All the so-called communications industries are primarily concerned not with communications, but with selling.
I. F. STONE, 1963
Few voters in the United States saw more television political advertisements in 2012 than those living in Nevada, a presidential “battleground” state that was also hosting a competitive U.S. Senate race and competition for an open U.S. House seat and dozens of state and local offices.1 And if candidates, their supporters, and the “independent” super-PACs that advertised in their favor wanted to reach voters in Nevada, they had to buy time on Las Vegas television stations. Lots of it. As the election approached, Las Vegas television stations aired more than 600 ads a day—yes, more than 600—from the Obama and Romney campaigns, their parties, and allied groups seeking to influence the outcome of the presidential race. Hundreds of additional ads were aired each day by Senate candidates and their allies, and hundreds more by state and local contenders. The total number of ads aired on some days surpassed 1,500.2 At a thirty-second rate, that’s twelve full hours of television programming each day. But it was not spread through the day. The campaigns and their allies wanted to reach the most likely voters. And the most likely voters watched local news programs.
What to do?
“Local stations are shaving minutes off their news programs to accommodate the crush,” reported the New York Times in a mid-October report from Las Vegas.3
The calculus cannot get any worse, or any more illustrative, than that. Faced with a flood of campaign commercials that were, in the words of an independent observer, “as caustic as they are ceaseless,” essential local media outlets decided to give voters less news in order to make way for more political propaganda.4
But that’s just how they roll in Vegas, right? Wrong. That’s the calculus of American media in a new age when journalism is continually sacrificed on the altar of profit. It is not merely a matter of greed or shortsightedness any longer; the structure of the money-and-media complex, Dollarocracy itself, demands this sacrifice.
The historical problems with campaign coverage we outline in Chapter 6 continue to the present and generally are getting more pronounced. The efforts of scholars to convince journalists to reform their practices have been an abject failure; the structural forces are far too powerful. Two developments, both beginning decades ago but hitting full force more recently, have fundamentally changed American political journalism and, with that, the most important journalism in a democracy: the coverage of the election campaigns that define federal, state, and local governments. First, after years of trivialization and commercialization of the news, the corporate abandonment of journalism as a profitable investment is accelerating. Second, the resulting journalism void has been “filled” by the emergence of substantial explicitly right-wing news media that aggressively promote the talking points of the Republican Party. In combination, these new factors should make some Americans nostalgic for the past, even the recent past, and all Americans very concerned about the future. If election coverage has been weak in the past generation, look out below. The power of money and political advertising is greater than ever and is virtually unchecked by any effective institutional force.
We chronicled the decline in resources to American news media in detail in our 2010 book, The Death and Life of American Journalism. On a per capita basis, less than half as much time and money is devoted to journalism today as was the case twenty-five years ago. And the crisis is getting worse, rapidly. Just since 2000, the labor and resources committed by major media to producing the news have dropped by 30 percent. The wheels came off corporate journalism in 2007, and since then the number of newspapers and newsrooms has declined sharply. This was not merely a reflection of broader economic troubles: while other industries edged back toward functionality after the effects of the recession and the 2008 Wall Street meltdown began to ease, newsrooms continued to empty out and once-great newspapers, such as the New Orleans Times-Picayune, ended daily publication.5 By 2012, the situation was grimmer than ever, and news industry veterans spoke openly about the end of the journalism that Americans had known throughout their history and that democratic theory requires for effective self-governance.6
Why do corporations no longer find journalism a profitable investment? To some extent, because increasingly monopolistic news media corporations gutted and trivialized the product for decades, this ultimately made the “news” irrelevant.7 To some extent, the crisis exploded as it did because the Internet destroyed the traditional business model by giving advertisers far superior ways to reach their prospective consumers. But the bottom line was clear and unequivocal: “The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism—going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy,” a 2011 Federal Communications Commission study on the crisis in journalism concluded, “is at risk.”8
The causes of this decline are not germane to our immediate analysis. We want to focus instead on the devastating implications for political journalism and, with that, campaign journalism. The numbers of foreign correspondents, foreign bureaus, Washington bureaus and correspondents, statehouse bureaus and correspondents, right on down to the local city hall, have all been slashed to the bone, and in some cases the coverage barely exists any longer.9
In an era of ever-greater corruption, the watchdog is no longer on the beat. Consider that the biggest political scandals in Washington in the past decade—the ones that brought down Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and Randy “Duke” Cunningham—were all revealed by investigations done by daily newspaper reporters. Those paid reporting positions no longer exist, and those specific reporters no longer draw a paycheck to do such work.10 This means the next generation of corrupt politicians will have a much easier time fattening their bank accounts while providing their services to the highest corporate bidder.
After we wrote The Death and Life of American Journalism, we traveled across the United States for events at universities, churches, and community centers. Everywhere we went during the period leading up to the 2012 election, we heard horror stories about the important stories being missed as the watchdog role of newspapers in particular and media outlets in general was steadily diminished. We heard about a woman who ran the county social services office in an eastern state. Her office, which employed hundreds of people, accidentally screwed up, and as a result a person apparently died. When this happened, this individual freaked out, thinking it would lead to wrongheaded threats to the budget for her department and, though she was not in any way responsible, the possible end to her career. Then after a few weeks, she realized that no one knew anything about the death. It had got no press coverage because there were barely any reporters left at the one daily newspaper in her county, and they were overmatched by the assignments before them. The moral of the story: life and death stories are no longer “news.”
The accountability that saves lives—or, at the least, sends up red flares when lives are lost—is no longer demanded of public agencies by a media industry that “afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted.” In following up on this report with journalists from the area, we learned that until recently the newspaper in question had been regarded as one of the finest dailies in the region and had won numerous awards. In 2008 and 2009, however, it laid off over 80 percent of its reporters. In 2012, the staff was made smaller again.
Blowing stories of corruption and misconduct, as horrific as they are, may not be the worst symptom of the condition that now defines journalism in America. Even more serious is the lack of coverage of the details of legislation and budgets, what is debated at hearings and buried in official reports, and what regulatory agencies are doing, even when there is no explicit corruption but just politics as usual. This is the stuff of politics; when people talk about wanting a serious issues-based politics, this is precisely what is meant.
But everywhere in the nation most of this government activity is taking place in the dark, certainly compared to two or three or four decades ago. The Wisconsin budget battles of 2011 generated massive protests and, by recent standards, inordinate press coverage from what remained of the state’s news media. Yet it was striking that key radical changes in the budget were missed by working reporters. Matt Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, stumbled across a major change in the budget in which controversial governor Scott Walker would use a line-item veto “so that state employees are no longer vested in the pension system until they have worked for the state for five years, instead of being partially vested immediately.”11 One or two decades ago, this might have been a front-page scandal and possibly a major news story for weeks; in 2011 it made it into a blog and had no echo effect, because there were so few journalists to follow up these loose ends.
