Glenn Greenwald skewers a Washington press corps that has, through its superficial coverage and attention to the unimportant and the horse-race aspect of campaigning, helped deform our political culture. As Greenwald points out, media celebrities like the ridiculous Chris Matthews are uninterested in the things that average voters care about, the issues that affect us on a day-to-day basis.
The very idea of discussing issues, examining the candidates’ positions, or even analyzing voter preferences does not and cannot even occur to Chris Matthews. That — the most elementary nuts and bolts of standard, healthy journalism — is way, way beyond the scope of what our media stars are able to do or want to do.
Instead, as anyone who has watched the painfully empty coverage of this seemingly endless campaign season knows, we get sports analogies and poll numbers. Is Hillary winning? Where does John McCain stand in the polls in relation to Mike Huckabee? These are the questions that obsess people like Joe Scarborough and Matthews. Not whether the candidates’ health care plans will extend coverage or their foreign policy will tamp down tensions around the world. To the extent that questions of policy do come up, they are addressed through the prism of polling and the horse race — an approach that leaves the voter in the dark.
I won’t pretend that I don’t enjoy the horse race — it does have its place in the larger scheme of coverage — a small place, so long as it is connected to some legitimate analysis of why candidates seem to be doing well in the polls. What are the issues to which voters are responding? What part of a candidate’s message is working and why?
But that’s not what we’re getting. What we are getting, as Greenwald points out, is bad journalism:
The endless attempts to predict the future and thus determine the outcome of the elections — to the exclusion of anything meaningful — is a completely inappropriate role for journalists to play, independent of the fact that they are chronically wrong, ill-informed, and humiliated when they do it. It would all be just as inappropriate and corrupt even if they knew what they were talking about, even if they were able to convert their wishes into outcomes.
Part of the reason why the bigfoot media outlets do this is because it is a lot easier than plowing through hundreds of pages of policy proposals or sitting down with voters and actually finding out what they have to say. But that is what needs to be done. Voters need to know whether their choices will result in a prolonged war, the further distortion of the tax code or the further erosion of their constitutional rights.
Before anyone accuses me of tossing stones from a glass house, they should consider the way my papers have handled elections over the years. We only write about issues. I do enjoy the horse race, but only as a parlor game and not as the focus of coverage. I wish my colleagues at the larger outlets approached it the same way.
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Hank Kalet 