Dollarocracy (31 page)

Yet with regard to which candidates got questions, and with them the attention that makes or breaks a campaign, there is no debating that the fix was in. When Dickerson's e-mail was revealed, his defenders argued that the network's political director had no say with regard to the character, content, and quantity of questions asked in the network's big political debate. Dickerson, they said, was just spouting “his punditristic [sic] expectations of the event,” and Bachmann was a “second-tier” candidate who got the coverage she deserved.
Perhaps. But isn't that a much more serious issue, and a much more fundamental problem for democracy? When consensus punditry trumps curiosity, when it is clear before a debate even begins that candidates who have qualified to participate in that debate are not going to get questions, then we have reached a point where the media are deciding who gets a chance to break out of the pack and, indeed, who gets a chance to win or lose. This bias can shape a race every bit as thoroughly as a negative ad or a grassroots mobilization. Indeed, given the omnipresent role and influence of media in the shaping of our discourse at the early stages of campaigns, they often set the field before a single ad is aired, before a single field office is opened.

Yet for the most part, while most observers increasingly grasp the defining influence of money on American election campaigns, they do not similarly appreciate the defining role of media. Most election coverage is not just inadequate but also inaccurate. It warps our understanding not just of particular elections but also of the changing dynamics in our politics. It preserves and even enhances a dysfunctional status quo while narrowing prospects for real reform. Only when we consider the interplay of money and media influences can we begin to identify not just symptoms but also disease. And until the disease is diagnosed, there can be no sufficient cure.

There is reasonably broad recognition today of a symptom: the hijacking of American elections to the point where they have lost much of their capacity to provide a popular check on entrenched corporate power and the wealthy over the government and the broader political economy. But as much as anything, the disease that afflicts American elections is a media crisis, and it reflects the disintegration of a credible journalism system. Indeed, if the United States had a sufficient journalism, the ability of the wealthy and corporations to dominate politics and elections would be considerably weakened. Political advertising would have less effect; the need for gobs of money would be less pressing. For that reason, the path to rejuvenating elections and democracy goes through media policies as much as anything else. There can be no question, in a modern society with increasingly sophisticated communications, that credible journalism is a necessary precondition for effective elections and for self-government.

“Elections are also proxies for democracy,” Herbert Gans wrote, “because they are virtually the only occasion in which citizens play a major [role] in
government.”
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There is arguably no greater test of the quality of a press system than how it prepares voters for elections. If media outlets flunk this test, it really doesn't matter how good a job they do analyzing some celebrity's love life or reporting on a car crash.

Until rather recently, the matter of having a sufficient journalism for elections was a fairly straightforward proposition. There were reporters who worked for news media, and their job was to accurately convey what the issues were, where the candidates stood on those issues, and what the pertinent characteristics, records, and qualifications of the candidates were. The calculus, never quite as simple as it seemed but always well understood, went like this: journalists would give the voters the straight news, without bias or a political agenda, and let those voters come to their own conclusions.

Equipped with that information, voters could successfully participate in elections, and democracy worked. As one great newspaper's motto put it, “Let the people have the truth and the freedom to discuss it and all will go well.”
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Popular information, broadly available and easily accessible for all, was essential to the calculation. Were the news media to fail to fill the void, voters would be left adrift in the middle of the ocean on a raft, while political and economic elites sailed by on their ocean liners. But failure could be averted by scholars and analysts, whose role it was to admonish news media for foibles and limitations in covering campaigns—or, when appropriate, praise them for their accomplishments—in an effort to make the system work more effectively.

These are the broad outlines of a media system built around the premise of “professionalism.”

To most Americans today, including many reporters, a commitment to professionalism and objectivity remains the hallmark of the First Amendment and of our constitutional system. They assume it has always been the American way and no other way is possible for a democracy. To the extent our news media fail today—in election coverage or otherwise—it is, the theory goes, because they have strayed from the professional path. And as Americans are now experiencing the unprecedented disintegration of the profession and institutions of journalism—to the point where they barely exist in a meaningful sense—people are at a loss to comprehend why it is happening and what, if anything, can be done to reverse the situation. Because rejuvenating journalism
is one of the crucial reforms that must be enacted to make elections meaningful and democracy functional, this book argues that a misunderstanding of American journalism proves to be a major barrier to policy debates and eventual action.

In this chapter we chronicle the rise and fall of professional journalism. To do so, we assess the role of journalism from the beginning of the Republic, several generations before contemporary theories of professionalism and objectivity in the news existed. What we find is that at all times the connection among news media systems, journalism, and the caliber of elections has been a primary political concern in this country. Although there is much to value in professional journalism, the knee-jerk embrace of it as the be-all and end-all fails to convey that some of the most successful periods of American electoral democracy, not to mention other successful democracies, had news media systems that operated under premises and with purposes substantially different from what nostalgic admirers of Watergate-era journalism pine for. Although there are no perfect systems for creating and disseminating political news, some, on balance, are far more conducive to popular sovereignty than others. And Americans who would shape a democracy-sustaining and -enhancing media are fortunate to have a very rich press tradition from which to draw.

America was called into being by a journalist, Tom Paine, whose writings for the radical weekly newspapers of the colonial era framed the arguments that would be collected in his seminal works of American revolution, the pamphlets
Common Sense
and
The Crisis
.
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After their revolution against the British Empire had succeeded, the founders outlined a “freedom of the press” provision in the First Amendment to their Constitution not as a protection for the Rupert Murdochs who were to come but as a necessary defense against the excess of elites.

