Why did it take the complete meltdown of the financial markets and the partial nationalization of the banks by the most conservative administration of the past 75 years to put issues at the center of media coverage of the presidential race?
Last Sunday's New York Times featured its ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, addressing this issue. Hoyt indicated that less than ten percent of the paper's coverage has been about how the candidates stood on the issues or how they would govern. This was true in spite of both polls and the Times' own reader research that indicated readers wanted more coverage of what difference the election would make and less of who was ahead in the horse race. The explanations from the Times staff were, for the most part, along the lines of "we just didn't get to it."
The most stunning response came from Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, who said "their best intentions were affected by the world financial crisis, which pulled away reporters who are experts on the economy..." I didn't think hard enough about this statement when I first read it, but later on, while mentioning the story to a friend, it struck me: What did she mean?
Two immediate explanations came to mind. One is that Abramson thinks the economic crisis began when Wall Street melted down, so that there had been no particular urgency about economic analysis earlier in the race. But Main Street, as opposed to Wall Street, has been suffering through the collapse of the industrial economy in places like Canton, Ohio, for years now -- and it's shocking if a managing editor of the Times believes that only economic crises in New York count.
But perhaps Abramson was saying more broadly, "Look, we don't think our political reporters can cover any issues -- that's not their job. To cover issues we have to pull beat reporters off their regular assignments." This statement is even more stunning -- it confirms that the American media think elections are like sports -- contests about who wins -- rather than the process we use to make our most important choices.
What's more, her statement implies that the media assign coverage of this process to a group of professionals whose bosses don't expect them to inform us about what is important and about what we care about -- in fact, a group of professionals who their editors consider incapable of telling us what we need or want to know. (For the record, I have a high impression of the intelligence of political reporters -- but they write the stories their editors want, not the stories they necessarily care most about. I find my issue conversations with them quite adequately challenging -- they just never get on the front page.)
Perhaps Abramson meant something very different -- this was just one quote, out of context, and I know how that can mislead. But overall the Hoyt piece didn't leave me with a sense that there was any serious rethinking going on in the newsroom -- the kind of rethinking that the Times would routinely expect of, say, a failing presidential campaign.
Let's put this is another context -- if you follow the financial pages, you know that American print journalism is a failing enterprise. You would think that having your customers tell you, unequivocally, "We want A", and then concluding that you had been giving them "B" instead, might lead you to shake things up.
But as communications theorists say, the frame trumps the facts. Despite the many facts that suggest elections are about how we govern ourselves and that we want to be better informed, the media has adopted the frame "this is a horse race." And so far, that frame is winning.
