The Media Villagers Are Failing Us Again During An Existential Crisis To Save Democracy

Colbert King of the Washington Post writes, The media’s horse-race narratives are covering up the big issue of voter suppression:

White nationalism is on the rise and worming itself into the Republican mainstream. The country is experiencing a “racial justice crisis,” as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, told a virtual Howard University audience this week.

Yet, that’s not what’s dominating the front pages or cable news shows. Instead, the Biden administration is being subjected to “horse race” reporting that pays more attention to whether the president is winning or losing against Republican rivals on a range of issues — infrastructure, gun control, climate change, withdrawal from Afghanistan, you name it — than to the substance and merit of the issues themselves. Public life in Washington is once again being reduced to a competitive game between Democrats and Republicans — who’s ahead, who’s behind in the battle over who knows what.

Dan Froomkin at Press Watch makes the same point more pointedly. Political reporters are hurting America, so how about getting rid of most of them? (excerpt):

When I founded my Press Watch website a year and a half ago, my goal was to improve political journalism. Since then, I’ve railed against lazy, both-sides, optics-obsessed, horse-race coverage. I’ve preached about the desperate need to replace amnesiac stenography with context, accountability and passionate advocacy for the truth.

But a few days ago, along came NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen (probably the person I quote the most hereabouts) with a thought: What if you should just give up?

OK, that’s not how he phrased it.

“The politics beat breeds analysts of the game. It’s unavoidable,” he wrote.

So instead of trying to change them, he suggested, let’s make the case for there to be fewer of them.

Leave “a skeleton crew to handle the game, and the both-sides sensibility that is native to it,” he wrote. They would track the spin, handicap the campaigns, offer review of the day’s optics and obsess over who’s up and who’s down.

And then major news organizations could “redistribute resources to subject-matter reporting, where the focus is on how to solve problems.”

As Jay explained: “Politics isn’t really a subject. It’s a phase or dimension of other things. There’s a politics to improving infrastructure in the U.S., but that’s just one part of the problem. When the beat is politics itself there’s a ‘missing’ subject. That vacuum is filled by the game.”

I think that’s exactly right. What I see happening these days, in Washington newsrooms filled with a surplus of political reporters and a relative dearth of subject-matter experts, is that stories that are actually about health or science or governance or race or demographics or democracy all end up becoming “political” stories.

For a political story, what matters is the fight and the moves, which party comes out ahead or which politician — or whether someone said something stupid. The working assumption is that there are two sides, and that they are presumptively equally valid. The time frame is generally 24 hours or less. The favored device is the pithy quote. The goal is to find the drama and review it from a remove.

Whether what’s being discussed potentially reflects an effective solution to a real problem experienced by actual human beings is not what matters.

Jay was responding to my many imprecations over time for editors to let subject-specialist beat reporters, rather than political reporters, take the lead on the most important stories of the day — and to send them, instead of White House reporters, to demand answers from White House officials.

[I]n January, I proposed a rebranding of political reporters as “government reporters” to free them to cover what’s happening in Washington in the context of whether it is serving the people well, rather than which party is winning. My tweets on the subject are legion.

But to Jay’s point, that is all so damn naïve! There’s a big market for the horse-race, “who’s up and who’s down” stories, which means political reporters (and their editors) aren’t going to change. The reporters are happy. The editors are happy. Bitching and whining from people like me doesn’t shame them, it amuses them, because I obviously don’t get it.

Because political reporters are the stars of the newsroom, they get on TV. And because they get on TV, they are the stars of the newsroom.

When you put a political reporter on a story, they never start by writing “of course this happened, because this is how things work.” Because political reporters tend to think very short-term, they can be easily surprised. They can find a “wow, look what just happened!” story where a subject-matter expert would write “this is a big distraction from the real issue” or “this really doesn’t address the problem.”

They treat the right-wing media ecosystem as if it were their assignment editor, because it tends to produce exciting stories. They obsess over the president’s every move and utterance — which made a certain amount of sense when the president was Donald Trump, but there is now an actual policy-making process that requires attention. (The questions they ask show how profoundly out of touch they are with the concerns of normal people.)

