Category Archives: Press and politics

Leadership, Media revolution, Newspapers, Press and politics, Uncategorized

Journalism failed us badly. Here’s how.

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People will be parsing this election for years to come. Here’s one thing I know: Journalism failed us badly. Since we are going to need good journalism more than ever in the days ahead, I offer some thoughts about what went wrong:

  1. The bottomless well of Trump coverage early on. This is mostly attributable to cable, but it was true of television more broadly, and it influenced print and online media as well.

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I included this chart from the New York Times in my March 28 blogpost: A tough test for Journalism and the Midterm Grades Aren’t Good.

As the Times story said, “Over the course of the campaign, he has earned close to $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history. It is also twice the estimated $746 million that Hillary Clinton, the next best at earning media, took in.”

Of this development, CBS Chairman Les Moonves famously said: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”  Here’s what else he said: “Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”

He did. So did they.

Continue reading Journalism failed us badly. Here’s how. →

  1. Near abandonment of issues coverage.

A Harvard study by Tom Patterson, released in late September, looked at 10 major news outlets, including the New York Times. It concluded that “substantive policy issues have received only a small amount of attention so far in the 2016 election coverage.”

Another study, released in late October, looked at the networks’ news coverage to determine how much of it concerned issues:

Total ABC CBS NBC
1988 117 36 40 42
1992 210 112 38 60
1996 98 29 53 17
2000 130 45 39 46
2004 203 40 119 44
2008 220 41 119 66
2012 114 13 70 32
2016 (YTD) 32 8 16 8

(Andrew Tyndall 10/25/16)

“With just two weeks to go, issues coverage this year has been virtually non-existent. Of the 32 minutes total, terrorism (17 mins) and foreign policy (7 mins) towards the Middle East (Israel-ISIS-Syria-Iraq) have attracted some attention. Gay rights, immigration and policing have been mentioned in passing.

“No trade, no healthcare, no climate change, no drugs, no poverty, no guns, no infrastructure, no deficits. To the extent that these issues have been mentioned, it has been on the candidates’ terms, not on the networks’ initiative.”

 

  1. Data journalism gone haywire.

The Times’s Nate Cohn may have no regrets, as per this tweet:

Nate Cohn ‏@Nate_Cohn Nov 10 Most of our journalism this year was about how people were ignoring the importance of white working class to Dem chances. I have no regrets

But something surely went wrong, since virtually everyone else in the world was in shock, no matter where they stood politically.

As Nick Bilton put it: “Every big-data, number-crunching Web site, from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight to The New York Times’ Upshot; every poll, from Fox to Bloomberg to Rasmussen, had predictions that were so off that it now seems surreal. And while we now all have to swallow the noxious potion that is President Trump, the chaser is that polling is completely and utterly broken.”

 

4. False equivalence. And more false equivalence. And more…

As in: They’re both unpopular. They both tell lies — no matter how vastly different the proportions:

screen-shot-2016-11-15-at-5-58-41-pm

Ethan Coen’s sarcasm in his “thank you notes” in the Times rang painfully close to how the stories read:

“You balanced Donald Trump’s proposal that the military execute the innocent families of terrorists, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced pot-stirring racist lies about President Obama’s birth, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced a religious test at our borders, torture by our military, jokes about assassination, unfounded claims of a rigged election, boasts about groping and paradoxical threats to sue anyone who confirmed the boasts, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced endorsement of nuclear proliferation, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced tirelessly, indefatigably; you balanced, you balanced, and then you balanced some more.”

The Times’s columnists tried to tell ‘em so:

“I know some (many) journalists are busy denying responsibility, but this is absurd, and I think they know it,” said Paul Krugman in “The Falsity of False Equivalence.”

And Nick Kristof:  “Of course we should cover Clinton’s sins, but when the public believes that a mythomaniac like Trump is the straight shooter, we owe it to ourselves and the country to wrestle with knotty questions of false equivalence.”

The primary response came from the then fairly new public editor, Liz Spayd, in an exceptionally weak column, urging Times journalists not to be intimidated by the false balance charge.

They weren’t.

Does this kind of flawed journalism happen because a news organization wants to avoid driving away the right?  Did it make for more interesting stories?  Did it seem harmless, because Clinton was sure to win?

The New York Times — this newspaper on which I depend (as is evident in this post), and which leads much of the other news coverage in America — is deeply implicated here. It is perhaps the most important news outlet in the country, one of the most important in the world, and it must be better than this.  A statement from its publisher and  executive editor, after the election said this:

“As we reflect on the momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. It is also to hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.”

Rededication? Yes.  “Same level?” Please, no.

 

  1. My fifth point moves beyond traditional, legacy news operations, which are no longer the gatekeepers that they were (though I believe firmly that their power continues to matter sufficiently to worry deeply about how they conduct themselves).

Organizations like Google and Facebook make decisions that have enormous power over what Americans know and believe. Outrage over the fake stories that proliferated during this campaign is finally being recognized by these reluctant corporations.

