The Politico has received its fair share of abuse since its launch, but I thought this piece, from John Harris and Jim VandeHei, suggests the publication is, at a minimum, aware of the shortcomings that have befallen the Politico and other campaign journalists.
New Hampshire sealed it. The winner was Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the loser — not just of Tuesday’s primary but of the 2008 campaign cycle so far — was us.
“Us” is the community of reporters, pundits and prognosticators who so confidently — and so rashly — stake our reputations on the illusion that we understand politics and have special insight that allows us to predict the behavior of voters.
If journalists were candidates, there would be insurmountable pressure for us to leave the race. If the court of public opinion were a real court, the best a defense lawyer could do is plea bargain out of a charge that reporters are frauds in exchange for a signed confession that reporters are fools.
Well said. Indeed, the litany of mistakes and misguided narratives, all from the year before the presidential election, is rather lengthy. Campaign reporters were absolutely certain that John McCain was done. Mike Huckabee didn’t have the organization to pull off a victory in Iowa. Barack Obama simply couldn’t catch up to Hillary Clinton — and then he simply couldn’t lose in New Hampshire. National security fears were so strong, Republican primary voters were breaking the mold and willing to overlook all of Rudy Giuliani’s personal faults and ideological apostasies.
The Note-inspired “Gang of 500” agreed on all of these points, and created a conventional wisdom that looked askance at anyone who thought otherwise. Obviously, we know how all of these “flimsy storylines” look now.
To their credit, Harris and VandeHei got specific about the areas in need of improvement.
1. Horse race frenzy — We are addicts. Do not listen to any reporter who says otherwise. It is why reporters leave their homes, spouses and families for long stretches to cram into crummy hotels and smelly buses to cover campaigns.
The Web has made us a bit less defensive about this than we were in the past. That’s because we now have metrics — based on what stories get clicked on — that show our readers are obsessed with the horse race, too…. The entire profession gives polls an oracular significance that no responsible polling expert would ever agree with. Perhaps every story should come with a bold-type reminder, “This is polling, folks, not infallible data.”
2. The echo chamber — Check out the nicer restaurants in Manchester, N.H., or Des Moines, Iowa, in the political season and you will see the same group of journalists and pols dining together almost every night. We go to events together, make travel plans together and read each others work compulsively. We go to the same websites — the Drudge Report, Real Clear Politics, Time’s “The Page” — to see what each other is writing, and it’s only human nature to respond to it. That is one chief reason the “Hillary is inevitable” and “Hillary is toast” narratives developed so quickly and spread so rapidly.
3. Personal bias — This one is complicated. Most reporters, in our experience, really do work hard to separate their personal feelings from their professional judgment. But it has been tough to avoid a sense this week that some of the coverage has been shaped by journalists rooting for certain outcomes — either because they think it’s the better story or simply the one they’d prefer to see.
Those seem like three rather helpful acknowledgements, though the fact that Drudge, RCP, and The Page — all conservative — are the sites the campaign media establishment is checking, is not exactly encouraging.
Nevertheless, like Greg Sargent, I thought the Politico’s piece, headlined, “Why reporters get it wrong,” read like a mea culpa. And admitting you have a problem is the first step.
The next step is following through. In November, Mark Halperin, one of the more notable media establishment figures in the country, wrote a startling NYT op-ed arguing that there are fundamental problems with the way reporters cover a presidential campaign: “Our political and media culture reflects and drives an obsession with who is going to win, rather than who should win.” Halperin added, “In the face of polls and horse-race maneuvering, we can try to keep from getting sucked in by it all.”
Halperin’s mea culpa, while welcome, lasted less than a week. Literally just a few days after the NYT piece ran, Halperin wrote two pieces for publication that blew off substance and dwelled on nothing but horse-race maneuvering. We’ve seen more of the same ever since.
So, to the Politico’s John Harris and Jim VandeHei I say, kudos. You’ve identified a problem, and the factors that create the problem. Now, get to work and stay away from those old habits.