Everywhere the situation is the same: far fewer journalists attempting to cover more and more news on tighter schedules. As the FCC observed, reporters and editors “are spending more time on reactive stories and less on labor-intensive ‘enterprise’ pieces.” Television reporters “who once just reported the news now have many other tasks, and more newscasts to feed, so they have less time to research their stories.” The situation is especially disastrous at the local level, where smaller news media and newsrooms have been wiped out in a manner reminiscent of a plague. The Los Angeles Times is now the primary news medium for eighty-eight municipalities and 10 million people, but its metro staff has been cut in half since 2000. The staff “is spread thinner and there are fewer people on any given area,” Metro editor David Lauter lamented. “We’re not there every day, or even every week or every month. Unfortunately, nobody else is either.”12
At least the Los Angeles region still has a daily newspaper that tries to cover some of the area’s diversity. A growing number of American cities that were once served by one or more daily newspapers now have none. In some cases, newspapers have shuttered altogether, but the far more serious trend is one of sweeping consolidation so that a part of the country that once had multiple dailies serving individual communities—such as California’s East Bay—now has one paper with dramatically fewer reporters overall.13 Serious local coverage is disappearing, and often the void is being filled by advertising dressed up as “news.” For instance, the venerable Boston Globe began allowing advertisers to write their own blog posts on its boston.com Web site, thereby further blurring the distinction between news and advertising with so-called branded content.14
Cutbacks in print are the most notable, especially when they occur at the national level—as when Newsweek announced in 2012 that after seventy-nine years, it would no longer produce a weekly magazine.15 Like quality regional dailies that once felt a sense of responsibility to sort through all the news from all the communities under their watch, Newsweek and other national publications once performed a similar task for the whole of the United States, producing weekly roundups of the news from cities and states across the country in a form that was, limitations notwithstanding, relatively thorough and accessible. No more. The information is still there, but it comes now in a constant pattern of flash floods that leaves little insight in its wake.
The erstwhile first responders of the media system—radio stations—were the canaries in the commercial news media coal mines. By the end of the 1990s, they had already cut back and consolidated news departments so rapidly that many communities that once got hourly broadcast updates now get nothing but Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity ranting from afar. And, as we’ve noted, local television stations are “shaving” newscasts in order to create more space for political ads.
There may not be much journalism, but there still is plenty of “news.” On the surface, at least on cable and satellite television, we seem to be deluged in endless news. Increasingly, though, it is unfiltered public relations generated surreptitiously by corporations and governments. In 1960, there was less than one PR agent for every working journalist, a ratio of 0.75 to 1. By 1990, the ratio was just over 2 to 1. In 2012, the ratio stood at 4 PR people for every 1 working journalist. At the current rates of change, the ratio may well be 6 to 1 within a few years.16 There are far fewer reporters to interrogate the spin and the press releases, so the likelihood that they get presented as legitimate “news” has become much greater. The Pew Center conducted a comprehensive analysis of what the sources were for original news stories in Baltimore in 2009; it determined that fully 86 percent originated with official sources and press releases. These stories were presented as news based on the labor and judgment of professional journalists, but, as Pew noted, they generally presented the PR position without any alteration.17
For the already powerful, this is an ideal circumstance: they can guide the discussion via press releases, press conferences, and manufactured messaging. There’s only a one in seven chance that a story not to their liking gets told, and if it does, their PR firm can send out six more press releases. That’s not the outline of a functional and democratic media system. It’s better understood as a petri dish in which propaganda is nurtured.
But won’t the Internet save us?
For a good decade, pundits have argued that digital developments will provide a new system of commercially viable journalism. In fact, as traditional journalism disintegrates, no models for making web journalism—even bad journalism—profitable at anywhere near the level necessary for a credible popular news media to be developed, and there is no reason to expect any in the visible future.18 Today we have a few thousand paid online news workers, interpreted liberally to include many aggregators who do little or no news gathering or reporting or even writing. As often as not, the best-known bloggers and online journalists are supported by some old medium that provides the resources. When these old media go down, the number of paid digital journalists is likely to shrink, not grow.
That has certainly been the case in cities such as Seattle, where the Post-Intelligencer newspaper ceased print publication in 2009 with this announcement: “The thing that should not be missed here is that the P-I is not going away. The P-I is going online.” It fell to Washington’s governor, Chris Gregoire, to note that with the move, “most of the newspaper’s dedicated staff lost their jobs.” At the time of its closing, the P-I had 150 employees, who maintained a fierce competition in local news with the Seattle Times. Just about everyone in town recognized the competition as good not just for journalism but also for the community, for the public’s right to know, and for democracy itself. Citizens had organized to try maintaining that competition, and when the P-I’s decision was announced, local lawyer Anne Bremner, who cochaired the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town, responded, “What a terribly sad day this is. Only tomorrow will be worse.” She was right. The P-I’s newsroom full of beat reporters, columnists, editorial writers, copy editors, photographers, and even a Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist would be replaced by “about 20 news gatherers and Web producers.” Three years later when we checked, the Web site had eight “news gatherers” (apparently doing a good deal of aggregation) and two “producers” to cover a metropolitan area that was home to 3.5 million people. Most of the space on the front page of the site’s “Local” section was dedicated to wire service reports, under the headline “Local News from the Associated Press.”
Research concludes that the original journalism provided by the severely underpaid or unpaid contributors to Internet news sites gravitates to what is easy and fun, tending to “focus on lifestyle topics, such as entertainment, retail, and sports—not on hard news.”19 This does not mean the Internet is not affecting political communication significantly (an issue we devote Chapter 8 to examining). It just means that the Internet has not in any way solved the crisis of journalism.
In short, journalism, especially political journalism, is facing an existential crisis in the United States. There has understandably been an increase in the number of people, to nearly one in five, who state they have gone “newsless”—not even glancing at Internet headlines—for the day before the poll. Who can blame them? By 2009, nearly a third of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four were so self-described.20 Forty years ago, young Americans consumed news at the same rate that their parents and grandparents did. Similarly, Gallup determined that mistrust in news media hit an all-time high in 2012, with 60 percent of Americans saying “they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.” Gallup polling showed positive trust in media was as high as 72 percent in the 1970s.21
The problem that the collapse of journalism has created for election coverage is devastating. As the Gallup report on popular antipathy toward news media concluded, “This is particularly consequential at a time when Americans need to rely on the media to learn about the platforms and perspectives of the two candidates vying to lead the country for the next four years.”22 Thomas Patterson’s research showed “a close association between the ups and downs in the amount of coverage and the ups and downs in involvement. As coverage rises, people increasingly think and talk about the campaign.”23
What coverage remains, even by major news media like CBS News, is being done increasingly by inexpensive and inexperienced reporters in their twenties.24 Don’t get us wrong. Young journalists have in the past contributed mightily to the coverage of American politics, and they are continuing to do so. We think, for instance, of the groundbreaking work of labor journalist Mike Elk, which revealed late in the 2012 campaign that Mitt Romney had urged his business supporters to pressure their employees to back the Republican ticket.25 That’s classic good, and necessary, journalism. But even as Elk was breaking the story, In These Times was struggling to figure out how to keep him on the job, as grants for independent journalism dried up.26 And even though Elk was determined to keep at it, a growing number of veteran journalists—many of whom have contacts and experience that allowed them to provide nuanced news coverage—were closing their notebooks and giving up on the frustrating work of not just covering campaigns but also trying to make ends meet.27
The most striking consequence of the exodus of journalists and journalism is that for countless races there is barely any coverage at all. By 2010, a “nearly reporter-free campaign trail” in statewide races across the nation was common.28 In Wisconsin, where Senator Russ Feingold was in a fight for his political life, he found himself traveling virtually alone during much of his campaign. In his three previous Senate campaigns, especially in the 1990s, Feingold had been trailed by a posse of reporters. In Illinois in 2010, so little attention was paid to the Democratic primary for the state’s number 2 job, lieutenant governor, that a pawnbroker who spent heavily on TV ads was nominated. The ads failed to mention that he had been arrested in 2005 for domestic abuse or that he had failed to pay back taxes and child support. When those details were revealed, a scandal developed that would ultimately force Scott Lee Cohen from the ticket. So why didn’t voters know about Cohen’s problems before the election? As Mark Brown of the Chicago Sun-Times explained it, “We in the news media failed the voters by missing the story.” But the story wasn’t really “missed.” Like so many political stories these days, it was left uncovered by news media that no longer hire enough reporters to cover all the races, leaving most voters in the dark most of the time.29
