. Someone has to make the choice to cover any given event, and that selective act itself illustrates bias. If you accept that all news is necessarily biased (and it must be given the truly huge number of events which never receive coverage), then you need to ask yourself Does it even matter? There are two kinds of readers/viewers: those that already have opinions, and those that don't. The first group, a large majority, is likely to gravitate to coverage which reaffirms their beliefs. The second group, predominately passive recipients of mediated information, is pretty vulnerable to suggestion. Now here's the dilemma: to give the second groupers a chance to get the story and form their own opinions, we need a variety of coverage. However, given that these people are most always passive recipients, it's unlikely that they have enough exposure to the news at any one time to be able to take advantage of that variety. This ties back in to the classic utterance that "news is only news once." If big media would stick to a story for more than a week, maybe more people could have their paper and read it too. Posted by: Jason at March 11, 2004 1:02 AM | Permalink We actually saw some of that duality in the early stages of the campaigns, pre-primary, when the DLC types were attempting to preemptively nuke Dean. I recall several stories in the New York Times focusing upon the DLC convention (?) and reporting heavily the views of people such as Evan Bayh, Lieberman and various DLC functionaries, who at that time were arguing the folly of attacking Bush on taxes, national security and credibility, which of course have since emerged as the major themes of the Democratic campaign. The press could easily have maintained that two-track coverage, and in a sense it did, but the subject was transmogrified into that of passion rather than strategy or issues. I think that explains in large part why the coverage devolved to the point that Dean's anguish in Iowa became the obsession it did; reporters in general are uncomfortable with passion and don't recognize it as a legitimate political expression that can coexist with policy preferences, and Dean for them became a means of discrediting it. In the process, the issues that begat the passion were relegated to obscurity. At this point we're not hearing about that schism in the Democratic party because it essentially doesn't exist anymore: the DLC candidates got creamed despite the anti-passion bias among reporters, and the Dean message in its most basic form - attack Bush - triumphed. For what it's worth, I had a brief correspondence with Daniel Okrent regarding Times reporter Jodi Wilgoren, who had the Dean beat, and her role in hyping Dean's Iowa moment. Okrent passed my criticism along to Wilgoren, and both she and he agreed that the context - the flap over the scream - justified the infinite feedack loop, and neither acknowledged that the press had essentially created the incident and then reported on their own reaction to the creation and eventually, in Wilgoren's case, reported on Diane Sawyer's interview of the Deans reacting to the collective sin of Onan committed by, among others, Wilgoren. Very postmodern. All of which is to say that the two-track notion isn't particularly radical or alien, but the complexity of it and in this instance the heat of it seem to frighten or embarass, or both, the reporters responsible for shaping the coverage. Posted by: weldon berger at March 11, 2004 5:47 AM | Permalink I'm puzzled as to why just about any daily newspaper COULDN'T do more or less what Schell did: Not write a book, but hang out/stay in touch with a representative, or quasi-representative, readers for the entire campaign, gauging their reaction to, say, TV ads and speeches AND the larger campaign issues, both in the moment and, every so often, in analytical pieces. Would this really be so hard? I'm just askin'. Jason -- You make two fundamental claims that I'd like to take on. 1. "Most viewers get all their news from the same source." These are the assumptions I discern beneath these claims and some counter-assumptions. * Assumption: News is a finished product, the embodiment of or at least a proxy for truth. People get it from one source, which is more or less effective at embodying or representing the truth about how the world is. Counter-assumption: News is an input, an offering, which people take and mix in with their own direct experience of the world, especially their interactions and conversations with other people. So even if it is demonstrable that people get their news from one source, they add so much else to that input that it does not predetermine how they see the world or assess the truth. It may cramp their range of vision or imagination instead of broadening it, which is a shame, but it doesn't predetermine their understanding of the world. * Assumption: Opinions are fixed. People without fixed opinions are passive (which may be code for lazy or vapid and, as you say expressly, suggestible). Counter-assumption: Opinions are fluid, shaped by new information, the insights of others, learning from experience, etc. There may be some underlying ideology or pattern of information processing that is consistent, but it doesn't mean people don't change their mind as they engage news, conversation and life. People without opinions at any particular time may form them when they perceive a need for an opinion. More importantly, opinions may well yield over time to judgment as people work through competing claims and competing values. Press Think as Jay describes it may get in the way of forming opinions or coming to public judgment (Daniel Yankelovich's insightful phrase) and therefore efforts to strengthen journalism are a good idea. But your picture of people as pig-headed or passive seems to offer the same argument for elite guardianship -- we know best for everyone -- that is embodied in the worst journalism. Posted by: Cole Campbell at March 11, 2004 11:32 AM | Permalink We have reached a point in journalism where rather than "digging" for a story, it would be nice to see reporters just blow the dust off the initial report. The best example of this can be seen when the contribution list of the the 527 PAC Americans for Jobs and Healthcare was released. [This is the 527 that ran the anti-Dean, Osama connection adds in December '03] The first reporter who wrote the story immediately jumped on the Toricelli connection . And that was as far as it went. Now a simple google search on the rest of the list provided enough in depth stories for at least a hundred journalists. No journalist even sought out the people on the list and asked them why they had contributed to this 527? The path to good journalism in this case did not entail any act of imagination but rather just a commitment to the W basics. In this case Who, When and Why. Model???? Surely you jest. Consider this, their was a very serious structural problem within the Dean campaign. No journalist either during and even after the Dean campaign had or has looked at the campaign by comparing and contrasting it's structure to a typical structure. There is something very strange going on under the title of journalism. Whatever it is or whatever it's cause is story in its self. But one thing for sure this new journalism guarantees eight months of frivilious stories that will do little to assist the public in their quest to make a "rational" decision. Posted by: paul m at March 11, 2004 7:30 PM | Permalink Cole-
Posted by: Jason at March 11, 2004 9:23 PM | Permalink "Which is true. Long form journalism is not a good set of instructions for daily reporting. For most journalists, the virtue of Schell's example lies elsewhere. It's always possible to rotate an image of politics in your mind, just to see what looks different." Isn't this what Jimmy Breslin has done every day of his working life. It's not like this is a new or startling thought. Posted by: E.R. Beardsley at March 12, 2004 4:05 AM | Permalink Isn't the so-called "two-front" story is just a standard "Campaign Factions Battle For Control" story? That is, reporting on the various alliances and schisms within a party or a campaign is part of the typical coverage too, just secondary to the higher-level battles. Of course framing the questions determines the coverage - isn't that just a restatement of the idea that news is what journalists says news is? (to put it harshly) But why would you think a lazy journalist would do a better job with one question than another? Seems to me the answers would likely be superficial in any case. Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at March 12, 2004 7:29 AM | Permalink Here is my cranky response, E.R. and Seth: A while ago, I gave up counting the number of ways and different occasions people find for telling me that what I'm saying isn't "new." I try to avoid that claim (and you won't find "here is a new idea" in this piece, either) but I noticed how little that seems to matter to those bent on my reminding me: this isn't new, you know. Anyway, you're right. It isn't. On your other points, Seth: There is no idea good enough, no suggestion fertile enough, to prevent lazy reporters from doing lazy journalism. Does a campaign coverage style driven by short form daily reporting make sense when in all likelihood the vast majority of the public is tuning in to the campaign much less frequently than that (particularly during this pre-convention stretch -- see http://www.vanishingvoter.org/VV2000/Data/vii-current.shtml)? Moreover, most of the "enterprise" these days seems to be a takeoff on the raw material of short-form reporting, rather than reporters pursuing original ideas (like the Sherman Park project) even for just a week. For example, look how many stories have been spun off of whether or not John Kerry said foreign leaders want him to beat President Bush, and meanwhile the original reporter is now saying that he misheard Kerry's original quote. |
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