Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has an insightful observation about why the feckless corporate media villagers’ reporting is so shallow in Election Rule #34: Process Gaffes Matter. Policy Gaffes Don’t:
[I]t might just be the usual preoccupation that political reporters have with process over substance. For example, Steve Benen notes today that Kentucky Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes recently dodged “a straightforward question about whom she voted for in the 2012 presidential election” and got hammered for it. But in Iowa, when Joni Ernst refused to say if she wants to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency or what she’d do for those who’d lose health care coverage if Obamacare is repealed, the reaction was mostly crickets.
The difference is that Grimes was clumsy over her handling of a process issue: her support for a president of her own party. Reporters feel free to go after that. Ernst, by contrast, was crafty over her handling of policy issues: in this case, environmental policy and health care policy. Likewise, Cory Gardner is being crafty about his handling of abortion and contraceptive policy. That sort of craftiness generally invites little censure because political reporters don’t want to be seen taking sides on an issue of policy—or even rendering judgment about whether a candidate’s policy positions have changed. In fact, being crafty on policy is often viewed as actively praiseworthy because it shows how politically savvy a candidate is. [Another word for this is deceitful.]
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Generally speaking, policy views are out of bounds for political reporters, regardless of whether they’ve changed or whether they’re transparently absurd.
Process over substance. This is an abject failure of our modern corporate news media reporting (and I would argue that they also fail to get the process part right: the media is loath to report that the “Senate GOP filibustered the bill to death.” The headline will always be “Democrats failed to pass” — which in no way comports with procedural reality.)
We have seen this writ large in the LD 9 House race in Tucson. Virtually every news organization which has reported on this race has selectively cherry-picked two votes out of hundreds of votes cast by the mythical moderate Republican Ethan Orr aka “E.Orr” to label him a “moderate” or “centrist” Republican — his vote for Gov. Jan Brewer’s Medicaid (AHCCCS) expansion, and his vote against the Religious Bigotry bill, SB 1062.
For purposes of contrast, Democratic Congressman Ron Barber has voted in favor of dozens of GOP bills in Congress, often over the strenuous objection of his Democratic constituents (including yours truly), but does the media label Ron Barber as a “moderate” or a “centrist”? No. Apparently this label is exclusively reserved for conservative Republicans who on rare occasions depart from the radical extremist agenda of the modern-day Republican Party (this is not your father’s GOP).
Kevin Drum may be right. This all too frequent bias in reporting may not be straightforward political bias, but rather the product of the feckless corporate news media’s emphasis on process over substance. “We don’t do public policy.”
The public is not being informed by the media on what really matters, public policy, and we are all the worse for it.