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) conducted a comprehensive study of how regional daily newspapers in St. Petersburg; Portland, Oregon; Pittsburgh; Burlington, Vermont; and Madison, Wisconsin, covered campaigns for the House of Representatives in their areas in 2008 and 2010. The study found that the coverage was effectively nonexistent; that only close races or races with scandals connected to one of the candidates received any attention at all—and then not much; and that third parties were ignored. “If you want to cast an informed vote for Congress,” FAIR concluded, “local daily newspapers will likely not be much help.”30 Journalist Joe Rothstein added the only consolation for newspapers: “As thin as newspaper coverage is, local TV coverage is virtually invisible.”31 In Bangor, Maine, two weeks after the 2012 election, the news anchors on the local ABC affiliate closed a Tuesday night broadcast by announcing that they were quitting. Citing mounting frustrations with management choices that made it harder to cover the news in general and elections in particular, anchor (and station news director) Cindy Michaels complained, “We were expected to do somewhat unbalanced news, politically, in general.” What made the story of her departure notable was not the complaint, but merely that she voiced it on a live newscast.32
This elimination of press coverage has had devastating effects on political campaigns. “It’s hard to believe,” University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato said, “that only five presidents ago, reporter Sam Donaldson and President Ronald Reagan sparred during fairly spontaneous press conferences. And [1984] vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro spent two hours answering reporters’ questions about her tax returns.”33
In 2012, Mitt Romney’s refusal to release his tax returns was only briefly a major story—a summer dalliance before the “real” campaign began. And even though Romney’s refusal violated recent practice, contradicted a standard established by his father going into the 1968 campaign, contradicted broadly accepted practice in recent campaigns, and left fundamental questions about his personal and business activities unanswered, the Republican nominee for president was essentially allowed to coast through three debates and an intense fall campaign without having to face the tax issue.
The ability of candidates to dodge questions increases exponentially as the focus moves down the ballot. The scrutiny afforded presidential candidates is virtually nonexistent at the regional and local levels, despite the fact that the officials who occupy those positions arguably have more direct and far-reaching influence over the day-to-day lives of Americans.34 “If you think about what government provides on a day-to-day basis—schools, transit, water supply, waste and sewage disposal, public health surveys of restaurants, fire, police—those things are mostly provided by local government,” explained Sarah Elkind, a professor of political history at San Diego State University and the author of the book How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy. “If those services are not adequate people have to supplement out of their own pocket.”35
Yet local reporters are now the first to admit that the job of covering politics is no longer getting done. In part, this is because of the dramatic cutbacks that local newspapers, radio stations, and television stations have experienced and because of the dramatic underfinancing of online news sites. But there is more to it. Politicians are starting to recognize, and enjoy, the political benefits of an absence of accountability. “Political campaigns have changed dramatically since I was a rookie reporter,” veteran St. Louis journalist Phill Brooks observed. “Back then most candidates were easily accessible to reporters. They held regular and lengthy news conferences in the statehouse. They issued detailed policy papers that reflected extensive thought and staff research. They seemed truly eager to talk with reporters about their views.”36
Increasingly during the course of the 2012 campaign, it became evident that candidates, especially incumbents or favorites, were barely even considering journalists a necessary evil they needed to work with any longer. As Patterson noted in the early 1990s, candidates had been angling for awhile toward reducing their reliance on the news media;37 with the disintegration of journalism, this becomes a plausible strategy to pursue. “With every campaign,” Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum wrote in 2012,
candidates push the envelope a little more, testing the boundaries of how far they can restrict press access. The answer, I think, is pretty plain: they could literally allow the press no access at all and it wouldn’t hurt them. The only reason they still allow the little bit they do is inertia. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they still find it hard to believe they could get away with shutting out reporters completely. But they could. The mainstream media, by its own rules, isn’t really allowed to gripe about access, and anyway, nobody listens when they do.
As Drum noted, the appeal to candidates is obvious.
Campaigns can reach everyone they need to reach, more safely and with more pinpoint control, via partisan media, television ads, data mining, debates, short hits on local TV, and social media. In those forums they can pretty much say anything they want, without having to field any embarrassing questions about whether they have their facts right and without fear of inadvertent gaffes. The truth is the downside risk of talking to reporters is now greater than the upside benefit of the coverage they give you.38
Or as Brooks put it, candidates “can buy all the broadcast time and newspaper advertising they need to communicate without the risk of being forced off message by pesky reporters.”39 The press corps “shadows, but rarely interacts, with the candidates” any longer, the Washington Post acknowledged.40 “I want to be reincarnated as a late-night TV host, for one reason,” Walter Shapiro wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review. “It is my one shot at an interview with a presidential candidate during the fall campaign.”41
A clear example of this calculus came in October 2012 after Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan took some tough questions from Flint, Michigan, television reporter Terry Camp. The journalist from a town that had experienced significant gun violence in hard-hit neighborhoods asked Ryan whether the Republican candidate’s one-size-fits-all response to society challenges would be a sufficient response for Flint. “And you can do all that [deal with poverty and violence] by cutting taxes? With a big tax cut?” An agitated Ryan grumbled, “Those are your words, not mine,” as an aide rushed to end the interview with shouts from off-screen of “Thank you very much, sir.” The camera kept rolling, however, capturing Ryan reprimanding the reporter for putting him on the spot. “That was kind of strange,” the vice presidential nominee bellyached.42 Actually, it wasn’t strange at all; in most mature democracies the leading figures in major political parties are familiar with aggressive interview questions and consider it a mark of honor to be able to handle them. Not America. Ryan did not just end that interview; his aides suddenly started turning down local media requests for interviews—and kept doing so until the end of the campaign.43
It wasn’t just candidates whom the campaigns walled off from the media. Remarkably, in 2012, we even witnessed campaigns restricting reporter access to supporters who were attending rallies, a narrowing of access that left journalists with no option but to stenographically note the remarks of the candidate and perhaps describe the red-white-and-blue bunting.44 And when reporters were fortunate enough to get candidate interviews, campaigns increasingly insisted on getting control over what quotes were used in the eventual stories and how they were worded.45
The effect of the new journalism-free or journalism-lite campaign was apparent in 2012. A comprehensive Pew Research Center study determined that the percentage of campaign themes in the news coverage coming from the press, as opposed to the candidates, fell from 50 percent in 2000 to 27 percent in 2012. The report had one “unavoidable” conclusion: “Journalists to an increasing degree are ceding control of what the public learns in elections to partisan voices.”46 Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, noted that the press coverage “balance has shifted to stenography versus mediating.”47 As Rosenstiel noted, that also explained why press coverage was so much more negative in 2012 than in previous election years. It was often regurgitating the campaigns’ talking points. “The media are more an enabler and conduit for partisan rhetoric than we’ve ever seen before. It’s been happening steadily over time, and this year, it really jumped out at us as inexorable. And it helps explain why the campaign feels so negative.”48
The implications of this new world order are striking: in the absence of journalism, voters must become journalists themselves. One Orlando Sentinel reporter put it well:
Thanks to the confluence of media layoffs, the fracturing of the public sphere and the explosion of partisan research and pseudo-think thanks, voters are being asked to drink from a fire hose of flawed or intentionally misleading information with little to help them to sort out what’s true and what isn’t about hundreds of candidates. Nobody has time to cast fully-informed votes. Social scientists have known for about 70 years that information has an acquisition cost, which is why we need mechanisms like party systems to help organize and simplify the decision-making process. The build-up of pseudo-information adds to those costs, instead of reducing them, by making it harder for voters to sift through the nonsense.49
The absurdity of this process for voters is clear and is confirmed by polling. In the hard-fought race for an open U.S. Senate seat representing Wisconsin in 2012, the advertising by the campaigns of Republican Tommy Thompson and Democrat Tammy Baldwin and their supporters was relentlessly negative; indeed, surveys suggested it was the most negative Senate race in the country.50 To assess the direction of the race, pollsters barely asked about the positions of the candidates; rather, they inquired about the extent to which voters agreed with the messages of the attack ads.51 Newspapers in Wisconsin, with no apparent sense of irony, then reported on the fact that the dynamic force in the Baldwin-Thompson campaign was not solid reporting on the positions of the contenders but the ads purchased by the candidates and their out-of-state backers. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which announced during the campaign that it was going to stop making endorsements of candidates, threw its hands up in the air editorially and declared, “The truth [is] hard to dig up amid all the attack ads.”52
There are those who will suggest that this is journalism evolving to respond to the changing dynamics of campaigns. We beg to differ. This is journalism surrendering to the demands of politicians and to the all-important demands of corporate owners. And in our view, it serves as a powerful argument for a rethink by journalists and for a renewal of historic commitments to maintain a strong, independent journalism.
