Media Matters, But Not That Much

Rick Perlstein, on a panel about the media, describes The Boys on the Bus as a book about politics on a level with Machiavelli's Prince or John Locke's Second Treatise on Government. Obviously, that's deliberate hyperbole. But still, I think it reflects a common disagreement I have with the netrootsian perspective on things -- a tendency on their part to vastly overstate the significance of media issues in terms of their impact on the real world.

People working in a medium should do things that the medium is well-suited to. And blogs are very well-suited to complaining about media coverage. So blogs spend a lot of time complaining about media coverage. Which is all, I think, perfectly fine. But the tendency to make the leap from "complaining about the media would be a good thing to do with my blog" to "objectively speaking, complaining about the media is hugely important to creating political change" is a mistake. If anything, I think it's much more likely that the press tends to go easy on conservatives because conservatives have been politically successful than it is that the success is due to media coverage.

Comments

I think however that the conservative successes of the past couple decades have no doubt been helped by the conservative movement for the last 40 years putting a huge emphasis on their own complaining about the media. The whole "liberal bias" thing, the establishment of Fox news and so many other partisan conservative media outlets to challenge what was the mainstream media before them, etc.

Posted by Will Hutchinson | July 18, 2008 3:16 PM

I think you're right and wrong. The political media is horrible in a way that helps conservatives--partly because conservatives are better at exploiting the press's horribleness, but not entirely. But, complaining about this is not actually very politically useful or important. What would be useful is providing good coverage of substantive stuff instead--making a serious attempt to replace the political "press". Blogs don't have the resources to travel abroad, develop confidential sources, etc. & can't really replace serious investigative reporters, foreign correspondents, etc. But coverage of Washington & politics is way, way easier than that. A lot of the information is public & easily accessible from a computer. And promoting/commenting on real news reporters' work & substantive issues instead of Chris Matthews' latest inanity is also not that hard. I mean, the sort of "reporting" that cable news or Marc Ambinder does--anyone with a little time on their hands can do that. For that matter, a couple of the sites with more resources could probably try getting a press credential & having someone ask the White House or the campaigns some serious questions.

Posted by Katherine | July 18, 2008 3:31 PM

What MattY doesn't discuss is that many on his side aren't content simply to complain about the media, but try to silence the other side. That includes his new employers over at ThinkChildrenOfTheCorn.

Posted by TLB | July 18, 2008 3:32 PM

I think it's much more likely that the press tends to go easy on conservatives because conservatives have been politically successful

I think that's right: the press follows power like the face of a flower follows the sun. But because of that, there's a tendency for media watchers--which includes, particularly, the media--to infer power from treatment by the press. There ends up being a substantial lag when power shifts.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 18, 2008 3:35 PM

Of course the media matters.

The media is filled with people who just love to think they are liberal and do their darndest to frame the Overton window such that they are liberal. They also want to appear "objective" (as well as knowing on which side their corporate masters have buttered their bread) so they go out of their way to be "very fair" to the right (egged on by constant allegations of liberal media bias).

In as much as a number of these people are wankers, most Americans come to think we liberals are a bunch of wankers.

And let's not forget the "even the liberal media" phenomenon. IIRC, even you MY were swayed by pro-Iraq war arguments from "serious" people. This happens even more so with workaday 'Murkins -- "even the liberal media has 'concerns' about Obama ... he must be a dangerous moonbat". Nu? The media goes out of their way to be conservative friendly, which only causes people to think -- "wow even the liberal media sees it the GOP way" ...

The constant "working of the refs" by the GOP and their liberal media meme is the gift that keeps on giving.

Posted by DAS | July 18, 2008 3:40 PM

Hey Matt, I've got to admit, I'm impressed. You've been ripping apart your colleagues more frequently now, especially Ambinder and Goldberg. Please please please on your last day write something completely taking apart those douches and Megan and the rest, these fucks have had it coming.

Love, and I'll see you at CAP.

