Of course, I’m not optimistic that anyone will actually take me up on this idea. Even as political media becomes fractured along partisan lines, the impulse toward pack journalism remains deeply rooted. There’s a degree of professional safety for journalists whose reporting remains in step with the prevailing take on the news. At a broader level, news outlets little incentive to produce conflicting interpretations of an event; the authority of news coverage is implicitly premised on the idea that there is one objective set of facts to report. In reality, of course, news reporting is a process of selective interpretation—especially when it comes to debate reporting and commentary, which tend to focus on arbitrary and subjective stylistic judgments.
Legitimacy questions aside, however, it’s worth noting that the economic incentives that supported pack journalism are disappearing. Media outlets need to differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded marketplace, and experimentation along the lines I’m suggesting could help us all learn something about the subjectivity of news judgment. Editors: take a chance!
*This sentence has been updated for clarity.
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Debate advice: Turn off Twitter
What I saw at the South Carolina debate
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Here's a case where I wholeheartedly agree with Brendan Nyhan, based on my experience covering the first Kerry-Bush debate in Miami in 2004. I can't link to it, but here are the last few grafs of a piece I wrote about that experience for the Miami Daily Business Review:
After all this spin, I didn’t know what to think. So I asked a big-shot journalist what he gets out of Spin Alley. “It’s ridiculous, it’s Kabuki theater,” scoffed CNN commentator Jeff Greenfield. In the old days, he said, you could occasionally get an honest comment, recalling that after the 1980 Carter-Reagan debate, Democratic Party leader Bob Strauss admitted that Carter lost.
Greenfield, who watched Thursday’s debate on one of the regular TV networks, gave me the most useful tip of the night. He pointed out that the closed-circuit broadcast in the media center did not show split-screen shots of each candidate listening as his opponent spoke — which is what the rest of the country saw. “You didn’t really see the debate,” he said.
Sure enough, when I got home and turned on C-SPAN’s rebroadcast of the debate, I watched the split-screen reaction shots with fascination. More than the comments of the Spin Alley operatives, watching how Bush and Kerry nonverbally responded to each other changed my perception.
It was like rewatching the first Bush-Gore debate in 2000 and noticing Gore’s condescending sighs after GOP spinners pointed them out. In Thursday’s debate, the president’s nervous head and eye movements, combined with his expressions of exasperation, presented the image of a man who doesn’t take well to criticism or differences of opinion.
That dovetailed with Kerry’s criticism that Bush has stubbornly refused to recognize the grave problems in Iraq and reconsider his flawed approach. Watch for the Democrats to pound away at this theme in an attempt to lock in the initial perception of a Kerry debate victory.
Personally, I found Spin Alley both exhilarating and humbling. Even when you watch something with your own eyes, how you perceive it is complex, subjective and affected by external factors such as other people’s opinions and, yes, spin. I’ll try to have more patience with other people’s ambivalence.
#1 Posted by Harris Meyer, CJR on Wed 3 Oct 2012 at 01:43 PM
It seems suspiciously omissive for CJR to write about pack journalism without mentioning Journolist, which of course CJR's participated in. For political reasons, Nyhan has picked examples that try to make this phenomenon seem like a conspiracy against Democrats, but the facts that Nyhan leaves out, about the biggest and most solidly organized case of pack journalism in recent memory, show how much this phenomenon actually pushes the media to the left.
For that matter, did CJR ever take adverse action against its reporter, Holly Yeager, for being part of Journolist? Does CJR actually see pack journalism as a problem?
#2 Posted by Tom T., CJR on Wed 3 Oct 2012 at 09:08 PM
Tom T, one of the very worst players in Journolist was Columbia's own Todd Gitlin, who not only was not reprimanded but continues to teach "journalism" to this day. You can read about him as a "moderator" in the Tea Party / OWS discussion referenced here at CJR.
Gitlin's comments on Journolist are ironically quite apropos to this discussion:
“On the question of liberals coordinating, what the hell’s wrong with some critical mass of liberal bloggers & journalists saying the following among themselves:
“McCain lies about his maverick status. Routinely, cavalierly, cynically. Palin lies about her maverick status. Ditto, ditto, ditto. McCain has a wretched temperament. McCain is a warmonger. Palin belongs to a crackpot church and feels warmly about a crackpot party that trashes America.
“Repeat after me:
“McCain lies about his maverick status. Routinely, cavalierly, cynically. Palin lies about her maverick status. Ditto, ditto, ditto. McCain has a wretched temperament. McCain is a warmonger. Palin belongs to a crackpot church and feels warmly about a crackpot party that trashes America."
#3 Posted by JLD, CJR on Thu 4 Oct 2012 at 08:41 AM