It’s a step, albeit a belated and limited one. And one reason it’s belated and limited is this, as one employee told Gizmodo about Facebook: “They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous citing fear of retribution from the company. The source added, “there was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after Trending Topics,” and that “a lot of product decisions got caught up in that.”  (Some things, new and old media share.)

 

After every election, we agonize about journalism’s coverage. But this one feels bigger, the stakes higher. Legacy media still matter. The choices they make will affect our future, just as they affected this election. They are searching for economic survival in a Wild West of media change. My conviction is that, if they distinguish themselves by being trustworthy and fair-minded, dedicated to the truth as close as they can determine it, committed to purveying news that is proportional and comprehensive — well, that will be their best chance of survival.

Ours, too.

 

 

 

 

Leadership, Press and politics, Women and leadership

A terrible loss for journalism, as Gwen Ifill dies at 61

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Gwen came out to Los Angeles to receive the 2011 National Cronkite Award at USC.  The  judges (I was honored to be among them) cited her (and her co-winner Judy Woodruff) for election coverage “focusing on the issues, talking with real voters and letting the candidates explain themselves,” adding that “they avoided the horserace component that is so typical in political coverage.”

How powerful those words feel now, at this moment of loss.

 

 

 

Media revolution, Press and politics

It’s not just the Fox, it’s the sheep’s clothing

The New York Times’s new public editor worried recently that the paper is perceived as liberal; she advised trying to address that problem. Like NPR’s bid to shed the “liberal-media” epithet by shedding Vivian Schiller, like Walter Isaacson’s attempts to cleanse CNN of it by paying a visit to Trent Lott, this is doomed to fail. Thanks in no small part to Roger Ailes.

Ailes, when he set out to create a cable network with a point of view, was clearly filling a market need. But his real brilliance lay in the motto he chose: “Fair and balanced.” The outlet designed to serve conservatives was inoculated at birth from charges of bias by claiming that it alone was free of that taint.

A few years into Fox News’s existence — on the occasion of an award being given to Fox’s leading newsman, Brit Hume — I suggested a public discussion about the merits of this new (for the U.S.) kind of journalism, The Washington media were so dog-whipped by the “liberal-media” lashings that nobody wanted to own up to noticing that Fox was conservative. But the reticence protected no one. The “liberal-media” accusations have only grown, as the public editor’s column reminds us.

Continue reading It’s not just the Fox, it’s the sheep’s clothing →

Ailes himself must have been amazed at his success: Not that having a point of view would appeal; not that having that POV be conservative, to serve Americans who felt they didn’t see themselves in media. What distinguished it all was the masquerade of being something other than what it was, until it didn’t need to masquerade any more, and a new kind of journalism was firmly entrenched – including the spawning of other POV media such as MSNBC.

Fox New still does it best, as this research shows: “Fully, 60% of Fox News viewers describe themselves as conservative, compared with 23% who say they are moderate and 10% who are liberal, according to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center. By contrast, the ideological makeup of CNN viewers (32% conservative, 30% moderate, 30% liberal) and MSNBC viewers (32% conservative, 23% moderate, 36% liberal) is far more mixed.”

Unsurprisingly, the skill with which Ailes’s inventive cable channel carried out its work (helped along by its self-proclaimed uniqueness as an exemplar of fairness) has had an impact on the nation’s political environment. And it has had another impact too, the one I find most worrisome: Its allegiance to point of view seems to trump its allegiance to facts. According to Politifact, about 60 percent of the Fox claims checked in their study were rated Mostly False or worse. (By comparison, 80 percent of the claims made by CNN were rated Half True or better.) Or see this research on how Fox News viewers do worse on factual questions than those who watch no news at all

Perhaps this is why Megyn Kelly became a hero, during her coverage of presidential election results in 2012, simply by questioning a fiction being clung to by Karl Rove. When a reporter is deemed courageous for pursuing a fact over the view of a favored ideologue, it says something about the network’s normal regard for facts.

Meanwhile, over the years, mistrust in media more broadly has grown ever higher. Interestingly, this plays out differently across the political spectrum.

Obviously, your (and my) own point of view determines what we think about the impact of Ailes’s achievement on politics and on media. But if you think, as I do, that our future relies on a significant number of Americans’ believing that they want the closest thing they can get to the truth, this is clear: From the moment Ailes’s new creation sailed forth under that cunning motto, he has been leading us ever farther away from that target.

Media revolution, Newspapers, Press and politics

Election 2016: A tough test for journalism, and the midterm grades aren’t good

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The 2016 presidential campaign is handing journalism an extraordinary challenge: How to deal with so many remarkable developments — a mold-breaking Republican front-runner, a former first lady in the lead for the Democrats, an extremely volatile electorate — all at a time of disruption for news organizations.

Given the importance of this election, trying to figure out what is happening in time for some mid-course correction feels critical. Toward that goal, here are a few thoughts about some of the factors at play:


1. All Trump, much of the time.

The catnip of Donald Trump’s candidacy has been irresistible to the media, resulting in coverage that is unprecedentedly cockeyed. As a recent New York Times article put it, “Over the course of the campaign, he has earned close to $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history. It is also twice the estimated $746 million that Hillary Clinton, the next best at earning media, took in.”

