I'm wary of starting into a political blog topic, because it can be both painful and addicting... kind of like habañero sauce. But I will anyway. I guess it's Monday and I'm surrendering to Cranky Old Guy inside my head. Though in reality, this is more of a media post than a political post.
It stems from my usual Monday morning frustration with
Cokie Roberts. She is always annoying, but at least she has the flexibility to find different ways to annoy me. Today's approach was Standard Option B. It's less annoying than Option A but more pervasive across the media so more in need of calling out.
What is Option B? Replacing political commentary with horse race handicapping.
Now I'm not the first to complain about this, either with Roberts or in general. It's a theme that's gained a small bit of traction in the last eight years or so. I probably had my thoughts on the matter focused when I read
Eric Alterman's book
What Liberal Media?. There are worse examples of reporting and commentary in the media, but Roberts is particularly reprehensible because she has venue on the relatively serious NPR and because she's seen as a respectable commentator.
But like I said, this morning is mostly about the horse race handicapping. Consider this, the next time you're reading or listening to political commentary. How much of the coverage is about who the candidates are and how they would govern, and how much is about their electoral strategy, where the 'momentum' goes, and who's moving up or down in the polls? The vast majority of political coverage you hear will focus on either who leads in the horse race, or handicapping on what's going to happen next in the horse race. Hint: any time someone talks about a poll, this is what they're doing. But it goes beyond that too, into discussing what's the strategy of a particular candidate, or how are they changing their message.
We're so used to this that it's a bit tough to take a step back and think about why that's kinda crazy. Think of it this way: if you're making a decision on who to vote for, what do you need to know? Well, you certainly need to know what the candidates will do if they're elected. That includes things like their plans, their history, their stands on general issues, and so forth. It's probably also worthwhile to know about their personalities: how they function, who they associate with, what's their past history. (I'm used to being annoyed by coverage of this personal stuff, and it does get overblown, but it
is relevant to how the person would govern.)
You can start collecting that kind of information straight from the candidate. They will tell you all about themselves and what they want to do. And that's good, but of course it's also highly biased. To some extent you'll get contrasting stories from their opponents, but that's going to be just as biased. Debates and live exchanges can help with this but it's still not a complete picture. So it's critically important to have somewhat evenhanded media coverage of these things, so that you can get an independent story on what the candidate is about.
And yet the bulk of the coverage is not about the candidates and their ability to govern; it's about who's going to win. That's a lot easier because it has a clear storyline. (It' an incredibly lazy way to report, because you can just keep writing the same basic story while changing the names and numbers.) It also defends a bit against accusations of bias, by focusing on metrics like poll numbers and dollars raised or spent. Most importantly, I think it drives a sense of excitement about elections, because races are exciting, right? And that excitement drives TV ratings or newspaper sales or what have you. But all of this is completely unhelpful in deciding who you should vote for.
It's not that this horse race coverage is inherently wrong. It's good to know what is happening with polls or money, and it's an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how political machinery functions. But that should be way down the list of topics to cover, instead of #1 through #3 in every news story.
It's really tough to avoid this stuff. I mean, as a reporter you need to talk about these candidates every day for 18 months or so. How many times can you write about their health care ideas? If the candidate is even mildly competent this stuff isn't going to change very much. But it can be done.
Matthew Yglesias is making a pretty good effort at it. He's not religious about it but his balance is pretty close to right. I'm sure there are others out there too who are doing a good job, but after 2004 I had to cut back my political blog reading quite a bit.
Labels: media, politics, rant
