January 25, 2015
In 2012
on the fortieth anniversary of the Watergate Affair, a notable commentary on
the state of political journalism appeared in the newspaper whose investigative
reporting uncovered the Nixon administration scandal. Leonard Downie Jr., who
had worked at the Washington Post for
forty-four years, wrote that American investigative reporting was at risk in
the “digital reconstruction of journalism.” As Downie noted, the mission of investigative
reporting and holding governments accountable remains as essential as ever to
American democracy. But, he concluded, it has become a financial burden for
established newspapers now struggling to survive, while digital startups
seeking to fill the vacuum have not found a successful model for financial
sustainability.
The
financial uncertainties that Downie describes are a cause of concern for the
future of quality journalism. But it is part of a deeper problem—the corruption
of American political culture in the United States. The American political
system is broken, and political journalism has played a part in that failure.
I saw my
first televised political convention at age ten. It was a spectacle that
intoxicated me. With my camp buddy Jeff Greenfield (who would go on to become a
big-time political journalist at CBS and CNN), I watched the presidential
candidate nominations of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson II in 1952. We
lived in a world of two major political parties with traditions and alignments.
Democrats and Republicans stood for different but clear principals. They
developed strategies for building grassroots support. The around-the-clock
coverage, and the reporting on the political conventions by respected and experienced
journalists like CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, made us feel a connection
with the democracy we were learning about in school. Then the media consultants
took over. The conventions eventually became like conventional TV shows,
shorter and less engaging. The big TV networks insisted on their need for
commercial support and showed limited appetite for public service programming.
Meanwhile,
the merger of the news biz and show biz further changed political journalism. Political
reporters began spinning their “face time” on pundit shows into self-promotion
exercises. They parlayed name recognition into book contracts and bigger jobs
negotiated by agents. Much of the rise of these journalists was tied to their
access to government sources and the hype encouraged by their media outlets. Some
reporters became prancing egos.
In a 2011
column, the Washington Post’s Dana
Milbank skewered the annual White House Correspondents’ Association annual
dinner. Once a “nerd prom” for journalists, he wrote, the event had spun out of
control. “With the proliferation of A-List parties and the infusion of
corporate and lobbyist cash, Washington journalists give Americans the
impression we have shed our professional detachment and are aspiring to be like
the celebrities and power players we cover," Milbank wrote.
The
superficial aspect of so much of political journalism today is another huge
concern. Hugely popular social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter have
become dominant sources of constantly updated information. Thoughtful
journalism offering context and background are often conspicuous by their
absence from the headline hit parades. A number of new online publications
feature deeper long form journalism, but in the Twitter age of endless hits it
is not clear how widely they are read, or how munch influence they have outside
of a small information elite. There is constant repetition in an ever-changing
zeitgeist and stew of sensation. Questions raised in the morning are gone by
the afternoon. The public is being exposed to more while absorbing less as a
flurry of changing stories compete to dominate the news agenda. Cultural critic
Bill McKibben dubbed our times “The Age of Missing Information” in his
perceptive 1992 book on sensory overload.
Another
problem is how political journalism has contributed to the poisoning of
political discourse. Politicians now see politics as warfare. Political parties
have fractured as factions and movements manipulated by big-money donors
operate with targeted communications and over-the-top partisan online media. Political
action committees tie support to ideologically rigid requirements. Supreme
Court decisions have essentially supported the takeover of politics by
agenda-driven interests. Entities like Fox News can be blamed for supercharging
the political environment and assuring a lack of civility. Political
polarization is fueled by TV talking heads with prefabricated audience-tested
“message points” that make it difficult for people to disagree without anger or
find common ground. While the media publishes frequent commentary about
America’s broken political system, too few journalists are challenging the new
partisan political reality.
That may
be partly because of the complicity of political journalism in the broken
system. For example, as Huffington Post
senior media reporter Michael Calderone has noted, throughout his presidency
Barack Obama “has used smaller, private meetings with influential columnists
and commentators as a way to explain his positions before rolling out major
foreign and domestic policy decisions.” Obama has met with conservative as well
as liberal journalists. In 2014, Calderone reported on how the U.S. leader held
an off-the-record meeting with more than a dozen prominent American journalists—from
numerous leading outlets from the New York
Times and Washington Post to the Atlantic and New Yorker—just hours before calling for an escalation of the war
against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in a primetime televised address.
When asked about the meeting, the White House “declined comment.”
So there
you have it, four decades after a newspaper brought down an American president,
political journalism is joined at the hip with an administration that doesn’t
just secretly brief journalists but sucks up their ideas for how to sell a war
to the public. It’s one more nail in the coffin of political journalism.
Danny Schechter is the author of sixteen books,
most recently Madiba
A-Z: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela. He
was an Emmy Award-winning producer for ABC News and has directed numerous documentary
films. He edits Mediachannel.org and
blogs at NewsDissector.net.