Some final(ish) thoughts on the election
Can we stop making journalists *the* story?
Last week, an eternity ago really, we talked about how “media” has become its own story of the U.S. presidential election. Where the spotlight used to be on the candidates, it now shines brightly on media personalities.
In a way, it’s inevitable. Big production budgets, fancy “magic walls,” an ominous or triumphant score (depending on the network), make Election Day look more like a Reality TV show than the informative role news media is supposed to exhibit.
And Election Day (or Week?) is what cable news was built for: filling air time with personalities to try to put limited information into context. On Election Night, as we wait for results, a vacuum is created giving birth to the media superstar.
https://twitter.com/i/events/1325020418441269248
Obviously, the fault is not on the journalist, per se. It’s a spandrel of a system that puts entertainment on the same plane as information. And a time when Twitter often dictates coverage, elevating journalists (and then sometimes even knocking them down), creating media superstars is par for the course. Media navel-gazing is at an all-time high.
But with that, as the focus centers on the personality, we should also take stock of the tributary of effects that come with a narrative that place the reporter above the story. We can see the director (just a reminder, every news show has someone literally calling the shots and camera angles) choose which storyline to place our newfound heroes. Fan cams were established.
Yesterday, the New York Time’s Ben Smith wrote about his friend and colleague Maggie Haberman. It’s a fine piece about one of the hardest-working and intrepid reporters in the industry, and one whose reporting will no doubt be the foundational narrative for this moment in time. But it should not have been written, at least by Ben or by the New York Times.
The day after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election, there are a million media stories to write.
Perhaps a more interesting, if not more expansive/less Times-y story would have been to write about the women reporters covering the Trump White House and how their lives have been affected by a president who openly belittled them.
Or maybe a media story about the fabled Trump bump for media companies and what will happen when Trump is out of office.
One could even take a hack at what a Biden administration means for ad tech (though that’s probably a bit niche for a general New York Times audience).
For an industry that mythologizes “with neither fear nor favor,” having a clause 12 grafs down that reads “We remain friends, as well as colleagues. This is another one of these columns where you have every reason to doubt my neutrality.” gives bad-faith actors a sense of validity.
The point is this: journalists should not be the story. (Exceptions, of course, exist; like, say a serial plagiarist or fabricator; a journalist that erodes the trust of the reader.)
Taking a more expansive view of the election cycle, not just Election Day/Night/Week, in this morning’s Press Run, Eric Boehlert writes about Andrew Tyndall, a longtime network news analyst (I highly recommend clicking through; it’s a good read full with interesting data):
"The Tyndall Report has monitored the nightly newscasts' coverage of each quadrennial election cycle since 1988," he recently wrote. "Never before in any of the previous eight elections has so much attention been paid to the threats to a free and fair vote, nor to the efforts to secure the vote against any disruption."
Of course, the networks have never before covered a president who lobbed relentless threats to undermine free and fair elections, so it stands to reason the focus this year would be unique. To the networks' credit though, they treated the topic as hugely important. And they helped educate voters.
This represents a welcome U-turn from 2016 when Tyndall's analysis found that the same nightly network news programs drastically cut back on policy coverage — on what a Hillary Clinton or Trump presidency would look like — in order to gorge themselves on email "scandal" coverage.
Letting the liars lie down
One last thing to think about: Republicans have not been playing out the Homer Simpson-descends-into-the-bushes meme these last couple of days.
Indeed, during the week, many, from Senator Lindsey Graham to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had fallen in line with Trump’s delusions of grandeur that he had won the election (or, another way, hadn’t lost?) repeating these claims. As of Sunday evening, Trump still hasn’t conceded.
And the very few Republicans who have acquiesced to reality, like Senators Mitt Romney and John Kasich, while congratulating Biden and urging unity among Americans in one breath, belie that message with their next breath that hiccups, “oh and we will work hard to defeat everything that Biden tries to pass.”
But it’s striking that many of Biden’s colleagues from the Senate have not congratulated him, yet. Or even acknowledged his victory.
There’s a growing chorus of people saying something along the lines of “we can disagree on favorite baseball teams or types of music we listen to, but when it comes to the vile and morally bankrupt behaviors and policies the Trump administration enacted through his enablers in Congress, we need to draw the line on comity.”
There is a nugget of truth in this. And the media, as the arbiters of what messages see the light of day, play an important role in shaping what we believe, but also what we know. The political press has failed, often, over the last thirty years, and one lesson they should have learned over the last four: don’t interview Trump officials; don’t make them talking heads; don’t give them air time. They were just as responsible for the bad, if not evil, policies this administration administered on behalf of the American public.
And when you bring on Republicans who enabled the president, because they will (there’s no way Meet the Press or Face the Nation won’t have Senators Ted Cruz or Marsha Blackburn on), the “talent” on these networks need to ask until they’re blue in the face: why did you let Trump do X -- where X can be any number of irregular, illegal, immoral things.
The media has to move from a both sides-ism/view from nowhere philosophy to that of acting as a model of finding the closest thing to the truth. Letting bad-faith actors wantonly lie to Americans doesn’t do that.
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Trey Anastasio Band, “Rise/Come Together”
Some interesting links:
For some real good news:
Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine is more than 90 percent effective in first analysis, company reports (Washington Post)
For new streaming networks:
Bloomberg’s Streaming News Channel Deepens Push in Consumer Media (WSJ)
For mergers and acquisitions:
VF to buy Supreme for $2.1 billion (Bloomberg)
For earnings:
S4 Capital boosted by tech clients as organic growth surges 23% (Campaign)
For media criticism:
Inside the New York Times’ heated reckoning with itself (NY Mag)
For publishers:
Quartz becomes an independent media company (Quartz)
For misinformation:
Misinformed through social media, Trump supporters take to the streets to challenge election result (CNN)
Yet again, the pro-Trump commentariat is called upon to prove Trump’s unfounded claims (Washington Post)