Dollarocracy (35 page)

Significant research has emphasized the silly nature of much campaign coverage, horse race or otherwise. Len Downie and Robert Kaiser of the
Washington Post
lamented the overall plethora of “pontificating commentators” who represent a dramatic shift from the journalism of their youth and “the substitution of talk, opinion and argument for news.”
⁷⁴
Harvard's Patterson took dead aim at the abundance of stories based around poll results: “A poll story is entirely manufactured. It is pseudo-news created by the media to report on the game: ‘They create it, pay for it, and then report on it.'”
⁷⁵
For James Fallows, election coverage is now filled with the conventions of sports reporting—actually,
bad
sports reporting—especially the endless and mindless predictions, to which no journalist or pundit is ever held accountable.
⁷⁶

Political expedience was not the only factor accounting for such nutrition-free fare. Every bit as important was cost: such material was far less expensive to create and produce than hard journalism that might go out and investigate candidates and the issues or bring new candidates and issues to public attention.
Stripped-down election campaign journalism, especially on TV, and particularly for the presidency and Congress, could pay for itself, as cable channels came to demonstrate by the 1990s. Some of the “breaking news” of campaigns came when reporters got leaked material from a campaign that was damaging to the candidate's opponent, and then the news media reported on it—sometimes in rumor status and often decontextualized—as if they had conducted a hard investigation. Then the leaking campaign could run a series of negative TV ads using the news coverage as a “citation” for the charges. This contributed to what Patterson observed: the percentage of campaign news stories with a negative framing increased sharply starting in the 1980s and 1990s.
⁷⁷
It also explains the obsession of campaign journalists with candidate “gaffes” or minor screw-ups, like getting an expensive haircut or making the wrong food choice at a restaurant.

Campaign news stories are now based on political ads to a significant and growing extent—in some cases as much as 20 percent of a newspaper's campaign stories. To be sure, these articles are at times critical of the dubious claims in the ads, but even when they are, the pattern is basically to allow the news coverage to amplify the claims in the ad, with the wildest charges making for attention-getting stories. “Advertising is easy to cover,” Travis Ridout and Michael M. Franz wrote. “Writing a story about a new political ad does not require the reporter to do a lot of difficult research or travel to an isolated location.”
⁷⁸
Candidates also use their ads as their way to direct the campaign coverage to where they want it to be, and journalists largely oblige. This creates a sense that campaigns are all about ads, and that activists and voters are mere speculators whose only real role is to donate as much as they can in order to keep favored contenders “on the air.” As early as 1968, Joe McGinniss recognized that the power of marketing in general and television ads in particular was such that “the press doesn't matter anymore.”
⁷⁹
He was jumping the gun, as it mattered then far more than it does now. But McGinniss was right that what can only be described as political propaganda, rather than serious news coverage, was beginning to define the discussion in America.

In sum, the logical product of this type of campaign coverage is an amplified version of the popular cynicism scholars have attributed to professional journalism's political news in general. “The audience is left to sift among the images of this power play for conclusions about the political system,” Matthew
Kerbel wrote in the conclusion of his 1998 study of election news. “It was not difficult to decide that politics is simply about power, that power is about personal gain, and that the candidate who figures this out and exploits it best is the most likely to prevail. Finding reasons to participate in the election, enthusiastically support a candidate, or feel good about the electoral process was far more problematic.”
⁸⁰
All the tendencies that generated Kerbel's assessment were apparent and thriving in the 1980s and 1990s.

Yet even then, there was still a sense that there were many journalists and much news media covering politics, so the system had rays of light, as few as they may have been. So we were not surprised when we interviewed Americans for this book and discovered that more than a few of them recalled wistfully the election press coverage of just two or three decades ago, warts and all. Something horrible must have happened between then and now. Let's find out what it was.

All the so-called communications industries are primarily concerned not with communications, but with selling.

I. F. STONE, 1963

F
ew 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.