Tough Enough

James Fallows talks about how politicians want to talk about their agenda, but the press only wants to hear about the freak show:

The obvious complaint, easily dismissed by reporters, is that press coverage is biased against or "too tough on" this or that candidate. Reporters tell themselves: Hey, we're tough on everybody. You're not strong enough to take it, maybe you should find a different line of work.

The more heartfelt and bitter complaint is about the way press coverage seems biased not against any particular candidate but against the entire process of politics, in the sense that politics includes the public effort to resolve difficult issues. (Medical care, climate change, banking crises, military priorities, etc.) For twenty years I have heard this from frustrated politicians -- Gary Hart, Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Carter, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, they may not share a lot of views but they are as one in this frustration. What galls all of them is the way that the incentives created by most coverage bring out the very worst in most politicians, and discourage them from even bothering to try the harder, more "responsible" path. No one says that press incentives turn potential Abraham Lincolns into real-world Tom DeLays. But the incentives push in that direction rather than the reverse.

What's driving this, I think, are the dual desires to be "tough" and to be "objective." In particular, being objective is thought to preclude being tough about public policy because that would entail picking sides in ideology-inflicted arguments. And people didn't get into this business in order to provide softball coverage. So instead you ask tough questions about process or about trivia, even though there's little evidence that these are the subjects about which people want to hear.

Comments

Plus you actually have know something and be reasonably intelligent to comment on policy issues. In contrast, any ignorant idiot can blather on and on about how voters will react to the latest gaffe of the week.

Posted by DTM | April 28, 2008 12:21 PM

It's worse than that-- a reporter can be tough and objective about policy if (s)he chooses to be. The deeper problem is the whole "Let's you and him fight" narrative. Sure, politics is competitive, but why can't the competition be about ideas rather than about "Fuck you", "No, fuck you."

Posted by MattF | April 28, 2008 12:22 PM

And people didn't get into this business in order to provide softball coverage.

Cite?

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | April 28, 2008 12:24 PM

Reporters get into the business first of all to eat. Their bosses say, "Fluff First, Eat Second" so reporters squirm around in the gap between "Tough Fluff" and "Easy Fluff". There are more reporters who are capable of writing a Tough Fluff piece than there are of writing, say, a book like "Heads in the Sand". So, there's competition for "Tough Fluff" reporters. So, reporters feel justified in writing Tough Fluff articles. If it wasn't them it would just be someone else.

What they'd do though if there was a market for real reporting. Whew. Set your hair on fire.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | April 28, 2008 12:29 PM

Relevant Taibbi column:

All journalists are cowards. Hitchens knows it, I know it, everybody in this business knows it. If there were any justice at all, every last goddamn one of us would be lowered, head-first, into a wood-chipper. Over Arizona. Shoot a nice red mist over the whole state, make it arable for a year or two. A year's worth of fava beans and endive for the children of Bangladesh: I dare anyone in our business to say that that wouldn't represent a better use of our rotting bodies than the actual fruits of our labor.

One friend I know describes working in the media as shoveling coal for Satan. That's about right. A worker in a tampon factory has dignity: He just uses his sweat to make a product, a useful product at that, and doesn't lie to himself about what he does. In this business we make commodities for sale and, for the benefit of our consciences and our egos, we call them ideas and truth. And then we go on the lecture circuit. But in 99 cases out of 100, the public has more to learn about humanity from the guy who makes tampons.

Often not that crazy about his work, but when he's right, he's right.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | April 28, 2008 12:37 PM

The problem with the state of "journalism" at this point in our history (and perhaps it has always been this way) is that the average journalist is in no way affected by the outcomes of the political process they are tasked with covering. As a result, they see politics as just another game. A silly contest full of drama, deception and double crosses. So and so said this, she back-stabbed him, this campaign is in turmoil, these top campaign aides won't talk to each other, ad nauseum.

Perhaps if your average major media pundit had any skin in the game, they would cover health care policy, or the war in Iraq in a more serious and reflective way. Imagine if these people were actually part of the middle class how different their perspective would be on major issues. Imagine if they actually knew a member of the armed services. Until the gatekeepers of our discourse are anything besides sheltered wealthy hacks, our political "coverage" will continue to suffer death by a thousand inanities.