The singular importance of a broad-based newspaper system that provided citizens with the resources to effectively participate in politics was foundational to the American experiment. As Thomas Jefferson put it, this was the only way people without considerable property could ever be politically equal to the wealthy who traditionally ruled societies. There was no sense in the first
decades of the Republic that entrepreneurs pursuing maximum profit through the “market” would generate a satisfactory quantity and quality of journalism to achieve the Jeffersonian standard. The wealthy would certainly have a commercially driven journalism to meet their needs, but everyone else would be out of luck.

To create the circumstance necessary for a popular journalism to flourish, the federal government instituted extraordinary postal and printing subsidies to spawn an independent press. To give some sense of the commitment, if the federal government subsidized journalism as a percentage of GDP today at the same level it did in the 1840s, it would have to spend in the range of $30–35 billion annually.
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When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s, he was astounded by the prevalence of newspapers far beyond that to be found anywhere else in the world. “The number of periodicals,” he wrote, “exceeds all belief.” He was also impressed by the inextricable relationship of newspapers to political equality and to democratic governance. “The power of newspapers must therefore increase as men become equal.”
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It was no accident; it was the result of explicit government policies and subsidies.

Journalism, the newspaper system, the Fourth Estate, effectively became synonymous with the party system that dominated American politics through the nineteenth century. Readers defined a party or a political movement by its newspapers; if a party or movement did not have a newspaper, it effectively did not exist. Virtually all newspapers were explicitly partisan, usually linked to a party or even a faction within a party. Sometimes newspapers received direct subsidies from parties. Newspaper editors—generally also the newspaper owners—were important partisan political figures. Andrew Jackson, for example, appointed fifty-nine editors to government positions upon taking office in 1829. The measure of a newspaper's success was to some extent commercial—few publishers were generating fortunes in a competitive market. But it was arguably as much political: Did the newspaper's party win elections and control government policy-making? The competition for voters put a check on outlandish propaganda for the most part. Likewise, the ability to launch new newspapers, and take advantage of the huge postal subsidies, meant that newspapers could not take their readership for granted.
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A democratic partisan press system with genuine competition and no censorship was a far cry from what is often associated with partisan press systems today, such
as the totalitarian propaganda systems of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, where only one party was permitted to have a voice and everyone else either shut up or was locked up, or worse.

At the same time, it would be inaccurate to read back to the antebellum United States our contemporary obsession with elections as the essence of politics and political journalism. Politics was very much about parties and policies, like slavery, tariffs, the economy, and expansion. Newspapers often engaged in serious expositions on policy matters, sometimes in debate with other papers. Elections and voting were important, of course, but they tended to be more the entrée to political life and citizenry than the epitome. To provide some sense of partisan journalism, Karl Marx was the European correspondent for Horace Greeley's
New York Tribune
in the 1850s and considered one of the great reporters of the era. It can fairly be argued that the Republican Party would not have come into being had it not been for Greeley's
Tribune
, which circulated nationally in the form of a weekly edition that in the late 1840s and early 1850s linked the network of disappointed Whigs, dissenting Democrats, and radical reformers that would form the infrastructure of the new party.

Among the regular readers of Greeley and Marx, as well as the leading advocates for ending slavery, distributing land to the poor, welcoming immigrants, and extending popular democracy, was an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who devoured the
Tribune
when it arrived via the mails at Springfield.
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At the same time, Walt Whitman was editing the
Brooklyn Eagle
, a rigidly Democratic paper. And the most prominent print proponent of the 1852 presidential candidacy of Franklin Pierce was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in the previous two years had risen to national prominence as the author of
The Scarlet Letter
(1850) and
The House of the Seven Gables
(1851). It is not surprising that some scholars have argued the partisan press of the first half or so of the nineteenth century produced the highest caliber of journalism in our nation's history. After all, the partisan press attracted the finest literary voices of the era to the work of writing articles, pamphlets, and campaign biographies that Hawthorne said were “intended to operate on the minds of multitudes during a presidential canvass.”
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The strength of the partisan system of journalism is that it generally puts politics in context and attempts to make sense of political issues and events,
which is very attractive. Facts are not presented unconnected to other issues or to political values. “Unlike our contemporary papers,” Richard Kaplan, one of the leading scholars on the matter, observed, “the partisan paper was thus authorized to explore systematically and repeatedly the various social implications of governmental policies in editorials and in feature articles.”
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The partisan press made elections come to life with a vibrancy few living Americans have ever experienced. Not surprisingly, the system contributed to far higher rates of turnout among eligible voters, especially in the northern states, than has been the case for the past century. “Political participation,” one scholar noted, “skyrocketed during an era of partisan press.”
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This is not to say that the partisan system was perfect, or necessarily superior to what would follow it. The system produced extreme attacks on enemies and its share of nonsense. But elements of the partisan system remained central to some of the most vibrant democracies in the world throughout the twentieth century. Even those who were often at the receiving end of its strongest criticism, like Jefferson and Lincoln, were among its strongest proponents. In a manner that would likely surprise most contemporary observers, nineteenth-century Americans thought the partisan press system was ideal for spawning diversity, getting at the truth, and making democracy effective. It
was
the free press, and it worked. “I am a firm believer in the people,” Lincoln said. “If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis.”
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