What the 2012 campaign demonstrated as much as anything was that in the postjournalism era, campaigns fully enter a “post-truth” era, as Paul Krugman put it when he coined one of the takeaway phrases of the 2012 campaign.53 Michael Cooper captured the logical concerns: “Every four years there are lies in campaigns, and at times a blurry line between acceptable political argument and outright sophistry. But recent events—from the misleading statements in convention speeches to television advertisements repeating widely debunked claims—have raised new questions about whether the political culture still holds any penalty for falsehood.”54
In Chapter 5 we discuss the central role public media play in girding election coverage in other democracies and the tragedy of the woefully underfunded version in the United States, which has compromised public media’s campaign coverage. While avoiding the most moronic and salacious aspects of commercial journalism, public media still follow the same professional code for campaign coverage as the commercial news media. And it was one of public media’s most lasting figures, PBS NewsHour executive editor Jim Lehrer, whose bizarrely disengaged moderation of the first of 2012’s presidential debates allowed Mitt Romney to lie with such impunity. When Romney said something completely inaccurate in a later debate, the Republican nominee was shocked to be corrected by the next moderator, CNN’s Candy Crowley.55 Beyond the fact of Lehrer’s “phone-it-in” presence at the moderator’s table, the truly disappointing thing about PBS’s role in the debates was the network’s willingness to lend public media credibility to the entire charade. It is, sadly, not surprising that the commercial networks buy into schemes managed by the former chairs of the Democratic and Republican national committees. But it is appalling that a network that is supposedly more serious, more thoughtful, and more ethical than the others would foster the fantasy that America has presidential debates. The United States does not hold presidential debates in any realistic sense of the word. It holds quadrennial joint appearances by major-party candidates who have been schooled in the art of saying little of consequence in the most absurdly aggressive ways. In 2012, as in every presidential election since 1988 when control over presidential debates was taken away from the League of Women Voters by the two parties, America was denied the full debate because major media that should demand real debates cooperated with the travesty that is the Commission on Presidential Debates.56
Going into the 2012 debates, pundits said much about their importance, and there is no question that the combination of a ridiculous format, Lehrer’s fact-free moderation, and Obama’s somnambulance, gave Romney a brief leg up in the horse race. But by the standard understood by any and every fourth grader—that the point of any debate should be to enlighten voters with a clash of ideas that accurately reveals the differences between the candidates—the presidential and vice presidential debates of 2012 were massive failures.
It wasn’t the fault of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. American debates fail because, since the commission took over, they have become the political equivalent of a classic rock radio station. You’ll hear all the hits and maybe even a few obscure tracks that you’d almost forgotten. But you’ll rarely hear anything new—let alone enlightening. The whole point of Barack Obama’s debate appearances was to say nothing that harmed himself and everything that harmed Mitt Romney, just as the whole point of Mitt Romney’s debate appearances was to say nothing that harmed himself and everything that harmed Obama. Neither man left his comfort zone, except perhaps in the brief moment when a nonplussed Romney took in the fact that Crowley was correcting him. Neither candidate jumped off the narrow track on which the 2012 campaign had been running. The only theater was provided by gaffes, which major media “fact-checkers” were more than happy to identify and repeat ad nauseam. But America deserves better than the journalistic equivalent of drinking games built around the wait for Mitt to be Mitt.
Anyone serious about politics or journalism knows what would make the debates better: more candidates. In most developed nations—from Canada to Britain to France—debates are multicandidate, multiparty affairs. It is not uncommon for five, six, even seven candidates to take the stage. Those countries do not just survive the clashes; they thrive—with higher levels of political engagement than the United States has seen in decades.57
Only the most crudely authoritarian states erect the sort of barriers that the United States maintains to entry into the debates by so-called minor-party candidates. And why? The fool’s argument against expanding the number of contenders is that debates involving more than the nominees of the two big parties—which, conveniently, control the access to the debates through their joint commission—is that it would somehow confuse the electorate. As if Americans aren’t quite as sharp as the French. Adding more candidates would not create confusion. It would add clarity.58
In 2012, had Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein joined Obama and Romney for the debates, it would not have been necessary to listen to a pair of adult men trying to distinguish between Obamacare and Romneycare. The debate could have explored real alternatives, with a working physician explaining why a “Medicare for All” program would be dramatically more efficient, economical, and humane than what either the Democratic president or his Republican challenger was proposing. Had Libertarian Gary Johnson been present for the predictably empty wrangling about whether America is “broke”—as opposed to suffering from broken budget priorities—the former governor of New Mexico would have pushed the parameters of the discourse out to where the American people are thinking. He could have proposed bringing American troops and resources home from policing the world’s trouble spots, a wholly sensible fix that would make the United States safer, richer, and more popular.
By the standards of most countries, Stein and Johnson were qualified to join national debates. Both had secured places on enough state ballots to win the electoral votes needed to assume the presidency. No, there was not much chance that the alternative candidates were going to become front-runners; there was every chance, however, that their presence in the debates might have run their numbers up. But, of course, the point of expanding the range of debate is not to help or hurt particular contenders. The value of adding more candidates to the debates is in the quality and diversity of ideas they bring and in the prospect that they might force the candidates to address—perhaps even embrace—those ideas. In 2012 in France, Left Front candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in that country’s presidential race raised the issue of taxing speculators. Mélenchon won only about 12 percent of the vote, but by the time the campaign was done, both the sitting president, conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, and the man who beat him, Socialist François Hollande, were proposing their own variations on the Robin Hood Tax.59
Could Stein, Johnson, or Constitution Party candidate Virgil Goode have added as much to the American debate as an experienced campaigner like France’s Mélenchon did? A credible case can be made for each of them. Johnson, former Republican governor of New Mexico, debated Romney during the Republican nomination fight. Goode, a Virginia legislator and member of Congress, served initially as a Democrat and then as a Republican. Stein, as the Green nominee for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, debated Romney several times, with major media outlets declaring her the winner.
