Is Good Campaign Coverage Possible?

[babylonsister]

Is Good Campaign Coverage Possible?


Last night I read three separate critiques of mainstream presidential campaign coverage. Evgenia Peretz’s look back at the outrageous and petty treatment of Al Gore in 2000; Eric Alterman’s column about how the “Big Foot Media” as already crafted the narratives for this election; and Paul Krugman on why he hates political coverage.

I think we can all agree that day-in, day-out campaign coverage often sucks, but the question is why?

There’s a number of reasons, but primarily I think the papers’ entire approach to covering campaigns is hopelessly flawed and puts reporters in a position in which they can’t help but produce trivinalia. Typically, papers assign a reporter to cover a certain candidate, and that reporter spends all day, every day, following the candidate around: going from photo-op to speech to photo-op and hoping to squeeze in some face-time in between. It’s an awful existence, I think. I first got an inkling of this when working as an organizer in Madison, WI during the final days of the Kerry campaign. I went to a big Kerry rally and saw the haggard press corps straggle in after him and sit with their lap-tops listening to a stump speech that by that point they must have heard 100+ times. So, if you’re in that position what do you do? If you sit through endless, mind-numbing hours listening to the candidate spew the same safe inanities, you inevitably start to snoop around for new “angles”. John Kerry has a butler! There are lots of kids on the trail! Al Gore sighed during the debate! The point is that all of this trivial bullshit is just a natural outgrowth of the need to break up the sheer monotony of the campaign.

Then there’s the additional problem that the longer a reporter spends with a campaign, the more likely they’ll develop either a kind of contempt for the candidate and the campaign or a strange version of stockholm syndrome. Clearly this was the case during 2000 and 2004 when the dislike for both Gore and Kerry was palpable. This might be natural and human, but it breeds awful journalism.

more...

http://www.chrishayes.org/blog/2007/sep/20/good-campaign-coverage-possible/

[CK_John]

1. With more news cutbacks, the campaign resident reporter will be outsourced to local coverage. n/t

[babylonsister]

2. I don't see that happening, especially for prez campaigns. nt