Players

Toward a More Honest Job Description For the Political Press

What is the proper job description for a journalist during campaign season? You don’t find much discussion about it. Whether the press is doing its job consumes our attention, as it should. But we cannot know how well the press is doing unless we know — and sort of agree — on the job to be done. I am not sure we do.

I know this: the standard job description needs work. It does not include all the tasks the press has accumulated since 1960, when the modern media campaign began. Horse-race handicapper is not in there, but the press does it. (And not very well, either.) Press language needs to stay current, not only with trends “out there” in the world, but also with roles and responsibilities journalists themselves have taken on — sometimes without announcing why, or thinking it through fully.

David Shaw writes in the Los Angeles Times: “When political journalists predict the future, their predictions often seem to eclipse — and at times substitute for — the reporting they’re supposed to be based on. Worse, those predictions can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Look at the coverage of Howard Dean’s post-caucus speech in Iowa.”

I would go further than Shaw. There are ethical reasons for leaving the future to itself, for not turning it into a probability statement or a handicapper’s ball in hopes of generating more buzz today. There is no bigger cliché in journalism than “time will tell,” but beneath the cliché is a moral proposition: Don’t play god, don’t preempt the future.

Whenever we redescribe what journalists do, new problems arise in what they should be doing. New questions of accountability spring up. A conventional, common-sense description of the job during campaign season would look like this:

Cover what the candidates are doing and saying as they compete for support
Dig into their backgrounds and explain where they come from, where they stand
Track the progress of the race and factors that go into winning it, like fund-raising
Examine the major issues in the campaign, showing where the candidates stand
Pose tough questions that illuminate the issues and hold actors to account
Offer analysis and commentary for additional background and context

That’s how you cover a campaign, right?

Right. Except that more is involved when the press gets going, and this has been known for some time. “Somebody had to prune the field, to ‘get rid of the funny ones,’ as one 1988 campaign manager put it,” wrote Paul Taylor, formerly of The Washington Post, in his 1990 book, See How They Run. “With the party bosses out of the equation, there was a huge vacuum at the front end of the process. Who would screen the field? The assignment fell to the press — there was no one else.”

Screening the field is rather different from covering it. If the press actually announced, “Once again, we’ll be screening the field for you,” it might have to say how, why, and when. It might have to defend its practices, or at least explain them in terms the public can grasp. There are costs to that. There are costs to letting it slide, too.

Taylor reflected on those costs after traveling on the reporters’ bus. He noted that “journalists have increasingly become players in a political contest in which they also serve as observers, commentators and referees.” One of the ways they influence things, he said, is through a journalistic “master narrative” built around two principal story lines: “the search for a candidate’s character flaws, and the depiction of the campaign as a horse race.”

This helps explain why the Dean Scream grew to such proportions as a news event from January 20 on. Yes, the scream really did turn people off. It is not implausible to say it crystallized public doubts about Dean, for some. But we also know that the master narrative favors a search for the candidate’s character flaws. The Scream story said to reporters: search over, flaw found.

Beyond screening the field and maintaining a master narrative, there are other recognizable tasks not in the official description:

Establishing the figure of the “frontrunner” and its rituals of scrutiny
Previewing the get-elected strategy of candidates and reviewing it as performance
Conducting polls, by formulating the questions to be asked, paying for the research, and publicizing the results as news
Moderating and sometimes sponsoring candidate debates, which means selecting who belongs in them
Creating a class of “authorized knowers” who are repeatedly asked to comment on the campaign

Then there’s everything the press does during those strange episodes that have come to be called “frenzies.” Here the news cycle feeds on itself and the story becomes nonstop, overwhelming all other news, and bringing a sense of siege or crisis to the stricken candidate’s camp. (The Scream aired some 700 times in the week after Dean released it.) Producing frenzies isn’t an official part of the job. But it happens and journalists know they are involved.

In fact, they tell us. Around the time of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, Tim Russert, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, said that when he and his colleagues focus relentlessly on a single story, “we may find ourselves driving the story.” Event driver is not in the official job description, either. But it happens.

The people the national press assigns to campaign coverage are smart and able, and they work hard. The experienced ones know a great deal about politics, the people in it, and what drives them. It is inconceivable that reporters at this level would fail to notice that there are times when, without plan or purpose, the press is causing things to happen. And there are other times (such as during the “expectations game”) when journalists are so mixed up in the action that things would not be happening this way without them.

Comparing the declared and de facto roles of the press, E.J. Dionne, a columnist for The Washington Post and a student of American politics, put it this way: “No one elected the press, yet the press is now an intimate part of everything having to do with elections. The press is not there to make political decisions, yet everything the press does helps shape those decisions. The press does not exist to represent the citizenry, yet in fact reporters do believe they represent citizens (or at least their interests) when they probe and question and analyze and pontificate.”

Now, if journalists know all that — and by the evidence in these quotations they do — then they also know their professional codes don’t cover these other roles the press has assumed. The press has an observer’s code, a watchdog’s code, possibly a critic’s code, but nothing beyond that.

What does the code book say about the proper way to handle yourself in a frenzy? It is silent, stumped. What do newsroom codes say about the expectations game and how journalists should play it so that citizens benefit? They say nothing. If all of a sudden you realize you are driving an event, what should the wise, responsible, and public-spirited journalist do? The codes don’t know.

Political journalists need a new description that recognizes their status as players in a contest they also report and comment upon. I understand why the press is reluctant to say it this way. Yet Shaw, Taylor, Dionne, Russert, and many others of sound reputation have said just that over the years. The public knows it, too. Conventional wisdom gets beaten up a lot, but journalists actually need wise conventions if, collectively, they’re going to do a good job. It’s time to rip up the old job description for the campaign press, and write one that’s more honest, more nuanced, more effective — and more real.

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