Dollarocracy (37 page)

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.
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“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.”
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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.”
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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;
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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.
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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.”
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The press corps “shadows, but rarely interacts, with the candidates” any longer, the
Washington Post
acknowledged.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism, noted that the press coverage “balance has shifted to stenography
versus mediating.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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