Covering the debates

Debate coverage--as with just about all campaign coverage--is some of the most torturous, meta-leaden reporting in the history of torturous, meta-leaden reporting. The rubric is basically this: report not the substance--never that!--but instead speculate about how everybody "will be perceived". When reporters follow that rubric, though, they of course play a major role in actually determining how everybody ends up being perceived. This is troublesome to me. It's troublesome to Paul Krugman, too:

Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”

Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites.

I think that there's probably a reason for all of this. There must've been a time--before JFK/Nixon, certainly long before I became politically engaged--when debate coverage was, like most news coverage, basic reporting. "Such and so said this and that," and on and on for 1000 words. At some point, though, somebody must have noticed that the public--seated without recourse to great rooms-full of news archives--was affected not by the substance of the debate itself but by the candidates' appearance and discipline. When pollers or sociologists caught on to that phenomenon, reporters must have been right there, not to change the way they provided information, but to incorporate their analysis. Far be it for them--objective observers, all--to remedy a problem when they could more easily accept and perpetuate it.

That's my theory anyhow.

Years down the line, there's all this inertia. And I'm sure publishers worry that if their reporters began fact-checking politicians instead of meta-analyzing how the debate might changes poll-positions, people would stop reading (or watching or whatever). I don't think it's ever really been tried before, and I suppose it's possible that people would bristle if a New York Times reporter had the temerity to mention that Mitt Romney said some extremely untrue things at the debate. But I really, sincerely doubt that.

Comments

[JimPortlandOR]

Near to the bottom line (on debates, campaign speeches, or after-election statements): there is no penalty for telling lies, half-truths, or clear distortions.

Remarkable, isn't it?

Now, it is maybe understandable that 'journalists' think it is beneath them to be reduced to checking facts, but if all they are now intended to do is report what people say, technology does it better and cheaper.

And if they are intended by the gods to just reflect on the atmospherics and speculate on the game performance, then they have no real qualifications for that either. A journalism degree or years of reporting experience does nothing to certify their competence to blather.

Our fourth estate seems to be in the midst (over several decades) of becoming our entertainment division instead of the news and analysis division, and they don't seem to know it (or won't admit it if they know). How is what they do different than standing along the red carpet and describing how much boob is showing on some film star's body?

And then they complain that the people are uninformed or don't care.

[jmc]

Is this a new phenomenon? What about Hearst's yellow journalism? What about the muckrakers?

Isn't it fair to say that sloganeering and sensationalism have always been more popular than reasoned debate?

Not to let anybody off the hook for this (Wolf), but it seems to me that a predilection for ignorance and the confirming one one's beliefs is the human condition, and that in today's internet age the public's ability to look beyond the bullshit is greater than ever.

[Neil the Ethical Werewolf]

I wonder how long it'll be before they make the natural move into going double-meta: "Sebelius was perceived as being perceived as timid in response to attacks..."

[Jorge]

This criticism of the media brings George Soros's theory of "reflexivity" to mind. http://www.geocities.com/ecocorner/intelarea/gs1.html . Reporters pretend that they are just observering and reporting on the debates, where in fact their reporting makes them "participants" (in the way that Soros uses the term) that shape each debate's outcome and significance. As long as the media is in denial about this, they avoid their responsibilty for the consequences of their putrid reporting. The first step in recovery is that they need to acknowledge that their roles as participants is unavoidable, and that the quality of their participating affects -- or even determines -- the quality of our politics. Or at least it did have that effect -- thank God for blogs.

[ChuckE]

The single most influential newspaper article of Campaign 2000 was the New York Times story about the first Bush/Gore debate, which mentioned in passing that a couple of people in the viewing audience were put off by Gore's sighing. Within 24 hours, a Gore win became a Gore loss, as the media decided the sighing was the story.