Posted by drjimcooper | April 28, 2008 12:37 PM

It's a combination of laziness and cynicism. You do have to do research, think and have something to say about policy. So most reporters don't bother. But it is also cynicism that makes political journalists not want to appear to care about anything, any person or policy, because that would not be cool. The ideal is Mark Halperin snarkiness and knowingness, not thoughtful pieces on policy like Matt and some others actually do write.

Posted by Mimikatz | April 28, 2008 12:38 PM

Yes, the problem is that our political reporters are just too good and too honest. Gee whiz.

Actually, the problem is that people in the lower rungs of the political reporting game want to make it to the higher rungs where all the money is. They don't want to criticize prominent media figures and endanger their careers. Nor do they want to go against prominent media figures. So they tow the conventional wisdom and advance their careers.

And the reporters and pundits at the high level are rich beyond the imagining of most Americans. Their interests are the interest of the super rich. And to super rich fops setting around Versailles, nothing is more fun than playing games and hurling clever insults, so this is the "sport" in which they engage. And for some strange reason, the party that always gets it the worst from these "distractions" is the Democratic party. It's funny, because these incredibly wealthy media figure just happen to do better financially when Republicans cut their taxes and screw over everyone else.

But I'm sure Matt's right. The engine that drove the war against Gore in 2000 was the desire of the press corps to be "tough" and to be "objective". That's why people like Maureen Dowd and Chris Mathews went around making up "lies" and pretending that Al Gore said them. Hey, it's not like they were taking sides. That would also explain why the New York Times invented the Whitewater story out of whole cloth in the early 90s and spent nearly a decade flogging it. That's why political reporters spent the Clinton years digging up one fake scandal after another.

Tough and objective. That pretty much explains why the press corps is McCain's base, why they give him standing ovations, bring him coffee and donuts, attend barbecues at his "cabin", yuk it up in the back of his bus, and always refer to him as a straight talker, maverick and war hero. Sure. They've been just as hard on him as they've been on Obama and Clinton. We've heard just as much about Hagee and Falwell as we have about scary Wright. Just as much about confusing Sunnis and Shiites as about sniper fire in Bosnia.

Tough. Objective.

Posted by Rob Mac | April 28, 2008 12:42 PM

even though there's little evidence that these are the subjects about which people want to hear

Really?

What is the evidence that people really want to hear about "issues"?

Let's look at, say, television ratings when Bill Clinton discussed his marital infidelity (the ultimate non-"issue", right?) as opposed to, say, when he went to war against Serbia. Which do you think interested the American public more?

Let's face it - people like Fallows really are out of touch with America if they think that people really want to hear, say, the details of candidate X's position on clean coal technology instead of, say, their drunk driving conviction 30 years ago.

Posted by Al | April 28, 2008 12:48 PM

What's driving this, I think, are the dual desires to be "tough" and to be "objective."

I think you're being kind. What's really driving this is good old-fashioned laziness. Think of how our news in general is constructed. Everything needs to be presented as finite, and closed. Team X beat Team Y. A building caught fire and burned to the ground. Six people were killed in a traffic accident. It rained today, but tomorrow will be sunny.

Not just short, but self-contained. Policy and agenda don't fit into that. What fits is the nonsensical crap that we see on the news. Candidate X called Candidate Y unpatriotic. Candidate Z can't close the deal. Governor S paid a hooker. President C diddled an intern.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with nonstop gibberish.

Posted by Roddy McCorley | April 28, 2008 12:48 PM

I blame the audience. If this shit didn't work, they wouldn't do it. As much.

Posted by Delicious Pundit | April 28, 2008 12:50 PM

I think you need to pay attention to your blog readers here. You are providing a great example of the real flaw at work in journalism. You are giving a pass to those who, at some level, share your interests or, at another level, hold power over you. The desire to be objective gets in the way of asking tough questions about policy??? Stop it. Obsessing over Clinton's zipper provided a greater impression of objectivity than asking hard questions about policy?

Journalists take sides on policy issues all the time. The last Clinton/Obama debate featured a moderator taking for granted that capital gains taxes pay for themselves. Journalists have for some time now written "death tax" without quotation marks. The Lehrer report, or whatever it's called these days, rounded up the head of a major new operations Pentagon reporting effort to comment on the lying-generals-for-hire story, and he spent every minute on the air saying it was perfectly respectable and a good way to gather objective information about the war in Iraq. The Post admits to being a mouthpiece for the White House, but never gets around ot apologizing for it.

