EDITORIAL
The Boys on the Broken Bus
Campaign ’04: A Progress Report
George W. Bush and John Kerry represent fundamentally different ideas about America’s role in the world and its domestic priorities. Given what’s at stake, this presidential election is the most important in at least a quarter century. So how the press covers it takes on amplified significance, too. For the last eight months, cjr’s Campaign Desk has examined the coverage on a daily basis. With two months to go, here are some things we’ve learned:
Contrary to what many media critics (and media consumers) assert, we haven’t seen much ideological bias among mainstream news outlets — for or against either candidate. There are exceptions, of course, but the typical reporter is not an ideological warrior, and the problem of bias doesn’t rate the attention it gets.
What does? While coverage has been plagued by many of the usual suspects (the horserace, the trivial), what is most troubling about this election is that the pace and proclivities of the twenty-first-century political campaign have not only magnified some enduring flaws but also rendered some traditional journalistic tenets, if not obsolete, then significantly diminished.
Reducing complicated stories to overly simple narratives is an occupational hazard in reporting. But in the modern campaign bubble, where technological “advances” have reporters on what amounts to a constant deadline, processing a never-ending torrent of digital spin, it’s often debatable who is actually framing the stories — the journalist or the campaigns. The poor reporter out on the trail, under orders to break news and remain “objective,” usually doesn’t have time to reflect, or even to really report in a way that gets beyond the spin. The spinners know this, and exploit it.
This system encourages busy reporters — even good ones — to lean on someone else’s version of the truth instead of assembling a more complete version of their own.
In this echo chamber, where reporters talk to the same sources and to one another, storylines rapidly calcify. Consider the “Kerry is a flip-flopper, Bush is steadfast” narrative. This gets repeated over and over in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. But couldn’t the flip-flop label be hung just as neatly on a president who derided the concept of nation-building while campaigning four years ago? A president who opposed the 9/11 commission but now praises it? Who swerved 180 degrees on what the UN’s role should be in rebuilding Iraq? Who promised a balanced budget and then promptly ran up the largest deficit in U.S. history?
Another way the press has failed voters this election season has been its refusal, based on a dysfunctional version of “objectivity,” to adjudicate between competing claims. Ever afraid of being accused of bias, journalists are just not comfortable saying overtly that one side is right and the other wrong, even when such a verdict is demonstrable. And because of the unprecedented speed with which information moves in this campaign, the candidates and their operatives seem more willing to say whatever is politically expedient, reasonably assured that their version will get uncritical he said/she said play in the story’s brief shelf-life.
And if they’re lucky, their version — true or false — will become part of the conventional wisdom. For example, the Kerry campaign has been saying since February that 3 million jobs have disappeared since Bush took office. But that number represents the private-sector job losses. The net job loss is significantly lower, at 1.1 million. The 3 million figure became locked into the narrative, and by and large it remains un-debunked at this writing.
None of this is easy, of course. It takes time and manpower to push beyond he said/she said. And most importantly, it takes the collective will to reclaim an adversarial role. What are we afraid of? Loss of access? Maybe less access wouldn’t be a bad thing. Such fundamental changes in resources and priorities must come from the top, but they need to come. The Boys on the Bus model of campaign coverage is obsolete.
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