This chart, from the Times article, shows how utterly out-of-whack Trump’s “free-media” coverage has been:

Screen Shot 2016-03-28 at 4.18.54 PM

This constant coverage – even of the outrages (maybe especially of the outrages, in Trump’s case) — has undeniably served to elevate him above all others.
Continue reading Election 2016: A tough test for journalism, and the midterm grades aren’t good →


2. Normalizing the out-of-the-ordinary

The question of how to cover a candidate as unusual as Donald Trump is a tough one — particularly considering how unusual several of this election’s other candidates are. Ted Cruz must be the first senator to run for the presidency while being universally reviled by his colleagues (even as a few have begun endorsing him). Then there is Bernie Sanders, who would be not only the first Jewish president, as well as its oldest, but a self-described “democratic socialist” as well. Then there is the former first lady, senator and secretary of state, prospectively the nation’s first woman president, with a lot of complicated baggage herself. But, however complex the coverage question, the answer is not to “normalize” Trump with the kind of false equivalencies richly illustrated in a recent story by Michael Barbaro in the New York Times. Here’s one quote from the article:

“Even those who vote for Mrs. Clinton harbor reservations. Renee White, 31, a Democrat in Youngstown, Ohio, is not entirely convinced that Mrs. Clinton, her choice in Tuesday’s primary, cares about people like her, she said. ‘A lot of people,’ she said, ‘just don’t trust her at all.’

“The views of Mr. Trump from Republicans are almost equally uncharitable and unwavering [my emphasis].”

Trump is sui generis — a candidate whose party is desperately trying to halt his momentum. Coverage that treats him as if nothing unusual is going on is misguided. Or, as Paul Krugman tweeted about this piece, “Can media really claim that Clinton, who has very strong favorability among Democrats, and Trump are similarly ‘divisive’? Yes they can.”

3. Back at the horse race

The longest running critique of political coverage may be that far too much of it is about the horse race – who’s ahead, who’s behind — with little that is substantially informative. Some observers have hoped that emerging media, with their new tools and reach, would help correct this. And indeed, some of the strongest coverage on the political scene these days is coming from sources that didn’t exist a couple of elections ago, such as Politico, The Upshot and 538. But if anything, these sources –with their dedication to mining data — are placing an even greater emphasis on the horse race. New media like Buzzfeed, Vice, Vox and Fusion have done some good issues reporting. Yet all in all, the focus on numbers rather than on context, explanatory reporting, investigation or enterprise seems only to have increased.

This may feel justifiable because, as one New York Times editor put it, this is a
“horse race for the ages.” This same New York Times editor predicted that attention would turn more toward substance as the candidate field is narrowed. But that is lamentably late.


4. Social media’s moment-by-moment claim on news attention

With so many of us getting our news through social media (second only to cable television), the hope for a deeper look, a continuous story, a helpful context, is overwhelmed by our fragmented, in-the-moment notion of what’s going on. When it comes to going viral, the latest outrage will beat the latest issue story any time. And the legacy news organizations, which have traditionally provided the in-depth stories, are themselves compelled to be in the social-media mix – placing additional demands on fast-depleting newsrooms.


5. Legacy media fighting for survival

Those newsrooms are not only losing staff; many are facing fundamental doubts about their very survival. With economic health no longer assured by the advertising that once guaranteed editorial independence, a journalism enterprise now is obliged to pay attention to the choices that consumers are making. Newspapers used to do in-depth profiles, lengthy investigations of candidates’ past positions or deep dives into the issues facing the nation without thinking about how many people would read them. Now they know exactly how big an audience there is for any particular piece of content – and they no longer have the luxury to ignore that knowledge.

6. So long, Walter Cronkite

On some previous occasions when the nation seemed to be moving in a particularly perilous direction, authoritative media figures have stepped forward and changed the national conversation. Consider Walter Cronkite’s
remarkable Vietnam commentary in 1968. Or the 1954 Edward R. Murrow exposure of Joseph McCarthy.

NBC’s Tom Brokaw may have had such examples in mind in his moving December 2015 response to Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims. But there are no figures in today’s media world with the kind of standing or reach to enable them to affect the nation’s mood that Cronkite and Murrow had.

7. Objectivity: a shifting standard

For good and for ill, the time-honored notion of objectivity is being questioned – and variously interpreted — today. A public preference for “voice” in media, the rise of news organizations with a clear viewpoint (Fox, MSNBC) and the fractionalization of the audience – all of these mean that media are finding their way on new ethical terrain. And they are doing so in a time when many in the public are clearer than ever about what they want: news that affirms their views, not news that brings new information and different viewpoints.

There is no question that these and other issues affecting the election are complicated and most of them deeply rooted. And there’s no denying that many news organizations are fighting for survival. Still, there are some things that journalists can do. And, with the nation’s future in the balance, they ought to do them now. Enough with the free media for Trump; let serious news judgment determine the coverage. Cut the normalization of what is truly out-of-the-ordinary; false equivalency misinforms voters. And, as for all that horse-race coverage, the field is wide open for the kind of desperately needed journalism that would truly inform public understanding.