Journalism is a business. Participants at every level have interests that are not perfectly aligned either with the business or with their readers. That seems a more fruitful issue for examination than the the two-headed journalist, afraid to seem partisan on issues that matter, but ready to change the outcome of elections over trivia in candidates backgrounds.

Posted by kharris | April 28, 2008 12:54 PM

Let's face it - people like Fallows really are out of touch with America if they think that people really want to hear, say, the details of candidate X's position on clean coal technology instead of, say, their drunk driving conviction 30 years ago.

The two are inextricably linked, Al.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | April 28, 2008 12:55 PM

I blame the audience. If this shit didn't work, they wouldn't do it. As much.

Yet, so many of the shows where this "gotcha" game goes on essentially have no audience. Hardball has no audience to speak of. Neither does Meet the Press or the other Sunday shows. If all these networks cared about was viewers, they'd run sports programs or game shows instead.

Posted by Rob Mac | April 28, 2008 12:55 PM

Again, Matt softpedals the truth about political journalism. Could be because he's part of the game, at least insofar as he doesn't want to criticize people he knows and likes (aka his peers). I don't think he's doing this on purpose -- and, in any case, I'm not a mindreader and wouldn't want to be -- but I think it's evident in what he actually says. He wants journalism to be better, of course, but he's remarkably uninterested in digging very far to discern the problem(s).

One of the things that is routinely ignored is the slant of "tough" journalism. It's a partisan thing. Again, I'm not a mindreader, so I don't claim to know what's in the minds of the journalists who cover politics, but . . . it's clear that the people who come in for most of the "flag pin" or "haircut" crap are Democrats. I'm sure that to some extent this results from internalizing conservative/Republican talking points (though I'm sure this is part of it -- laziness and the frantic need to fill up column space or airtime are very powerful forces. But there are other forces at work -- channeling Somerby, I wonder why no one ever takes a look at Jack Welch, the way they do at Murdoch and Ailes. And it's very disturbing to see people like Dowd and Russert and Matthews telling themselves and the rest of us that they are salt-of-the-earth types, even though they're all ridiculously removed from the earth, and even though they seem to have nothing but contempt for what you might call regular people. And then there's the sheer vapidity of it all. It's not tough or fair. It's really, really stupid.

I could go on. But what's the point?

Posted by mary | April 28, 2008 1:03 PM

Most political commentators are actually just serving some niche entertainment market. So, what they do isn't indicative of what most of the electorate wants in terms of political coverage, but rather it is just indicative of what the consumers in their little niche market want.

Posted by DTM | April 28, 2008 1:06 PM

being objective is thought to preclude being tough about public policy because that would entail picking sides in ideology-inflicted arguments.

It's your beloved 'polarization' at work, MY. The whole point of an explicit strategy of forced-polarization (the explicit strategy of the Right/GOP for many years) is to 'inflect' ideology into every single policy question, whether said inflection makes any sense or not - is even rational or not. The idea is to avoid dealing with said policy question; instead of debate the question, the GOP congressrobot says the magic sacred words: 'I just have an ideological difference with that'. Or better yet: 'You just say [fill in the blank] because you're a Liberal, so there!' If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, rigid ideology is the last refuge of an idiot.

The political press not only explicitly parrots the dominant political exponents, but also accepts the ideology's amoral conception and reformation of the press' very function: if it makes money, it's ipso facto good; if it doesn't, it shitty. Dealing with substance becomes this purile conception of 'taking sides' - straight out of the GOP playbook. Obviously, it's the GOP which has deliberately reduced everything down to that binary Sports mentality, a mentality which, as it happens, ends up being absurdly UN-ideological: George W Bush and his GOP congress are not ideologically coherent, to put it mildly. They are a brand, a team.

Posted by jonnybutter | April 28, 2008 1:07 PM

I read somewhere this week that most political writers just don't love politics the way sports writers love sports or food critics love cooking. I think it's basically true. That's why you get endless coverage of Obama's bowling score but hear crickets about his nationwide voter registration drive.

Imagine if Bill Simmons devoted column after column to Kevin Garnett's verbal gaffes or if Bill Buford obsessed over how well certain chefs connected with the Regular Joe's who ate in their restaurants.

The reason for the disparity, I think, is that political media don't actually cover the policy and governance angle of politics. Instead, they cover ebbs and flows in the raw power of politicians.

