News media keep getting it wrong in president race
Political reporting used to be a grinding and repetitive affair of bad hotels and rote speeches. The romance in Timothy Crouse’s classic Boys on the Bus is an anti-romance: campaigns were a gritty duty. But in the era of big data and social media omniscience, political reporting has transitioned from daily grind to sweeping commentary. And that is perhaps the reason why, in this race, it turns out to be so reliably and spectacularly wrong.
Hillary is inevitable, until she is not. Donald Trump is a joke, until he too is inevitable, until he is not. Even Ben Carson was possibly inevitable until he turned out never to have even possibly been inevitable. Anyway, pay no attention because Marco Rubio is inevitable.
If you had followed no campaign reporting for the past six months, watched no debates, listened to no commentary and forsaken all polling, you would now be no less wise about what will happen from here until next November.
The entire spill of campaign information has been mostly a waste of time. Not only has it made no one smarter, it seems it will not even influence the ultimate outcome: The center seems likely to hold.
Indeed, the news media now get it so wrong that the story itself is now invariably about reversals. Of course these reversals are supposedly about the fickleness of voters and the random nature of the way the political stars align, instead of, in fact, reversals of the news media itself.
In effect, campaign reporting — occupying a vast concentration of news media time and resources — has failed. In its new form, the job has gone from cataloguing the granular — who spoke where and when and said what (if anything) — to establishing the narrative. That is, a set of overriding likely outcomes and themes, against which the protagonists struggle, that change and reverse in novelistic or long-running serial fashion.
A modern political campaign, conceivably the most pointless and boring activity it is possible to engage in, almost impossible to express its meaninglessness and banality, somehow becomes rather edge-of-the-seat interesting, however absurdly remote its twists and turns might also be from reality.
There are many offenders in this new form of covering a presidential campaign — almost everybody, in fact, including many millions of new social media amateurs. But prominent among them are Politico’s “chief political correspondent,” Glenn Thrush, a master of the breathless development; The New Yorker’s John Cassidy, delivering frequent if not constant digital updates about the nation’s character; The New
York Times’ “presidential campaign correspondent,” Maggie Haberman, with her parachute-in insights; Nate Silver, the pollster who, with his prescient calls in 2008, lent some sort of science to the suddenly booming field of overblown narrative and authoritative prognostication; and Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, who have turned notoriously unreliable political gossip and basic gasbaggery into a small industry.
The new campaign reporting craft involves not just handicapping the overall race or a given primary, but making each seeming turn in the campaign indicative of a large cultural shift and, as well, a shocking glimpse into a roiled national psyche. If it’s not the faint or censorious of heart of American womankind tipping events, then it’s the rancor and resentments of the white man. Follow the Big Themes.
Using presidential campaigns as a metaphor for the American character and a window into the national unconscious has long been an American literary genre, arguably begun by Norman Mailer in his 1960 essay about John F. Kennedy, Superman Comes to the
Supermarket, and cemented by Theodore White in his Making of
the President series. This continued in Hunter Thomson’s Fear
and Loathing series, and, after the genre fell out of favor for some time, was revived by Halperin and Heilemann’s Game Change about the 2008 presidential race.
The difference is that these campaign autopsies were written after the fact. Now the approach is to write them during, to understand the secret aspirations and dark heart of America on the fly. Campaigns are now covered as long-running television series are written: If a minor character seems to catch fire with the imagination of the audience and the writer, that role expands. Hence, for several months we lived in the dystopian world of Donald Trump taking over the nation, until we woke up last week after the Iowa primary to find that we could apparently disregard that as merely bad dream. The new reporting is riveting, but not real. Of course this is generally blamed on politics, its shifting nature and magical properties, rather than on the reporting.
But politics in fact moves slowly and is absent all magical charm. If it has seemed to change, this has as much to do with the fact that the news media has changed. There are fewer reporters on the day-after-day campaign bus — that costs too much money. Social media, and its viral assessments, is now the main source of campaign reporting. Polling is far more frequent, far more authoritative, and far more in need of an overarching explanation to justify the fact that, reflecting compounded anomalies as each poll influences the next, they mean nothing. And, most of all, political campaigns return ever-more money to the media itself. They are one of the media’s few reliable profit centers.
Therefore the job of all political reporters who have any interest in keeping their jobs is to make political campaigns seem far more exciting then they are. There’s a conspiracy.