[P]olitical reporters operate in a different world, ruled by optics. Indeed, political reporters do a lot of ducking themselves — no more so, recently, than when covering the issue of voter suppression, which they obfuscate to avoid the appearance of “taking sides.”

Taking sides is the ultimate sin for political reporters — even when one side is the truth.

[A]mazingly enough, they even suck at covering politics. The country is in terrible shape and dramatic legislative action is required to make things better. That’s a great political story! Instead, they write about minutiae and the need for some sort of mythical, impossible bipartisanship. The Republican Party has no legislative agenda other than obstruction. That’s a great political story! But that, for political reporters, is a given, rather than a fact worth pointing out. The Republican Party engages in the rhetoric of white supremacy and is engaged in a desperate battle to make voting and the accurate counting of votes harder. That’s a great political story! But the Democratic move to restore or rescue democracy is boring and predictable.

Which brings me back to Colbert King’s opinion:

One [issue] looms large with those of us deeply concerned about the health of our democracy: the Republican voter suppression crusade that will diminish access to the ballot for people of color.

It is an existential threat to an essential right of U.S. citizenship — the freedom to vote in open elections.

Staring us in the face are 361 restrictive bills by mostly Republican state legislatures across the country that, at bottom, aim to curb voter participation. The supposed rationale for the open assault on voting rights is the baseless charge of voter fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election leveled by the defeated president, Donald Trump, and echoed by his flock of followers.

The real motivation, however, was the historic turnout for that election, and the color of so many of the folks who got off their sofas and on their feet to cast ballots for Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris. And who, in Georgia, went on to confound the pundits and flip the state — and the U.S. Senate — for the Democrats.

As the Rev. Jesse Jackson put it back in 1981 when confronted with resistance to court-ordered busing, “It ain’t the bus, it’s us.”

It was the sight of Blacks and other people of color standing in long lines to vote or leaving their homes to mail in ballots that prompted Republican statehouses to start cracking the whip on those uppity voters.

Anyone concerned about protecting what recently elected Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) calls “the infrastructure of our democracy” would do well to focus their gaze on history.

* * *

In 2013, the Supreme Court, with a majority of Republican-nominated justices, concluded that 48 years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, everything was just peachy keen down South, so there was no longer a need for Southern states to get federal preclearance to impose restrictions on voting. Within hours of the decision, states were off to the races with new Jim Crow-style voting restrictions. And the same thing is happening now in response to Democratic gains fueled by Black voters last year.

So that is really what’s at stake at this moment. Are we about to return to the days when White political leaders and election officials got away with depressing turnout by people they think of as enemies?

The For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act are designed to protect voting rights and bring equity and accountability to our system. Both bills, passed by the House and now pending in the Senate, face strong Republican opposition led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Horse-race reporting might be focused on who’s winning and losing in these early months of the Biden administration. But if Republicans win their voter suppression campaigns, the biggest loser of all will be American democracy.

Is there any hope for improvement? Dan Froomkin is not optimistic

So my point here is that neither what I’ve been suggesting (reform political reporting)  nor what Jay is suggesting (cut back on political reporters) will happen, or will do any good, until we get rid of the senior editors who currently rule those newsrooms.

I look forward to the day they are replaced with a younger, more diverse group of journalists who unabashedly cleave to core journalistic goals like creating an informed electorate, standing up for the common person, encouraging pluralism and, most of all, speaking truth to power. I’m hopeful, in the long run. In the meantime, I’ll keep on bitching and whining.

Alan Macleod at Fairness & Accuracy in reporting adds, ‘Divisive’: How Corporate Media Dismiss Ideas Unpopular With Elites (excerpt):

All too often, words such as “divisive,” “contentious” or “controversial” are used merely as media codewords meaning “ideas unpopular with the ruling elite” — what FAIR calls “not journalistically viable.”

Macleod then provides numerous corporate media examples.

All of the populist, pro-working class policies detailed above enjoy significant majority support with the public. They are not, by the dictionary definition, controversial. And yet time and time again, they are attacked as too contentious or divisive to work.