So why not let them in? Oh, right, the rules. But the rules that have been adopted by the Commission on Presidential Debates are based on a deal cut by Democratic and Republican powerbrokers. Either major-party candidate could have called for opening up the debates and the other would have a hard time keeping them closed.60 Unfortunately, neither opted for openness. Why? Because neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney was all that excited about getting dragged into a real debate. And thanks to the way in which the big parties have rigged the process, neither Obama nor Romney had to worry about any interesting questions, unexpected issues, or pointed challenges interrupting their joint appearance.
The debates provide a reminder of just how routinized our campaigns have become and of the extent to which traditional media outlets are complicit in the dumbing down of the political process—not merely by excluding the full range of candidates and ideas but by covering even the major-party candidates as predictably as possible. It is regrettable but true that what passes for campaign coverage these days hardly makes anyone wish the media had greater resources. All the patterns that developed over the course of the second half of the twentieth century persist, and they have grown only more severe with less countervailing material. What remains of the coverage is disproportionately concerned with the presidential race.
As Ralph Nader put it, the 2012 election coverage was “a dreary repetition of past coverage. Stuck in a rut and garnished by press cynicism and boredom, media groupthink becomes more ossified every four years.”61 Issues that polls show are of great concern to voters—such as corruption, money in politics, the failed drug war, and America’s military adventurism—are nowhere to be found in the press coverage because “legitimate” candidates do not include them among their talking points.62 And issues that ought to be the concern of independent journalists representing those outside of power, such as the significant levels of poverty, even extreme poverty, that mark the United States as an outlier among advanced economies, are nowhere to be found. FAIR’s 2012 examination of campaign coverage by eight elite media—including PBS’s NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered—found that only 17 of their 10,489 stories covered poverty in any substantive manner. In short, the concerns of the weakest and least powerful 20 percent of the population did not exist.63
Glenn Greenwald accurately described the only remaining thread of professionalism guiding election coverage:
At best, “objectivity” in this world of journalists usually means nothing more than: the absence of obvious and intended favoritism toward either of the two major political parties. As long as a journalist treats Democrats and Republicans more or less equally, they will be hailed—and will hail themselves—as “objective journalists.” But that is a conception of objectivity so shallow as to be virtually meaningless, in large part because the two parties so often share highly questionable assumptions and orthodoxies on the most critical issues. One can adhere to steadfast neutrality in the endless bickering between Democrats and Republicans while still having hardcore ideology shape one’s journalism.64
Bill Moyers and Bernard Weisberger got it exactly right when they observed, “Sacrificed to the ethos of entertainment, political news—instead of getting us as close as possible to the verifiable truth—has been reduced to a pablum of so-called objective analysis which gives equal time to polemicists spouting their party’s talking points.”65
The reigning motif remains the horse race. It is inexpensive and mindless to cover elections in such a manner and gives the illusion of actual reporting. Endless discussions of polls, pointless predictions, and assessments of how well a candidate’s spin is working are the order of the day. Maybe struggling candidates need to cook up some better spin? The 2012 election followed the recent pattern: the Pew Research Center determined that “coverage of the two candidates overall was fairly balanced.”66 “A good deal of the difference in treatment of the two contenders,” Rosenstiel wrote, “is related to who was perceived to be ahead in the race.” Once that factor was eliminated, “the distinctions in the tone of media coverage between the two nominees vanish.”67
Commercial pressures to hype the campaign like a sporting event are ever present. Variety’s Brian Lowry noted how commercial news media are “breathlessly chronicling the campaign’s every twist” because they “have a vested interest in ensuring the audience stays engaged, right until the end.”68 “Journalists themselves concede that to maintain daily or hourly tension in the contests they promote, they have little choice but to elevate minor poll shifts into major developments,” Sasha Issenberg wrote. “The truth is that we aren’t even that good at covering the horse race.”69
Sabato said reporters become obsessed with what he termed the “Gaffe Game,” a singularly poor way to evaluate candidates. “When we tire of Gaffe Game, let’s have a POTUS spelling bee. Would be about as revealing,” he tweeted.70 Media outlets obsess about misstatements and missteps—few of which ever move poll numbers—not simply on debate nights; they do so every night. Politico’s Dylan Byers wrote that “because of the pace established by Twitter and the Internet, the latest ‘gotcha’ moment snowballs faster than ever. For a reporter pressed to be ahead of the cycle, assuming conscientious-objector status would be suicide. Once one credible journalist takes the bait, everyone takes the bait.”71 The phenomenon is so common that Mother Jones’ Adam Serwer coined the term “dumbgeist” to refer to the plethora of “manufactured controversies, substance-free media obsessions” in campaign coverage.72
The tidal wave of unabashed lies told by candidates during the 2012 campaign raised hopes there would be a newfound role for news media as aggressive fact-checkers. Jay Rosen thought fact-checking was “something every full-service news operation should do.”73 And indeed this was a golden age for fact-checking, but the news media had nowhere near the resources to make this a significant part of the campaign coverage or the courage to stick to it when politicians ignored them and accused them of being biased.
Even the serious campaign coverage often revolved around horse-race themes. “Some journalists think of themselves as mini-campaign consultants,” Bob Woodward said.74 Their work can be sophisticated assessments of campaign strategy and tactics, occasionally it includes reporting on actual substantive issues, but it is generally about how well candidates can manipulate voters.
We admit to being political junkies who have spent countless hours assessing the minutiae and trivia of American politics. We can devour and enjoy horse-race coverage as much as any other political junkie. But by 2012, even we found ourselves agreeing with the Ohio journalist who wrote, “I love politics, but I hate campaigns—this year’s especially.”75 The degeneration of all political coverage into horse-race minutiae that never got beyond a slurry of polls and inane partisan talking points was too much for us to stomach. For the vast majority of Americans, who are not political junkies to begin with but who retain a stake in having a news media and a government that actually address the crucial issues of our times, elections become a chore. They know they should pay attention, but they aren’t given much of consequence to pay attention to.
In truth, they might be better off if they did not try. Horse-race coverage is not just bad for journalism. It’s bad for democracy. As Jonathan Chait noted in the final weeks of the 2012 campaign, “Rampant horse race coverage affects the outcome of the race. . . . Campaign coverage devotes far too much attention to which candidate is winning, and far too little time to conveying information that voters might use to make up their minds. Instead, the horse race coverage takes the place of the substantive coverage, and the candidate with the lead appears decisive and competent, and the trailing candidate faintly ridiculous.”76 So even though journalists may claim that horse-race coverage is a clinical examination of the contest and thus wholly nonpartisan, it ends up shaping the pattern of the campaign and perhaps even the result. That’s not good for journalism or for democracy.
The decline of campaign coverage has been masked to a certain extent because the gutting of newsrooms has also encouraged what Herbert Gans described as the conversion of all political news into campaign coverage. As political campaigns have become permanent, so has campaign coverage. Political journalism has been subsumed into campaign coverage. So what journalism resources do remain are disproportionately devoted to either campaign coverage or the increasingly cynical assessment of public policy from a campaign angle, in the worst horse-race mode described above. “At times,” Gans wrote, “it appears as if no government decision is ever made if it does not support White House campaign strategy.”77 Strategy coverage is cheap and easy to do, lends itself to gossip and endless chatter, and provides the impression that the public is being duly served and serious affairs of state are under journalistic scrutiny.