Posted by Mmmmm | July 18, 2008 3:42 PM

"If anything, I think it's much more likely that the press tends to go easy on conservatives because conservatives have been politically successful than it is that the success is due to media coverage."

That was certainly true at one time. There really was a liberal media when movement conservatism rose to power between 1964 and 1980. Today, though, I think its pretty obvious that that era is over. Conservatism successfully razed the old liberal establishment and built its own institutional structures in its place. Now progressives are trying to replicated that feat in reverse.

Posted by Leo | July 18, 2008 3:46 PM

For the first time, I think Matt is completely wrong here. The press goes easy on conservatives because they've been cowed into by years of harping on this issue and a willingness of the right to cry "liberal media bias" whenever someone points out an inconvenient fact. It didn't matter that there was little truth to the matter, it gave their supporters a reason to ignore those facts and pushed the press to quit trying to actually report, instead relying on he said/she said debates which work especially well when you can buy spokespeople by the dozen (see the Tobacco Institute and the oil-funded flacks at CEI).

Working the refs works and the right has been doing it for a long time. I don't advocate copying their bullying tactics, but keeping the press honest is important.

Posted by nitpicker | July 18, 2008 3:53 PM

There really was a liberal media when movement conservatism rose to power between 1964 and 1980.

I'm not sure I buy that. The "liberal media" of 1964 was actually just the public mainstream. The "movement conservatism" simply shifted rightwards starting in 1964, making the media look liberal in comparison. Eventually, the media followed conservatism rightwards.

Posted by Tyro | July 18, 2008 4:00 PM

If media coverage doesn't matter all that much, why does Matt have a blog? Blogs are media, esp. blogs operated by The Atlantic. And if media coverage doesn'g matter, why does almost everyone I know spout MSM talking points on a regular basis? Granted, the people I know are probably not "mainstream" -- if only because they read newspapers and magazines and they listen to NPR and some of them read political blogs. (And most of them don't bother watching TV news or punditry.) But most of them believe that Social Security is doomed, for example, and they've all internalized the conservative/MSM attitude toward Dems, which leads to a kind of tired cynicism and disrespect, which leads to . . . I don't know, exactly.

And I don't agree at all that the press is easy on conservatives because they've been politically successful. Look at Bill Clinton -- he was a very popular president and yet he (and his administration) was treated very badly by the media, mostly because conservatives were pushing scandal after scandal and the media was happy to help them out. On the other hand, I don't know whether pushing the media from the left is helpful -- but I don't know that it's NOT helpful, either. It's hard to say.

In the end, I'm not sure what Matt means by "not all that much." In terms of any given presidential election? Maybe that's true in a strictly statistical sense.

Posted by mary | July 18, 2008 4:01 PM

he was a very popular president and yet he (and his administration) was treated very badly by the media

The counter-argument is that it's because his party lost big in '94.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 18, 2008 4:29 PM

"The counter-argument is that it's because his party lost big in '94."

One might make that argument -- but I wouldn't buy it. For one thing, the Republicans lost big in 06, and that hasn't changed the coverage at all. (All news is good news for John McCain!) If anything, I would buy the argument that the larger political framework didn't bode well for Clinton and the Dems -- in fact, I would make this argument. But the personal attacks on Clinton were another thing altogether. And those attacks damaged his presidency greatly.

Posted by mary | July 18, 2008 4:39 PM

"The "liberal media" of 1964 was actually just the public mainstream."

Without getting into semantics, I guess I would just say that conservatives seem to have been right in thinking that the establishment media was somewhat hostile to their political views in the '60s and '70s, and they were successful in achieving power in spite of that hostility. But that isn't the situation any more.

Posted by Leo | July 18, 2008 4:55 PM

"The counter-argument is that it's because his party lost big in '94."

In addition to what Mary said, you should also look at the fact that the media didn't just suddenly start being hard on Clinton in January of '04. The so-called Whitewater matter was invented by the New York Times during the '92 campaign. And he was plagued by numerous "scandals" in the first 2 years of his administration. Anyone remember nanny-gate? Travel-gate? The "murder" of Vince Foster?