While billionaire-owned media outlets could simply come out and say, “We oppose these proposals for ideological reasons,” a much better rhetorical tactic is to present themselves as neutral observers, merely concerned about the practicality of such legislation.

The next time you hear your favorite political proposals being labeled as too “divisive,” “contentious” or “polarizing” to work, check the polls first. You might be being sold a bill of goods by dishonest commentators trying to pour cold water on a progressive fire.

Finally there is what used to be known as a David “Broderism” — “both-siderism” reporting. Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate writes, The Political Media Is Having a “Gotta Hear Both Sides” Relapse (excerpt):

Biden has settled the presidency back in its conventional rhythms, while Trump’s deranged and tangibly dangerous ranting has been confined to the occasional press release with a West Palm Beach dateline. For the most part, this is good. The “before times” atmosphere, though, has also triggered the media’s reflex to cover political questions as disputes between two factions, equal in legitimacy, that deserve to be treated with precisely the same balance of credulity and skepticism. Inside the Beltway, people whose entire job is to follow the news are waking up each day, Memento-style, and behaving as if they don’t remember anything that has happened since roughly the moment Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House.

* * *

This edition of Face the Nation was at least useful for demonstrating the D.C. press’s discomfort with the prospect of addressing the empirical and ethical dimensions of a given issue on the merits. One way of avoiding that kind of intellectual work is to turn public interest questions into binary confrontations. Another, demonstrated by the at-best-completely-beside-the-point “personal responsibility” and “self-reflection” questions, is to reduce every event into an inflection on a character arc and/or a potential opportunity to do mild finger-wagging about personal integrity.

It’s the latter approach that’s gradually swallowing coverage of Joe Biden, whom ABC’s chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl accused on Sunday of betraying his campaign promise to be a “moderate, transitional president” by “using his narrow [Senate] majority to ram through the biggest expansion of government since JFK.” Similar framing has marked Politico’s coverage of the administration, like a recent piece whose tagline asserted, in a tone of alarm and concern, that “the president and his party are poised to completely sidestep Senate Republicans whom Biden long argued he could work with” in a way that could “bury” his “bipartisan brand.” (Politico also recently characterized Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s effort to invalidate Biden’s electoral votes as a “controversial stand” that was criticized by “liberals and some Republicans.” Our thanks to indefatigable Daily Show writer and Beltway-schlock consumer Matt Negrin for flagging this and other examples used in this post.) At a recent White House event, a member of the presidential press corps asked Biden whether he will have “failed” on “his promise of bipartisanship” if no Republicans vote for an infrastructure bill later this year.

This trope implies that Biden is imposing an agenda with “narrow” 50-50 appeal, but the components of the legislation he’s passed and proposed have generally had the support of more than 60 percent of the public. (Even the 50 Democratic senators who did vote for his first major bill represent 56 percent of the population.) He also didn’t ever say he would be a moderate president, guarantee that Republicans would vote for his legislation, or promise not to pass anything without their support. He said repeatedly that he believed and hoped he could cooperate with Republicans after Trump was no longer in office. But he also said as early as last April that he wanted to pass a multitrillion-dollar green spending bill; deployed friends to note that, as a key figure in the Obama administration, “nobody knows better than Joe Biden just how much Mitch McConnell’s obstruction cost”; and hired, as his chief of staff, another Obama-era figure who’d in fact spoken to Politico about having learned, from that obstruction, that if you wait to do something until you can concede enough of your position that a Republican senator gets on board, you might end up waiting forever.

Yes, candidate Biden was strategically ambiguous, and perhaps willfully optimistic in a way that he knew would appeal to voters. But he didn’t issue a check-the-box promise not to do anything as president without the approval of a given number of Republican senators. To suggest as much—to treat a modern Republican position as one worth taking seriously by default—isn’t just doing the party a midterm-oriented favor. (Why aren’t they the ones being scrutinized for failing to reflect their constituents’ attitudes toward popular proposals?) It’s recreating the conditions that Trump took advantage of so destructively in 2016 (and to diminishing returns thereafter). Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice or more, I’ve been promoted to a prestigious position running politics coverage at a major American media outlet, apparently.

A world without the Sunday morning bobbleheads and cable jockeys would be an improvement.