The nature of 2012 campaign coverage was not really a surprise. “The 2012 presidential election is 15 months away. The first primary vote will not be cast until almost six months from now,” Greenwald wrote in August 2011.
Despite that, the political media are obsessed—to the exclusion of most other issues—with the cast of characters vying for the presidency and, most of all, with the soap opera dynamic among them. It is not a new observation that the American media covers presidential elections exactly like a reality TV show pageant: deeply Serious political commentators spent the last week mulling whether Tim P. would be voted off the island, bathing in the excitement of Rick P. joining the cast, and dramatically contemplating what would happen if Sarah P. enters the house. But there are some serious implications from this prolonged fixation that are worth noting.
First, the fact that presidential campaigns dominate news coverage for so long is significant in itself. From now until next November, chatter, gossip and worthless speculation about the candidates’ prospects will drown out most other political matters. That’s what happened in 2008: essentially from mid-2007 through the November 2008 election, very little of what George Bush and Dick Cheney did with the vast power they wielded—and very little of what Wall Street was doing—received any attention at all. Instead, media outlets endlessly obsessed on the Hillary v. Giuliani showdown, then on the Hillary v. Barack psycho-drama, and then finally on the actual candidates nominated by their parties.78
Perhaps the only surprise was how much the doubling of spending on the campaigns compared to 2008 reduced the already low standards beneath what Greenwald anticipated in 2011. Someone watching the twenty-four-hour cable news channels might think presidential races have never been so thoroughly exhumed by reporters. But the coverage was as nutritionless as the cardboard box that packages a fast-food hamburger. After a diet of “experts” discussing whether Joe Biden was a windbag or if Mitt Romney needed to make himself seem more likeable, and another group of experts assessing the meaning of the latest poll numbers, political ads didn’t look that bad.
The other factor that has altered campaign coverage comes from the corporate right in the form of “conservative” media. If there has been a vacuum created by the downsizing of newsrooms, conservative media have filled it with an insistent partisanship unseen in commercial news media for nearly a century. As we discussed in Chapter 3, the conservative media program has been a cornerstone of the Dollarocracy’s political program since at least Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo. Initially, the work was largely about criticizing the news media for being unfair to conservative Republicans and having a liberal Democratic bias. Although the actual research to support these claims was, to be generous, thin—one major book edited by Brent Bozell actually claimed corporations such as General Electric were “liberal” companies with an interest in anti-business journalism because they had made small donations to groups like the NAACP and the Audubon Society—the point was not to win academic arguments.79 The point of bashing the “liberal media,” as Republican National Committee chairman Rich Bond conceded in 1992, was to “work the refs” like a basketball coach does so that “maybe the ref will cut you a little slack” on the next play.80
The ultimate aim of Dollarocracy was, as James Brian McPherson put it, “to destroy the professionalism that has defined journalism since the mid-twentieth century.”81 The core problem was that professional journalism, to the extent it allowed editors and reporters some autonomy from the political and commercial values of owners, opened space for the legitimate presentation of news and perspectives beyond the range preferred by conservatives. That professional journalism basically conveyed the debates and consensus of official sources and remained steadfastly within the ideological range of the leadership of the two main political parties—it never was sympathetic to the political left—was of no concern. It still gave coverage to policy positions on issues such as unions, public education, civil rights, progressive taxation, social security, and the environment that were thoroughly mainstream but anathema to the right. Key to moving the political center of gravity to the right was getting the news media on the train, and that meant getting them to have a worldview more decidedly sympathetic to the needs of society’s owners. Newt Gingrich was blunt when he told media owners in 1995 that they needed to crack the whip on their newsrooms and have the news support the corporation’s politics. “Get your children to behave,” he demanded in a private meeting with media CEOs.82
In the late 1980s, conservatives moved from criticism to participation with the aggressive creation of right-wing partisan media. The first decisive move came with AM talk radio. The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine (which required that a broadcaster provide two sides to controversial political issues) and the relaxation of ownership rules such that a handful of companies established vast empires opened the door to a tidal wave of hard-core right-wing talk-show hosts. By the first decade of the century, the 257 talk stations owned by the five largest companies were airing over 2,500 hours of political talk weekly and well over 90 percent was decidedly right wing.83
This isn’t your grandfather’s conservatism either. Although some conservative hosts, such as Michael Medved, can be quite thoughtful, just as conservative writers such as William Kristol will sometimes acknowledge when the movement has gone off the rails, the realists are in the minority. For a huge portion of contemporary conservative media, the broadcast begins and ends with the fear card, and it is often played in extraordinarily incendiary ways. Sure, some of the radio ranting comes from lightweights who are only trying to fill the three hours on the all-talk affiliate in St. Louis or Minneapolis. But the most effective purveyors of the venom are gifted and charismatic figures, such as Glenn Beck and Michael Levin, whose fire-and-brimstone moralizing is matched only by their willingness to bend the truth to support whatever argument they’ve decided to make that day.84 Across large swatches of America, and most rural areas where little journalism remains, right-wing talk radio is arguably the leading source of political information.
The undisputed heavyweight champion was and is Rush Limbaugh, who emerged as a national radio force by 1990 and who by 1993 was already recognized by the bible of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review magazine, as an unmatched political power in Republican circles; the Review dubbed him the “Leader of the Opposition.”85 Limbaugh and his cohorts have the power to make or break Republican politicians, and all who wish successful national careers have to pray at his far-right altar or suffer the consequences. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella put it, in many respects Limbaugh came to play the role party leaders had played in earlier times.86
In the late 1990s, Rupert Murdoch launched the Fox News cable channel, and because television is such a ubiquitous and powerful medium, that put right-wing news media in the center of the mainstream.87 Michael Wolff characterized Fox News as “the ultimate Murdoch product,” because it brought tabloid journalism to American television.88 What has been missed in the analysis of Fox News is the business model of tabloid journalism: dispense with actual reporting, which costs a lot of money to do well, and replace it with far less expensive pontificating that will attract audiences. For a tabloid news channel, that means the value added is a colorful partisan take on the news; otherwise the channel has no reason to attract viewers. Former CNN head Rick Kaplan told the story of how he was confronted by Time Warner executives in 1999 or 2000 who were dissatisfied with CNN’s profits despite what had been record revenues and a solid return. “But Fox News made just as much profit,” Kaplan was informed, “and did so with just half the revenues of CNN, because it does not carry so many reporters on its staff.” The message to Kaplan was clear: close bureaus and fire reporters, lots of them.89 In short, Fox News is the logical business product for an era where corporations deem journalism an unprofitable undertaking.
Fox News and the conservative media sector (including the conservative blogosphere) provide a “self-protective enclave” for conservatives to cocoon themselves. Research demonstrates that the more a person consumes conservative media, the more likely she is to dismiss any news or arguments that contradict the conservative position as liberal propaganda and lies.90 Tom Frank argued that the point of conservative media is to facilitate a “deliberate cognitive withdrawal from the shared world” by their adherents.91 Conservative media also, to a remarkable extent, stay on message, and the message is largely that of the Republican Party; these media, at least Fox News and Limbaugh, seem to march in lockstep with the same talking points, the same issues, and even the same terminology deployed across the board. They apply the core principles of advertising and propaganda.