Certainly the right-wing campaign of working the refs for the past 40 years has paid tremendous dividends. But the problem goes deeper than that. We have reached a point where the most powerful people in the Washington political press corps are actually deeply conservative. They're all millionaires, after all, so it's not surprising that they would identify more with the rich and the party of the rich. This has been covered in tremendous (some would say excruciating) detail on dailyhowler.com.

Posted by Rob Mac | July 18, 2008 5:22 PM

I think that's right: the press follows power like the face of a flower follows the sun. But because of that, there's a tendency for media watchers--which includes, particularly, the media--to infer power from treatment by the press. There ends up being a substantial lag when power shifts.

The good thing about this hypothesis is that it may be testable in fifteen years or so. The Democrats currently have a big advantage in the House and may well have a significant one in the Senate next term, in addition to the President. They may even impact significantly the Supreme Court. In other words, power would in essence come from the Democrats. If the press follows suit and licks their boots, then we have some proof for this hypothesis.

Another way to prove this is to look at how the press treated the Democratic Party between 1940 and 1964, at the absolute peaks of its power.

But, one complication is that the Republican storm to power has been relaively recent - really since 1994 only. The Democrats held Congress in the 1980s, for instance, and thanks to that wielded significant, if not absolute, influence over political matters. So, a related question becomes: can we, through analysis, discern when the press became more likely to go easy on conservatives?

I think it might end up being the case that it is the perception of power as much as actual power that is the important variable, although this is conjecture.

I am more sympathetic to the belief that the operation of the press in TV and in print leads to certain habits that themselves either, unwittingly, favor conservatives or have been better exploited by conservatives.

Posted by Josh R. | July 18, 2008 5:44 PM

If structural concerns have anything to do with things (and I think they do), then the nature of the concentrated news media system would suggest a clear incentive to favor conservative approaches in many areas of life.

But, then, I don't think a lot of time was spent thinking about this particular blog post and its logical and factual implications and areas in which these questions could have already been studied empirically, so I don't think I'll invest my time doing so either.

Posted by El Cid | July 18, 2008 5:53 PM

I think it's much more likely that the press tends to go easy on conservatives because conservatives have been politically successful than it is that the success is due to media coverage.

Agreed, but I think it's even more likely that the press goes easy on macho idiot conservatives because pandering to macho idiots sells. It sells in America because most Americans are macho idiots. They'll vote for Democrats this year because no matter how hard they try, they can't ignore all the Bush fuckups and other recent GOP scandals. But they'll soon forget and go back to buying the macho garbage Fox News and the rest are selling, because that garbage is what they want to believe.

Posted by Gary Sugar | July 18, 2008 6:57 PM

> If anything, I think it's much more likely
> that the press tends to go easy on conservatives
> because conservatives have been politically
> successful than it is that the success is due to
> media coverage.

Yes, we can confirm that theory by the improvement of traditional press coverage of Democrats and liberals, and correspondingly tougher coverage of Republicans, Cheney, and the Radical Right after November 2006.

Oh wait...

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | July 18, 2008 8:28 PM

I hesitated to comment on this post before, as it is a recurring theme for MY--the awful coverage major Dems receive really isn't that big a deal--and he is clearly clueless on the matter.

Whether professional concerns drive this, and Matt is simply so drawn into the DC culture and really, really wants to be one of the kool kids someday, or he is just an ignorant and sheltered TFSB who doesn't get too caught up in MSM malfeasance because it is all sport to him, I don't know.

But it is a spectacularly ignorant post.

p.s., Al Gore says Hi, and Media Matters Much, dummy!

Posted by Andruw | July 18, 2008 8:32 PM

In the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell suggests you're wrong, Matt.

Posted by slag | July 18, 2008 10:28 PM

To drag this back to its starting point, "The Boys on the Bus" might not have been as transcendental as Perlstein asserts, but anyone who read it remembers it as a quietly devastating portrait of the herd mentality among the media in the 1972 presidential race. They sized up McGovern as unworthy and never took him seriously.

