Why Does the Media Suck?
“I’m Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?” - Bart Simpson
“I’m Dave Shutton. I’m an investigative reporter who’s on the road a lot and I must say that in my day we didn’t talk that way to our elders.” - Dave Shutton
“Well this is my day and we do, sir.” - Bart Simpson
With the possible exception of advertisers and Stephen Colbert no one in this country seems happy with the state of journalism. The ineptitude of the press, so gleefully covered by sites like MediaMatters, is shockingly easy to expose and almost impossible to correct. The recent “Barack Obama might (maybe) pray toward Mecca” story in the Washington Post is an excellent example, but there have been lots of others. The general complaint, so far as political reporting is concerned, is that the byline brigade covers political campaigns almost exclusively from a sporting angle and that covering politics in that way allows huge piles of obvious bullshit to go unchallenged and that in turn allows politicians as empty as Bush the Younger to ascend to high office. There’s a lot of merit to that claim, but the seldom asked question is why. So let’s ask it, why does the media suck?
It’s not an issue of corporate ownership, lazy journalism or partisan bias, at least not directly. Those are symptoms of an underlying cause. They are self perpetuating symptoms, but they are not causal. The real cause is the audience, specifically the small but sizable fraction of the country that follows politics as a hobby, the civically engaged, if you will. These are the people who listen to talk radio, watch cable news, and post comments on political blogs.
Six weeks ago the long suffering people over at the Project for Excellence in Journalism posted a summation of this year’s campaign coverage so far. Not surprisingly they found that press coverage of the 2008 campaign is heavily weighted towards sporting aspects, the tactics and strategy that affect the two great yardstick numbers of modern American politics, fundraising and polls. They note that,
All of these findings seem to be at sharp variance with what the public says it wants from campaign reporting. A new poll by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press conducted for this report finds that about eight-in-ten of Americans say they want more coverage of the candidates’ stances on issues, and majorities want more on the record and personal background, and backing of the candidates, more about lesser-known candidates and more about debates.On the surface of it, this looks like a cause for head scratching. If eight out of ten people want different kinds of coverage, surely some enterprising media conglomerate would’ve realized it by now and stepped up, if for no other reason than to increase their audience and ad revenue. Instead the media wagon rolls on and the public continues to be poorly served.
Conservatives and liberals will reliably trot out their usual bogeymen to explain this. Those on the right will speak of the “liberal media”, run from big liberal cities and staffed by bleeding hearts from top to bottom. The left will usually point the finger at corporate consolidation and he said/she said reports that treat verifiable facts as “in dispute”. Both of these rationales miss something though. The great majority of Americans, which probably includes a lot of that “eight-in-ten” cited in the Pew poll, don’t follow politics on a daily basis.
For the minority who do that raw information, about where candidates stand on the issues, their personal backgrounds and political histories, is old hat. They know that stuff already. (Or at least they think they know it already, based on whatever articles they’ve read or reports they’ve seen. For the purposes of this post it’s the same thing.) For them the sport is the news; who’s up, who’s down and why is the only new information. Poll numbers and fundraising totals are the box scores of a 24-hour a day gladiatorial contest.
Hunter Thompson summed it all up more than thirty years ago. From Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72:
This gibberish could run on forever and even now I can see myself falling into the old trap that plagues every writer who gets sucked into this rotten business. You find yourself getting fascinated by the drifts and stranger quirks of the game. Even now, before I’ve even finished this article, I can already feel the compulsion to start handicapping politics and primaries like it was just another fat Sunday of pro football: Pick Pittsburgh by six points in the early game, get Dallas even with San Francisco later on … win one, lose one … then flip the dial and try to get ahead by conning somebody into taking Green Bay even against the Redskins. After several weeks of this you no longer give a flying fuck who actually wins; the only thing that matters is the point-spread.That apt description applies not just to journalists, but to the audience as well. It’s fun to follow politics! It’s fun to look at it as a sport, to handicap it like one and in doing so display how cynical and cool you are. For a certain segment of the population it’s even appropriate. Counted federal ballots, the only truly hard data in the realm of national politics, come around only every twenty-four months. For fans that can’t let things go that long there’s a gap to fill, and since there are millions of such people there’s money to be made filling it.
At the dawn of television, and for a couple of decades thereafter, filling that gap happened on Sundays before football. But technology has allowed us an unlimited number of informational sources and there’s no longer any need to confine an audience to a timeslot. Between cable channels and websites no political junkie need ever go without a fix. That’s all well and good for the junkies, but the true cost of addiction is always borne by others.
This is not new. This group of people has always existed; the difference between then and now is that today we have outlets for it. Sadly, those outlets have taken the form of News when they are anything but. I’m not sure how to divorce the two, or if it’s even possible. Having an ever alert army of fact checking citizens on-line helps a great deal, but it certainly isn’t a solution.
Like many of the other problems we have, this one is systemic. The rewards offered for successful sporting news political journalism (money and fame) are enormous and the penalties (a stern rebuke from the ombudsman) all but nonexistent. There has to be a better way to structure things, be it non-profit ownership of media outlets, autonomous (non-political) governmental sponsorship of factual standards, or simply dropping the charade of impartial journalism and letting us all fight it out. I don’t know what the proper structure of the Fourth Estate should look like, but I know the current system isn’t sustainable or particularly useful.
