Re-thinking Elections 2012
By Bastique via Wikimedia Commons
As part of the Studio 20 graduate program at NYU, we’re partnering with the Guardian on a big question: how do we make election coverage more useful to the average user? So, today we launch the “Citizens Agenda”, an attempt to do just that. See the official announcement here.
But in order to understand what this is all about, I though I’d give a little primer on why many folks—our own Prof. Jay Rosen included—have been in a huff over “election-coverage-as-usual”.
Her are some of the top critiques:
1) Journalists and their audience seem to have a different outlook on politics. While reporters cover politics as if it was a strategic, insider game, most people see it as less of a game and more of a means of choosing leaders and (hopefully) solving social problems. And that’s a big disconnect. Greg Marx perhaps Greg Marx sums up much of today’s coverage pretty aptly in the Columbia Review of Journalism (CJR): “If you’re a politics junkie, you won’t learn anything new; if not, it’s probably unintelligible.”
Key reading: Thomas E. Patterson, “Out of Order”
2) Objectivity ain’t always your friend. What Rosen has dubbed the “View from Nowhere”—the objective standpoint most US-media organizations like to tout—tends to center around the “viewlessness of the news producer” (emphasis added). And there’s something pretty unnatural about that idea. As Patterson argues in the book mentioned above, the objective stand-point absolves the journalist of responsibility. If a reporter is being objective, s/he need not call out candidates on their BS, flip flops and/or lack of principle, but s/he need only report back what was said—and that doesn’t do much a service to the news consumer. Plus, the objective style might even be eroding trust in the press, Rosen writes in another blog post, and that’s no good.
Though objectivity probably isn’t going to fly out the window any time soon, the idea that it might not be the best way to get at political coverage is food for thought. (People seem to like a little viewpoint with their news when you think about it… just look at networks like Fox News, who are more …shall we say… opinionated.)
3) Elections are treated too much like a horse race. Yes, elections are technically a race. But they’re not just a race—which is what a majority of news coverage tends to center on. “Horseracism is the practice of reporters and their editors obsessing over polls and processes instead of substance,” writes Brian Montopoli in CJR. And this type of news is the best example of that “politics-as-game” obsession a good chunk of the press seems to hold dear. It’s an outlook that causes reporters to ask, “What’s the candidate’s strategy for winning?” more often than “What’s their strategy for jobs creation?” But how useful or meaningful is such coverage, critics, including Montopoli, ask? Between poll-obsessiveness and the focus on “mini-scandals” the real issues often get lost.
4) The press has lost it’s muckraker way. The number one lesson the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach gleaned from the ‘08 election is that “On the whole, political press is becoming more passive and reactive than it once was.” Yikes. Though they qualify that review by saying there is still “a good deal of superb enterprising reporting out there”, Rosenstiel and Kovach think that too much falls in the “passive and reactive” category. Their report found that most of what voters learned about the 2008 candidates through the press came from the campaigns themselves, rather than through independent, investigative reporting from the media—and that really is a scary thought. Though there are many explanations—the least of which is not the economics of the media biz today—the watchdog function should be the media’s first job, Rosenstiel and Kovach argue. Investigative reporting on candidates and their campaigns should not so easily take a back seat to polls and soundbites.
5) There’s a love affair with the status quo. In his blog post “How Media Frames Political Issues” Scott London follows the idea that the press rely too heavily on the government and campaigns themselves for information, and he sees this leading to an unquestioning preservation of the existing state of affairs. By being a one-way conduit from politicians to citizens, and not the other way around, the press is doing the public a disservice, many critics argue. (I’m starting to feel echoes of he “citizens agenda”…)
Though there are many more critiques (trust me on this one), these top five are already enough to merit at least a re-thinking of political—and especially election—coverage. How do we make such coverage more inclusive for our audience as citizens, not only news consumers, London asks in his post… and so do we.
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Further reading: Rosen, Audience Atomization Overcome; Rosen, Why Political Coverage is Broken; Marx, In Defense of (the Right Kind of) Horse Race Journalism; Stein, Defending (Gulp!) the Campaign Press; Pew Center, Winning the Media Campaign: 2008 How the Press Reported the 2008 General Election