The book actually buttresses the arguments that many commenters make about the media mattering -- and a lot. It also undercuts the idea of a monolithically liberal media. Nixon got far better press than McGovern -- and at the tail end of a failed war and just as the Watergate scandal began to break.

Posted by Chris R. | July 18, 2008 11:59 PM

I started reading The Boys on the Bus, but could never finish it after my girlfriend started singing the title to the tune of The Wheels on the Bus. Now every time I am reminded of that book I involuntarily shudder because of that soul-sucking earworm of a song.

Posted by rufustfyrfly | July 19, 2008 12:47 AM

Well, if the media's way of looking at the world didn't matter much- there wouldn't be much use for studying agenda setting.

I am not a believer in large media effects (i.e. the hypodermic needle model), but what the collected research has shown (by using both survey and experimental methodologies) is that the news media does an exceptionally good job of giving us the topics to talk about. In that way, the news media has tended towards topics that suit conservatives.

Posted by broca | July 19, 2008 1:44 AM

Well, if the media's way of looking at the world didn't matter much- there wouldn't be much use for studying agenda setting.

I am not a believer in large media effects (i.e. the hypodermic needle model), but what the collected research has shown (by using both survey and experimental methodologies) is that the news media does an exceptionally good job of giving us the topics to talk about. In that way, the news media has tended towards topics that suit conservatives.

Posted by broca | July 19, 2008 1:46 AM

Well, if the media's way of looking at the world didn't matter much- there wouldn't be much use for studying agenda setting.

I am not a believer in large media effects (i.e. the hypodermic needle model), but what the collected research has shown (by using both survey and experimental methodologies) is that the news media does an exceptionally good job of giving us the topics to talk about. In that way, the news media has tended towards topics that suit conservatives and the policies they would most like enacted.

Posted by broca | July 19, 2008 1:48 AM

Well, if the media's way of looking at the world didn't matter much- there wouldn't be much use for studying agenda setting.

I am not a believer in large media effects (i.e. the hypodermic needle model), but what the collected research has shown (by using both survey and experimental methodologies) is that the news media does an exceptionally good job of giving us the topics to talk about. In that way, the news media has tended towards topics that suit conservatives and the policies they would most like enacted.

Posted by broca | July 19, 2008 1:49 AM

um...

certainly didn't mean to post my comment 4 damn times.

sorry

Posted by broca | July 19, 2008 2:24 AM

But the tendency to make the leap from "complaining about the media would be a good thing to do with my blog" to "objectively speaking, complaining about the media is hugely important to creating political change" is a mistake. If anything, I think it's much more likely that the press tends to go easy on conservatives because conservatives have been politically successful than it is that the success is due to media coverage.

Well, you're totally wrong, but I'm sure you knew this already.

Control of the media has created today's politics, so when the media is changed or obsoleted, politics will change.

It's oppresion and espionage 101- control what people know and then you can control how they act, because they can't act according to what they don't know is true.

Posted by Swan | July 19, 2008 3:24 AM

Re: Look at Bill Clinton -- he was a very popular president and yet he (and his administration) was treated very badly by the media, mostly because conservatives were pushing scandal after scandal and the media was happy to help them out.

Scandals sell. The Media is happy to exagerrate any hint of wrongdoing by a politicioan (especially if it's titillating stuff involving sex) because they sell copy/gain audience share that way. The media ceratinly was hostile to Clinton-- but it was equally hostile to his predecessors and to his successor.

Re: The "murder" of Vince Foster?

???
There was a lot of whispering about Vince Foster's death as murder in the fever swamp of the far right, but it was not reported that way by any remotely reputable media outlet.

Re: We have reached a point where the most powerful people in the Washington political press corps are actually deeply conservative. They're all millionaires, after all, so it's not surprising that they would identify more with the rich and the party of the rich.

There's some truth to this, but the sort of conservatism one finds among such people is a fairly limited sort: the media (like much the upper class in general) is notably hostile toward religion and social conservatism for example.

Posted by JonF | July 19, 2008 8:05 AM