NYT Works Hard to Present Primary Race as More Boring Than It Is

[Jefferson23]

3/2/2016


Something you often see in media analysis is that campaign reporters have a bias toward the horserace—that is, because they want an audience, they have an incentive to present electoral races as more interesting and competitive than they actually are.

It’s completely untrue. The fact is, when real politics are at stake, corporate media often go out of their way to make races seem as boring as possible—to declare them over long before most citizens have had a chance to vote.


Take this item from the homepage of the New York Times today (3/2/16) summing up Bernie Sanders’ Super Tuesday performance: “Wins for Sanders in Liberal Strongholds.” Well, that’s kind of a dog-bites-man story, isn’t it? (That’s another myth about journalism—that media love a man-bites-dog story. Actually, most news outlets adore a story that reinforces their preconceptions.)

In addition to being boring, this headline has the further demerit of being wrong: Of Sanders’ four Super Tuesday victories, one was in Oklahoma, which hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, more than half a century ago. In recent years it’s voted Republican by about a 2-to-1 margin. Sanders won it with a 10-point margin.

http://fair.org/home/nyt-works-hard-to-present-primary-race-as-more-boring-than-it-is/