Wednesday night, Aaron Brown, CNN’s version of an “introspective” late-night anchor, hosted a short segment, reported by Washington Post and CNN media critic Howard Kurtz, on the increasing polarization of the viewing, reading and voting public.
Kurtz laid out recent poll results showing that Fox News Channel’s audience is disproportionately conservative, and that 44 percent of CNN viewers, though not necessarily describing themselves as liberal, are Democrats. Based on this data, Kurtz lamented that “some people seem to want only programming that reinforces their point of view.” This was followed shortly by the “news” that more viewers chose Fox News to watch the Republican convention speakers Tuesday night than any other outlet.
Next came an in-studio discussion between Brown and Kurtz, which showcased the anchor’s trademark faux-ruminative style. (“Are we — actually there’s two things I want to talk about. Let me change my mind here for a second. There is I think a problem in the country in that we don’t listen to each other. We don’t listen to other points of view, OK. I don’t often state my opinion, but that’s mine.”)
The exchange seemed designed to convey an image of serious, high-minded analysis: two smart, thoughtful men taking an honest and self-critical look at the polarized state of the populace — with a few subtle digs at Fox along the way, of course.
There is indeed evidence that this polarization is occurring, and Kurtz’s view that, as a result, “the national conversation shrinks,” seems fair. But there’s something missing from this picture. Identifying the problem as the country’s political polarization — as many commentators seem increasingly eager to do — allows members of the press to depict themselves as hapless victims, caught between passionately partisan camps. Having used Kurtz to frame the problem that way, Brown was able to wrap up last night’s discussion by throwing his hands up: “It’s an unbelievably angry time … I guess it’s just life … and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
We feel your pain, Aaron … but that’s letting the press off the hook a little too easily. There are serious, substantive criticisms of the campaign press’ performance this election year that don’t fall into any kind of “media bias” debate.
The “bias” that influences more editorial decisions and leads to more sloppy reporting than any bias toward a politician or a political philosophy is the bias toward controversy. The name of the game in the news biz, as one MSNBC reporter once memorably put it, is “asses in chairs” — getting a larger audience than the station one channel over or the newspaper next to yours on the newsstand. And that, not media bias, is the factor that pushes serious journalism off the front page in favor of breathless reports of doctored dust-ups between campaign camps.
Brown and Kurtz have each been around the block a few times; this is nothing that they don’t know. Yet here they were, speaking on the eve of President Bush’s speech to the Republican National Convention, a crucial moment in the campaign and, somehow, they avoided altogether any mention of perhaps the most important episode in the race thus far, and the one that the media utterly bungled: coverage of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. As Campaign Desk has noted, given its fatal attraction to conflict, along with an obsession for “even-handedness,” it’s no surprise that it took the press weeks to critically evaluate the Swift Boat Veterans’ tendentious claims, and that even then reporters could barely bring themselves to tell news consumers straight out that they didn’t add up.
As The New Republic wrote last week, it was cable news which kept this story alive:
CNN and MSNBC did their parts to sustain the controversy by running the Swift Boat ads repeatedly during their news segments, then giving the same old discredited Kerry critics a platform to continue spewing their same old discredited arguments.
The effect was to spread lies rather than scrutinize them, in a precise perversion of journalism’s supposed purpose.
The electorate may be polarized, but the most important problems of our news coverage can’t be explained away with reference to an intensely passionate, divided citizenry or with rueful conclusions that “there’s nothing I can do about it.” If the news media wants credit for bold and unflinching self-evaluation, it needs to be willing to consider the true nature of the problem.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.