Although Fox News and today’s conservative media might look at first glance like descendants of the partisan media of the nineteenth century, there are crucial differences. The old partisan media were far smaller in scale, and they operated in very competitive markets where it was not difficult for newcomers to effectively enter the field, hence giving readers/voters/citizens considerable leverage and a greater diversity of views. A partisan newspaper had difficulty avoiding periodic serious engagement with contrary policy positions in its pages if it wished to remain credible. Chains and corporate empires did not exist. In partisan systems, everyone is partisan and behavior is thus understood.
Moreover, nineteenth-century newspapers, while often aligned with parties, tended also to be ideologically driven, which meant that they frequently fought inside parties and in the broader political landscape for a set of ideals. In the twenty-first century, ideals are invariably sacrificed by corporate right-wing media outlets that are, first and foremost, profit machines owned by some of the largest multinational conglomerates on the planet. They make their profits by selling advertising to other large corporations. They have considerable monopoly power and receive valuable licenses and privileges from the government, which they are adamant to protect. They are at the pinnacle of the corporate establishment as much as the political establishment.
The single most important difference, however, is the shell-game premise of the entire conservative media shtick: that the mainstream news media have a distinct liberal bias that is deeply hostile to the right and big business and therefore that conservatives are simply offering either straight unbiased news by contrast or, more to the point, are justifiably bending the stick in the conservative direction to balance the liberal propaganda.92 In the current system, mainstream journalism works formally to not favor either major party and to prove at every turn its lack of bias toward either party. Reporters have to answer for such a bias if it is exposed. Conservative media do not have to play by those rules. The irony, of course, is that Fox News insists that it is “Fair and Balanced” and that “We Report, You Decide,” so it assumes the mantle and prerogatives of professional journalism while going about its partisan business.
Being a partisan player in the world of professional journalism has provided the right with considerable power to set the news agenda. Traditional journalists get their cues about what to cover from official sources and can dismiss some as ludicrous if they fail to meet an evidentiary standard and are opposed by other official sources. Fox and the conservative media, on the other hand, can reduce complex issues to one-word battle cries—“ACORN!” “Solyndra!” “Benghazi!”—which Republican politicians gleefully echo. Then those same politicians and right-wing media “watchdogs” badger traditional media for having a “liberal bias” if they do not cover the stories as well. By the time a hyperpartisan congressman like House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, is gaveling hearings into session, the Washington press corps is not about to say, “Hold it! This is ridiculous.”93 So it is that the nonstories that come to dominate news cycles invariably benefit the right.
But the right is never satisfied. Because they believe they are in an uphill battle with liberal propagandists, conservative media can have an unabashed and breathtaking double standard: they have very different evidentiary standards for stories that support, rather than damage, their politics. If facts prove inconvenient for the preferred narrative, ignore them. Republican officials are treated entirely differently from Democrats, even when the facts of a story are virtually identical. It is this opportunistic and unprincipled nature of conservative “journalism” that draws widespread analysis and consternation from outside the political right and from those remaining thoughtful conservatives willing to brave the wrath of Limbaugh.94
Between the cocoon effect and the shameless disregard for consistency and intellectual honesty, it is not surprising that professional surveys tend to find regular viewers of Fox News to be more ignorant about what is actually happening in the world compared to those who watch other networks. In November 2011, Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll examined how New Jerseyans watched television news, and the poll concluded that “some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who say they don’t watch any news at all.”95 In some surveys, to be accurate, Fox News does not rank at rock bottom in terms of audience knowledge.96 But on balance, it is the clown dunce of TV news. No other network ever comes close to getting the sort of assessment Fox News received from World Public Opinion, a project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland, in 2010. As one reporter summarized it, PIPA conducted a “survey of American voters that shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. What’s more, the study shows that greater exposure to Fox News increases misinformation. So the more you watch, the less you know. Or to be precise, the more you think you know that is actually false.”97 As Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson concluded in their study of the Tea Party, “Fox News makes viewers both more conservative and less informed.”98 What may be most revealing is that there is no evidence that this finding bothers the management of Fox News in the least.
In private moments, conservatives concede they have won the battle to control the news, though to justify their modus operandi, they have to maintain and ceaselessly hype the shtick of being the abused outsiders battling entrenched liberal dominance. The mainstream of journalism has indeed moved to the right, in part because it has followed official sources to the right. Also the corporate news media owners, as Newt Gingrich understood, were certainly open to the idea of more probusiness journalism. The news media have made concerted efforts to appear welcoming to the right, unlike any similar welcome to the left. As Jeff Cohen, who has spent time in all the major cable TV newsrooms, observed, the greatest fear of working journalists is to be accused of being a liberal. “Nearly all of the Clinton scandals,” McPherson noted, “were set in motion by right-wing groups, floated through conservative media organs.”99 Rick Kaplan acknowledged as much and said he sometimes covered stories at CNN for fear of right-wing attack, not because they were legitimate stories.100 If professional journalism was resolute in splitting the difference between the two parties, there has been a greater price to pay for antagonizing Republicans in recent years.101
The unraveling of media over the past two decades has driven many liberals, not to mention those to their left, to the brink of madness. Many are frustrated that traditional journalism has proven so incapable of resisting the right. With the success of Keith Olbermann’s on-air commentaries condemning the Bush-Cheney administration, MSNBC began to recognize that a lucrative market for low-expense, high-revenue programming was being underserved; it gradually put a few explicitly liberal programs on its schedule, which now includes boundary-breaking shows hosted by Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Hayes, and Ed Schultz.
Some have equated these programs with Fox News in style, imagining MSNBC as just a left-wing variant on Rupert Murdoch’s network, but the comparison fails upon inspection. Although these programs are expressly liberal, they are more independent of the Democratic Party than Fox has been of the Republican—as was amply evident when MSNBC hosts were quick to decry Obama’s weak performance in the first of 2012’s three presidential debates.102 They also have a commitment to factual accuracy and intellectual consistency that is rare on the right. At the same time, as Olbermann and Cenk Uygur learned as they were shown the door, the corporate management has little sympathy with the politics of these shows if it veers too often outside the mainstream Democratic Party, even when the shows are profitable. There is an implicit pressure to rein in the politics.