I spent some time a couple years ago studying dominance behavior in babboon troops. Basically, the animals closest to one another in the pecking order would seek to maintain or increase their position by humiliating one another within the sight of other members of the troop. You can watch the same thing in a slightly slicker form on MSNBC every day.

Posted by southpaw | April 28, 2008 1:07 PM

Which do you think interested the American public more?

Today's "Al" appears to be a condescending elitist bastard.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | April 28, 2008 1:08 PM

Sadly, I'm with Al on this one. People get the media they deserve.

Posted by Korha | April 28, 2008 1:18 PM

All businesses satisfy their customers. For the media, keep in mind, their advertisers are their customers--not their readers, not their listeners, and not their viewers. I am certain the advertisers are very satisfied with the present news coverage, and if they were not, it would change.

Posted by dwn | April 28, 2008 1:26 PM

Just look at the motivation for these questions: they are trying to trip the candidate, and when the candidate says anything that has the potential for being interpreted badly that is the one they hammer even when they know it isn't what was meant.

Of course, politicians have to be careful with words, but this is getting unreal. I think the electorate are starting to get a little tired of this very childish game, and they are right.

Posted by Chris Dornan | April 28, 2008 1:32 PM

Is it just me, or is journalism, particularly broadcast journalism, a magnet for extremely dim bulbs? The journalism students at my alma mater were a long way from sharp.

Posted by sglover | April 28, 2008 1:32 PM

The reason for the issue is:
1. ignorance: most reporters have little knowledge or life experience outside reporting.

2. ideology: most are "liberal" and come from the same general background.

3. personality type: most are incurious and aren't the "engineer" type, thus figuring out exactly how plans could be implemented never occurs to them.

4. corruption: almost every single reporter is simply a paid hack who knows what they can and can't discuss.

Just how bad the MSM is can be seen most clearly when they discuss immigration matters; scroll through my archives for endless examples.

If anyone wants to do something about this, go to campaign appearances, ask the questions the MSM won't, and then upload the response to video sharing sites.

Posted by TLB | April 28, 2008 1:33 PM

What's driving this, I think, are the dual desires to be "tough" and to be "objective." In particular, being objective is thought to preclude being tough about public policy because that would entail picking sides in ideology-inflicted arguments.

Being tough and objective about policy are usually only in conflict to the extent that "objective" means "teach the controversy." Looking tough and objective can be in conflict, yes. And all but the most self-important reporters are aware that being completely objective about everything is impossible. But, in the example of the recent article about budget proposals from the Clinton, McCain and Obama campaigns, it would have been both tough and objective to lead with the fact that McCain's budget has twice as much deficit spending as either of the others.

And people didn't get into this business in order to provide softball coverage.

Sure some of us did. We don't call it "softball coverage" to ourselves, we call it "human interest stories." Reporters say that human interest stories don't trivialize politics; they "put a human face on remote figures that don't have much to do with our audience's daily life." The completely irrelevant picture of children playing in the snow didn't prevent the teachers contract negotiations from getting more space on the front page. Well, OK, it did, but we have to have a graphic element on the front page, don't we?

Reporters may not say "I got into this business to provide softball coverage," but that doesn't mean it's not true.

Posted by Cyrus | April 28, 2008 2:04 PM

I'm pretty sure the likes of Joe Klein and George Stephanopoulos aren't tough enough to use Caron Butler's "Caron's Tough Juice" logo. Jus' sayin'.

Posted by EdTheRed | April 28, 2008 2:15 PM

most reporters have little knowledge or life experience outside reporting.

For instance, my knowledge beyond Scary! Mexicans! is deep and wide-ranging!

Posted by LBT | April 28, 2008 2:45 PM

Matt : No credit to Mothering Hut or the Wizznutzz? Chew straws, baby!

Posted by evan | April 28, 2008 3:56 PM

What about the obvious explanation that stories about the issues don't sell papers? People may say they want stories about the issues, but stories about the issues are boring. Who wants to read about the minutiae of Clinton and Obama's healthcare plans?

Posted by Elliot Reed | April 28, 2008 11:05 PM

"...being objective is thought to preclude being tough..."

Wrong, Matt. Being objective is more accurately thought to require being reasonably familiar with the merits of both sides' arguments. You, and your amen corner here, are too busy choosing sides.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 29, 2008 10:13 AM