Jon Stewart has described the media’s style of pack journalism many times with the same analogy: 8-year-olds playing soccer. As Stewart describes it, there’s a weird clump of legs, all moving in the same direction. Suddenly the kids see a ball rolling, and the weird clump converges on it in an awkward, graceless, and rather amusing fashion.
As Stewart sees it, reporters are the kids and news stories are the ball. Chris Hayes, displaying why he’s as good a political analyst as anyone I can think of, explains the psychology of the political press in a great item, written after last night’s debate in New Hampshire.
Reporting at event like this is exciting and invigorating, but it’s also terrifying. I’ve done it now a number of times at conventions and such, and in the past I was pretty much alone the entire time. I didn’t know any other reporters, so I kept to myself and tried to navigate the tangle of schedules and parking lots and hotels and event venues. It’s daunting and the whole time you think: “Am I missing something? What’s going? Oh man, I should go interview that guy in the parka with the fifteen buttons on his hat.” You fear getting lost, or missing some important piece of news, or making an ass out of yourself when you have to muster up that little burst of confidence it takes to walk up to a stranger and start asking them questions.
Of course, it’s amazing work. But I realized for the first time yesterday, that this essential terror isn’t just a byproduct of inexperience. It never goes away. Veteran reporters are just as panicked about getting lost or missing something, just as confused about who to talk to. This why reporters move in packs. It’s like the first week of freshman orientation, when you hopped around to parties in groups of three dozen, because no one wanted to miss something or knew where anything was.
The reporting that emerges from this is, to put it mildly, unhelpful.
Ezra reported on what it’s like to watch this dynamic unfold in real-time.
I must have heard the term “meltdown” in reference to Hillary 65 times. And I talked to reporters who would literally say, “I thought she did okay, but I just misjudged it” — the aggregate conclusion of the corps became some sort of objective, or at least agreed-upon, truth that the outliers measured themselves against. Very, very odd. Particularly because the part that much of the press liked least — her heated recitation of the programs she’s fought for — came off, to me, as one of her best moments.
Meanwhile, there is, on some level, an acknowledgment of the weirdness of all this. I was at a bar talking to some leftier members of the press last night when a reporter wandered up and asked if “we were discussing Hillary’s meltdown, or talking about real things?” Most of the folks I talked to happily admitted how unbelievably awful and surreal the spin room is, but everyone was in there. At one point, I asked an older reporter why everyone was assembled together for this debate, and he turned to me and said, “there’s no good reason. Reporters are creatures of habit, and all this is now habit.”
So Clinton’s flash of anger was a “meltdown” because the group of reporters collectively decided that it was. And they all reported on it the same way, because they knew to do otherwise would make put them outside the group.
Of course, once in a while, the media pack makes it really easy on itself and gives up on reporting altogether. I try to avoid television punditry, but last night, ABC did some “analysis” work between the Republican and Democratic debates, so it was hard to avoid. ABC’s coverage broke to the “spin room,” so viewers could hear four journalists tell us what the various candidates’ surrogates were saying. This resolves the problem of a reporter straying too far from groupthink because it doesn’t require any thinking at all — Mitt Romney’s aides argued their guy was great, so ABC duly reported, “Mitt Romney’s aides argued their guy was great.” It was television news at its most inane.
And this is admittedly tangential, but as long as we’re talking about campaign media, can some explain this praise for John McCain’s debate performance from Time’s Mark Halperin? (via Yglesias)
Relaxed and at home in friendly New Hampshire. To his advantage, he stayed above the fray — although to his disadvantage he disappeared for long stretches. Strong and firm on Iraq. Seemed to relish his engagement with Romney over immigration, slipping in a sharp jab over his rival’s fortune, and got in another zinger by twisting Romney’s message of change into a glib attack on the governor’s flipflopping history. Bottom line: Amazingly, the New Hampshire frontrunner was barely targeted — if he wins the primary, and then the nomination, it will be an historic missed opportunity for his Republican rivals.
McCain “stayed above the fray,” except for the parts of the debate when he went on the attack? Huh?