What is and isn’t news
I was reading this Slate article today about why the press should skip the conventions, and found it emblematic of a mindset within the media that I find incredibly counterproductive. The news media routinely define something as “making news” if it makes clear some piece of information that was previously totally unknown. The focus is placed on getting these bits of information — sometimes big, secret government surveillance programs, sometimes minor gaffes made by some candidate — and being the first to print/air them.
A lot of this is good — getting information out there is a key job of the press. However, it does tend to displace other types of coverage. Analysis, of course, gets pushed aside quite quickly. It’s hard to get in-depth focus on the issues. There’s one article in each newspaper about each candidate’s energy plan, written at the time they give their major speech about it. Then, aside from some finer points where there’s actually new information coming out or related events occurring, nothing is mentioned again. Of course, to reporters covering the campaigns 24/7, there’s nothing new to say — Obama is for solar credits but McCain opposes them, just like yesterday — but the majority of the country is unaware of these views. They don’t read every article that comes out, and revisiting an old story that most of your audience didn’t see or doesn’t remember could interest them a lot more (and is a lot more important) than a minor comment that could, if read the right way, be a tiny clue about the eventual VP pick.
It’s of course not just analysis that gets left behind, but old stories in general. The Reverend Wright scandal got blanket coverage for days, but Obama’s past drug use barely ever gets mentioned. Maybe I’m crazy, but the latter seems at least as worrying as the former. Clinton’s questionable real estate and futures dealings never got mentioned. I’m pretty sure almost no one in the public knows that McCain is very likely an adulterer, and the Keating Five scandal is completely absent from the coverage. This effect also shows up with stories that were simply never secret. Everyone deeply involved in politics always knew that for a while McCain’s entire presidential campaign was run by lobbyists on donated time, but not much got written about it, because it was already well-known. As a result, it remains almost completely unknown amongst the public at large.
This is, of course, an even bigger issue on the general policy and information front than it is with regard to political debates. At least with political issues, one candidate can give a speech or run an ad on some old but unreported problem with the other candidate, and that speech or ad is “news” enough to generate some coverage of the issue. Other important issues get no attention at all. US education, particularly in math and science, is awful. Business leaders have talked about moving operations overseas because there are no qualified workers in the US. This gets almost no coverage, despite being much more important to our geopolitical standing than the conflict in Georgia. Those secret surveillance programs that are so dutifully unearthed are then ignored as nothing gets done about them, because after that first bout of stories, they’re no longer news.
It should be said that this is true not just of newspapers and television, but blogs as well. Newspapers want citations in other outlets to raise their stature and give them free advertising. Bloggers want incoming links. None of that is easily obtained through a good article on the Keating Five scandal, but it happens instantly if you get a leak that maybe Obama is announcing his VP before the Olympics.
I’m not really sure what could be done about this, but it’s pretty clearly hurting the quality of debate in the country. Just look at a television interview with one of the VP candidates. A huge percentage of the interview is spent trying to get them to say something about whether they’re being vetted or picked or to make the seem too eager or not eager enough to get the job. The answers are all perfectly predictable. It’s just the off-chance that someone says something they shouldn’t that gets attention, but it gets so much attention that we ignore tons of chances to ask meaningful questions of the important people that are doing the interviews.
It’s also the reason that so many in the media are so opposed to convention coverage. Sure, there’s nothing “new” happening. We know who will be nominated, and who will speak, and so forth. But it’s a part of the national debate. It should be covered for the same reason that the debates should be covered — not because anyone’s saying anything they haven’t said before, but because it’s important enough to be worth a bit of repeating and focus. Add some fact-checking by the media, and you have the potential for a very healthy democratic process.
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