Most striking is this: the explicitly liberal programs tend to spend considerable time fact-checking, debunking, and ridiculing the material on Fox and conservative talk radio. Right-wing media seem far less interested in what the liberals are saying. Why should they be? In the overall calculus, they are still calling the shots, and the liberals spend inordinate amounts of their time responding to the right. This call and response is a logical commercial manifestation of the postjournalism moment. Neither Fox News nor MSNBC has its own teams of reporters to send out to break news stories. Slogans like “We Report, You Decide” are rooted in fantasy. Cable channels have program hosts, producers, and guest bookers. They look at what others are reporting, and then they invite people to talk about the politics of the day. At their best, they invite interesting and diverse guests who might even disagree with one another—as happened on Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show during the debate about whether to include a public option in the Affordable Care Act. At their worst, they feature Sean Hannity and Karl Rove abandoning all the touchstones of realism and engaging in extended preelection discussions about how all the polls are wrong and Mitt Romney will win by a landslide.103
If the rise of conservative media aggressively pushing Dollarocracy policies has strongly shaped political journalism, it has had a similar effect on election coverage. Conservative media are obsessed with elections and with winning power. They aggressively promote Republican candidates, push their issues, and amplify the charges made in TV political ads.104 They can provide a launching pad for charges against Democrats or progressive organizations and use their influence to demand mainstream coverage. Consider how the group ACORN, which was instrumental in registering poor people to vote, was destroyed in 2009–2010, based on a largely bogus video hatchet job. The stalwarts of conservative media are by their own admission expressly committed to Republican electoral success—as anyone who has heard the whistle of Sean Hannity’s “Stop Obama Express” well understands—by any means necessary.105
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Fox News steadfastly refused to address any significant Romney campaign falsehoods that had been exposed in the balance of the media. It routinely announced that the “mainstream” media were “in the bag” for Obama, all the while giving the Romney campaign an enormous advantage on the amount and tenor of coverage. In the final week before the election, Fox News gave coverage of Romney’s campaign speeches eighty-four minutes of airtime, compared to eighteen minutes for Obama. In contrast, the coverage elsewhere was only slightly greater timewise for Obama: forty-nine minutes to forty-two at MSNBC and fifty-three minutes to forty-two at CNN.106
Fox News is now a singular force in Republican politics. “The introduction of Fox News into the cable roster has been shown to have coincided with an uptick in voting for Republican presidential candidates,” Skocpol and Williamson noted. “The capacity to shift U.S. voting patterns suggests that Fox News has a very real persuasive power.”107 Fox News almost singlehandedly made the Tea Party a powerful force in American politics in 2009–2010, as Tom Frank put it, by presenting “the emerging protest campaign as if it was the network’s own reality show.”108 Skocpol and Williamson’s comprehensive analysis of the media coverage of the Tea Party concluded that Fox News’ “assiduous promotional and informational efforts surely made a big difference.” They argued that “Tea Partiers’ factually inaccurate beliefs about many policy matters are particularly striking given their relatively high levels of education and overall savvy about the political process. It is hard to escape the conclusion that deliberate propagation of falsehoods by Fox and other powerful media outlets is responsible for mis-arming otherwise adept Tea Partiers, feeding them inaccurate facts and falsely hyped fears.”109
By 2011, observers noted that traditional presidential “retail” campaigning had all but disappeared on the Republican side. “The contenders,” the New York Times observed, “are far more likely to make their visits on television than to ever drop by in person.” “Everything has changed,” Kansas Republican governor Sam Brownback stated. “It’s like a town hall every day on Fox News. You hear people talking back to you what you saw yesterday on Fox. I like Fox, and I’m glad we have an outlet, but it is having a major, major effect on what happens.”110
Fox’s first great achievement came in 2000 when it played a foundational role in getting George W. Bush in the White House despite the fact that he lost the vote. At a critical point in the early morning hours of the day after the November 7, 2000, election, Fox analysts—led by a cousin of Bush, John Prescott Ellis (who would later admit to having been in contact with the Bush campaign in the fateful night)—declared that Bush had won Florida. Thinking Fox had simply crunched the numbers more quickly, the other networks quickly followed Fox in making the call and, with it, identifying Bush as the winner of the Electoral College competition that would identify the next president. But Fox had the same numbers that the other networks had, and its analysts could not by any reasonable estimate have found a win for Bush in the available data. The Florida race, as the ensuing weeks of wrangling over recounts would confirm, was too close to call on election night. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that it was still too close to call when, thirty-six days later, a U.S. Supreme Court majority, made up of justices appointed by administrations in which Bush’s father had served, called the contest for the Republican nominee. To our view, there is a better argument to be made that Democrat Al Gore had a more credible claim to victory. That Gore was never able to effectively stake that claim, that he was in fact portrayed throughout the recount fight as a sore loser, was a media construct. By making a seemingly impossible election night call for Bush, Fox positioned the Republican as the inevitable winner.111
Twelve years later, the mastermind of Bush’s campaign, Karl Rove, melted down on Fox’s election night broadcast, openly arguing with the network after it called the key swing state of Ohio for Obama. In 2012, however, it wasn’t too close to call. A grudging Rove had to accept the will of the people, a circumstance with which he did not seem to be entirely familiar.112 But only the most naïve commentators presumed that Rove’s embarrassment was anything but transitory. The next day, he was on a conference call, explaining how he was recalculating for the next election. And Fox was featuring him once more, as if nothing had happened. For conservatives, Fox means never having to say you’re sorry—even when you are massively, publicly wrong. That’s because, like most of the right-wing echo chamber, Fox is not journalism. It’s what fills the void when journalism disappears.113
The political right is perfectly comfortable with the false construct of a “news” network that has, in the words of Eric Boehlert, “altered the game by unchaining itself from the moral groundings of U.S. journalism.”114 For partisans who do not want to be held to account, the conservative media landscape of the twenty-first century looks like a future in which they could reside quite comfortably. A world with little journalism, where the affairs of the wealthy and corporations receive little scrutiny, especially their dalliances with politicians, and where the political news agenda is dominated by their partisan news media and pundits, is jim-dandy. The conservative media can continue their migration and colonization of the news so that they are indeed the mainstream. It is a world where their ability to win elections is greatly enhanced, even when they are pushing policies opposed by the majority of the population. Even if they lose an election, as happened with the 2012 presidential race, conservative media are there the next day to tell conservatives that they need not accept the will of the people. “Conservatism did not lose last night,” shouted Rush Limbaugh on November 7, 2012.115 Actually, it had lost. Rather badly.
But if there is a basic premise that unites Limbaugh, the folks on Fox, and the vast infrastructure of regional right-wing talkers, it is this: conservatives should never bend to the demands of the voters; voters should be made to bend to the demands of conservatives. To that end, conservative media actively campaign against any proposal that might renew actual journalism. The conservative media and dollarcrats oppose all policy measures to address the journalism crisis, from increasing postal subsidies, enhancing public media, or breaking up monopoly media firms to create more competition. To the conservatives and to Dollarocracy, the status quo is just fine, thank you.
ELECTIONS ARE the tip of the democratic iceberg, the only moment at which everyday citizens are in control of the system. “The presidential election, when the public’s attention peaks, should produce a widening public reporting and discussion,” Nader wrote. “Imagine twenty presidential debates around the country with tough questioning by informed reporters and engaged citizens.”116 Instead, by 2012 our elections became what Greenwald termed “a tawdry, uber-contrived reality show that has less to do with political reality than the average rant one hears at any randomly chosen corner bar or family dinner. . . . the process is suffocatingly dumb and deceitful, generating the desire to turn away and hope it’s over as quickly as possible.”117 Discussing election coverage, Greenwald wrote:
If there’s an afterlife, I feel sorry for the American Founders: imagine how they must feel looking down on all of this, thinking about all the work they did to enact a First Amendment to protect press freedoms, and wondering why they bothered. . . . Actual journalists think that their “careers will be made” if they expose serious wrongdoing on the part of those in power; these people think that their careers will be made if they get to run in front of an MSNBC or CNN camera and announce Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential pick 11 seconds before everyone else announces it. The latter view about what is career-making is probably more accurate than the former, which explains most everything.118
Elections traditionally are embraced by the mass of citizens and feared by the privileged. They become farces without journalism, the kind that hold people in power accountable to the citizenry. By 2012, it was widely acknowledged in research and among political professionals that “nearly all citizens have extremely low levels of knowledge about what their various representatives have actually done while in office.”119
Walter Lippmann famously wrote in 1920 that “in an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis of journalism.” Unless a credible independent system of journalism were established, Lippmann was despondent about America’s future: “Men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information.” The choice was to address the “fundamental task” of creating credible journalism—and become “genuinely self-governing”—or see democracy “degenerate” into something more akin to dictatorship.120 The words appear prescient, but they simply clarify what always has been true and always will be true about free and democratic societies.