Shifting Political Coverage
Terry H. Schwadron
Oct. 18, 2022
The news and its presentation during this election season remind of a couple of truths about political reporting:
First, politicians lie. Some shade the truth, some spin it to advantage, and, increasingly, we see that some just make it up of whole cloth without regard to reality. Yes, there was a Jan. 6 riot, not a tourist event, led and directed by Donald Trump followers, not antifa.
Secondly, journalists may be doing the best that they can just getting politicians to address the issues, but their reports often are transitory, imperfect and, despite renewed efforts, may still only record what was said rather than the provide the complete context. Yes, the politician did just say that, but was it true?
It’s why we now need to hear that a presidential remark about injecting bleach as a covid cure doesn’t work, and may kill the patient, however easy a fix it sounds from a politician under duress.
Of course, those truths are both trumped, as it were, by wall-to-wall cable television and radio coverage that does not deliver all the news to all the people. Once again, this week, those listening to Fox News and other right-leaning Fox would barely know that there were Jan. 6 hearings.
It matters because unless we’re sharing the same information pool, no matter from what corner, how can we make real choices about people or policies? There is an obvious connection between what we hear and understand, and how we vote.
Our society’s answer to all this is for corporate and high-powered political organizations to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising to sell candidate messages or to demean political opponents. For decades already, we’ve understood that politicians are sold like soap to consumers, and if a message is successful in Michigan, we’ll hear it again in Nevada.
And, to hear most partisans, for the media of choice to shape messages from our would-be leaders to influence spin, and to reduce as much of public life to simple phrases for endless repetition.
Plus, we’re all on the constant hunt for the gaffe, the verbal miscue, the overstatement, and mistake by the other guy rather than for what solutions are being proposed.
It’s Work to Seek Context
Our job as voters and citizens is to seek out the context. It’s good that context often is available, and bad that it is up to us and not the snake-oil salesperson to offer it. Balancing what one hears takes more work. It’s easier to just demean Brandon or to stick a fork in a Trump doll.
Despite the ramp-up in sanctioned and unsanctioned disinformation and outright lying during the Trump administration years, the news media has been generally slow to respond — out of a tradition of remaining politically neutral or non-partisan.
Only gradually did the news move from reports that despite a politician’s state, history differed to situations in which the statements represented intentional misstatement, apparently for political purposes. It was called Fact Checks, and circumstances over the last several years have required that they become almost instantaneous.
News organizations began during the Trump years finally to label such statements as Lies.
Still, the desire to cover the actual remarks, the actual speeches, the actual statements from “both sides” have governed the news day.
It all has become relatively undone by the blur between what is factual reporting from what is offered strictly as commentary. When Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson, Fox commentators, have been challenged in lawsuits over various “factual” assertions they offered nightly, their defense is that they are not journalists — they are commentators with a right to opinion.
That, of course, is not how what they say is received by voters in about 40 percent of the country or more. Republicans have nominated candidates in more than 27 states for next month who deny the last election outcome specifically because their voters don’t hear or accept the news that more than 60 courts up to the Supreme Court, multiple investigations and many former aides to Trump have acknowledged publicly that there was no fraud in the last election.
They simply don’t hear or believe otherwise.
Leaning Towards Less Rote Coverage
Dan Froomkin of Press Watch, a media commentator, is one of those who insists that this is a nutty practice for news organizations that want to say they are seeking “truth.” If politicians from one side veer from accepted reality or even provable statements, and not just opinion, the news ought to reflect that.
In a new essay, he argues that news media “owe it to their audience to distinguish between truth and lies,” and “to identify defining assertions from each candidate they cover, assess their accuracy, then let the readers know, overall, who’s credible and who isn’t — ideally with an actual credibility meter.”
The belief that readers or listeners are willing to do the work to sort out who is telling truths is “a bad assumption.” If fact checking works, he argues, we wouldn’t be facing an election in which it is an open question whether we will elect candidates who want to emasculate democracy.
Margaret Sullivan, an editor who served as media columnist and arbiter for The Washington Post and The New York Times, argues in a Post essay that if Trump runs again, journalists cannot treat him as a normal figure who happens to be a politician. “Too many times, we acted as his stenographers or megaphones . . . it took too long to moderate our instinct to give equal weight to both sides, even when one side was using misinformation for political gain,” she notes in an excerpt from a new book. “I’m convinced that journalists — specifically those who cover politics — must keep a sharp focus on truth-seeking, not old-style performative neutrality,” pointing out that a public figure is an election denier, for example. “By no means am I counseling that journalists act as if they are ‘on the team’ of Trump’s rivals. That’s not our job. At the same time, we have to be aware that covering someone who doesn’t care about democratic norms — even something as basic as the peaceful transfer of power — requires different judgments about what stories really matter, and how we should or should not cover them. . . not just repeat what’s being said, but help explain what it means.”
At the same time, there is a new president at CNN News who is promising to tone down perceived on-air criticism of the political Right and to adhere to “both sides” journalism.
On the ground, the reality in our media companies, increasingly conscious of revenue streams and ratings, are either looking away or promoting the fact that their own stars are becoming increasingly politicized. Recent disclosures by Vice News that Tucker Carlson had edited out of re-broadcasts of an interview with Kanye West all his objectionable, racist, anti-Semitic diatribes raise the questions ranging from journalistic ethics to what Carlson is out to achieve in the first place.
Likewise, passing asides from an NBC television reporter raising questions about whether Democratic Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman is fit for office because he is relying on close captioning to help with temporary hearing loss from a stroke was not only misleading, but it was also a display of personally obnoxious bias towards a person with a disability.
Needless to say, no one suggests that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is incapable of serving in office because he uses a wheelchair. The same is not true for Joe Biden’s stutter, which is a regular feature on sites like Breitbart and Fox.
We’re in high election season, and the best advice to citizen voters is to listen closely to the news to hear the fuller context.
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