Media coverage of presidential campaigns is generally pretty bad. This is not to say that there aren’t occasional instances of quality, informative journalism, but for the most part, news consumers generally get a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
This isn’t new, and it’s not mysterious. Chris Hayes had a terrific post the other day, asking whether good campaign coverage is even possible given the way the system is set up.
Here’s what happens: a newspaper (TV campaign coverage is so absurd, it’s hardly worth criticizing) assigns a reporter to cover a candidate. The reporter hears the candidate give the same speech, over and over again, every day for months. This not only leads the reporter to start loathing the candidate, it also leads him or her to start focusing on trivia as a way to produce something of interest. Worse, it leads the reporter to basically wait, every day, for something remotely unexpected to happen. When it does, the unanticipated occurrence, no matter how insignificant, becomes the single most important event in the political world, in large part because it helped break the media’s boredom.
(Ironically, this style of reporting compels candidates to become more closely guarded and scripted, because they realize that spontaneity will be blown wildly out of proportion. The result of the reporters’ boredom actually produces the conditions that make them more jaded.)
This day-to-day coverage also necessarily leads to a lack of substance and analysis. If a candidate unveils a substantive policy proposal on, for example, healthcare, the media relies on reporters on a very tight deadline to produce a story on the candidate’s plan very quickly. The campaign reporter, who knows very little about healthcare policy, invariably writes a piece describing the bones of the plan, explaining the horse-race motivations for the candidate’s pitch, includes criticism of the plan from the candidate’s primary rivals, and then different criticism of the plan from the other party. Is the plan any good? The typical news outlet never quite gets around to that.
So, what can be done? Consider a few ideas.
Specifically, Hayes offers three recommendations.
1) Rotate reporters. There’s no reason to simply assign a reporter and have them stay with a campaign. It’s not like you need “expertise” to cover a campaign or there’s a steep learning curve. It’s not a domain of knowledge or a proper beat. Any competent reporter can parachute into a campaign and quickly get their bearings. For that reason, papers like the Times should just send a stringer to follow around candidates and file if something big happens, or news breaks. But they shouldn’t have to be constantly filing dispatches about the daily minutiae of the trail. And those stringers should be rotated in and out, until perhaps the final leg of the campaign. I think if that was the set-up, you wouldn’t get stories about John Kerry’s butler.
2) Go more for features and less daily reporting. The Times has been doing this, though, their feature coverage has tended to focused on such burning issues as what Hillary Clinton wrote in letters to a penpal 35 years ago. But it also produced an excellent piece about Giuliani’s fraught relationship with New York City’s black residents. These kind of longer-form, non-deadline pieces are fun to read, and far, far more informative than the daily dispatch.
3) Assign campaign coverage to beat reporters. When Obama released his tax plan. the article that ran in the Times about the plan was authored by the Obama beat reporter Jeff Zeleny. Zeleny’s a perfectly good political reporter, and he’s been following Obama since ’03, when he was writing for the Trib, but there’s no earthly reason to think he’s well-equipped to report on a tax plan. Meanwhile, the Times happens to have on staff the Pulizer-Prize-winning David Cay Johnston, who is unquestionably the single best tax reporter in the country. Why wouldn’t you assign him to write the piece about Obama’s tax plan? The same goes for every substantive area of policy. The Post and the Times have reporters who know a lot about environmental policy, health policy, fiscal policy, etc.. Why not have them cover those aspects of the campaign?
I endorse all of these suggestions, enthusiastically. What do you think? Any other recommendations for making campaign coverage less painful?