All the news that ain't

The anti-Sarah Palin bias and bigotry was on full display throughout main stream media, cable, blogs, etc. In contrast, worship of affirmative action, political correctness, and liberal bias acted as roadblocks to any meaningful investigation of Barack Obama. Comedians won't even make many jokes about him. Body language and overt cheerleading was evident of massive journalism support for Obama. Yes, objective journalism is dead even at the 'slumping, never recovered from Jayson Blair' New York Times.

"I did hard time in Olympia motel rooms" Hmmm, I'm sure you didn't mean for that to sound somehow nefarious...

A melancholy piece, but it seems like there have been repeated decreases in the number of stories in papers, and a lot of stories (maybe an increasing percentage) about polls and the latest standings.

I think the real challenge is - how do humans absorb information? Print stories are good in some ways - they allow you to go back and re-read, they are portable, they are easily shared with the people next to you.

The problem is some data fits well within text, and other data does not. This is where the opportunity is for professional journalists: to present their research in a way that helps lead to new insites and perspectives.

With regards to the campaign itself, there was some missing juxtaposition of some stories. When the Seattle Times had a headline about Palin's rocky tenure as governor, or something along those lines, the story itself was somewhat balanced. But as I read the headline, I thought to myself "she's new to the national audience. Sen Obama never had this type of a headline on the front page, something along the lines of 'Obama had little to show when board president of an education foundation to improve Chicago schools' or something along those lines that focused on actual accomplishments and ability to get things done.

Well my old friend and mentor Ross is back with another piece about how journalism is dead now that he's out of it. I've been reading these exact stories now from retired journalists since the day I started as a reporter, in 1989. This one strikes me as particularly odd because it seems to me we learned a great deal from the political journalism this year. It was largely from political journalism that I learned the detailed differences between the candidate's health care plans, their tax plans, their views on foreign policy, their cap and trade proposals, and, most importantly, their demeanors, temperaments and governing styles. There's also a raging debate right now whether the political journalism was too stacked in favor of Obama, and Ross you come with a story saying political journalism is irrelevant? If it's so irrelevant then why is everyone talking about it?

Some important stories won't be found on the campaign bus. They're out there waiting for enterprising reporters (and their editors), who seem to have been in short supply this political season, to do some in-depth analysis. They were given ample opportunity in the presidential race. Examples: "The surge is working", and "Dig baby, dig". We heard these mantras ad nausea, but no one in the media made the effort to really verify the claims.

The surge appeared to be working if you ignored sectarian cleansing, 4.5 million displaced Iraqis, concrete walls and check-points dividing Sunni from Shiite, and the US-paid Sons of Iraq paramilitary (who the Shiite-dominated government is unwilling to include in their permanent security force).

And where was the print media analysis of domestic oil: how much is realistically to be found off our shoreline, when will it become available, and at what price compared to other alternatives. Boone Pickens had it right in his early TV spots (before he rediscovered Republican religion), when he said we can't drill our way out of foreign oil dependency. Why wasn’t his switch a big story?

These were myths waiting to be exposed. And they would have been trumpeted up to the very end had they not been trumped by the fiscal crisis.

The traditional media is its own worst enemy when it doesn't do the work it’s capable of, and timidly succumbs to the vapidity of the blogosphere.

Glad Ross wrote this piece. Mainly I find myself agreeing with dn, who decries the lack of enterprise and investigative initiative by journalists content to do least-common-denominator, horserace-driven coverage.

There used to be an old rule about national campaign coverage. First, come the political reporters who mainly focus on the horserace and a lot of supposedly inside tactical stuff that mainly is irrelevant. Only later, when the Presidential candidates already have been selected, do in-depth looks get taken at their substantive positions and their histories and backgrounds. That was then. This is now and it has gotten worse. Hyper-partisan and/or ideological blogs, radio and TV entertainers and propagandists posing as analysts---overwhelming traditional print-media coverage--have made it difficult for ordinary voters to get old-fashioned, let-the-chips-fall analysis. Too often they go with the flow of the media source that reflects their own bias.

Anderson's colleagues were too often lazy and ready to report whatever
campaign flacks told them. We've gone downhill from there. The pendulum swings but it is long overdue in swinging back toward substance and
serious investigative reporting.

I think I fall somewhere between Ross and Danny on this.

There is a lot of good journalism being done, and it's easily accessible, but the Internet is so vast that it takes quite a lot of initiative on the part of readers to find it. To use DN's example, there was a fair amount of analysis of the oil question, before and after "drill, baby, drill." But to absorb it, a reader has to want to know about it and then has to go find it. L.A. Times? Anchorage Daily News? Joe's Oilpatch Newsletter? The Seattle Times?

The day-to-day national campaign is something that can't be ignored. It's kind of the bottom line of political coverage. I don't see national news outlets dropping that to do enterprise stories instead.

(And it should be noted that there is almost no boys-on-the-bus coverage of state campaigns. Local and regional papers long ago realized their resources are better spent writing about the issues, and they do.)

Unfortunately, enterprise campaign pieces are fewer and fewer as newspaper budgets shrink, and they are not often played prominently. It's not surprising that it -seems- as if they aren't there at all.

You are right on target about the difficult of finding the substance among the chaff. One of the hard parts though is knowing how long the shelf life is of a substantive article. Is it dated within a few hours, as happened during the financial crisis? A week or a month or longer?

Maybe this is something for Crosscut to pull together: key articles about a campaign or candidate, sorted by topic. So if someone wants to see articles about drilling and energy, they could go to that section. There might be some info about how long an article was, etc.

But a big unknown is whether the readership of the section, and therefore the ad revenue, would justify the amount of work needed. It would take human edits to make it valuable.

I thought there was quite a bit of good reporting during this campaign--much of it the kind of day-to-day, detailed tracking of people and events that would bore me snotless, which is why I didn't spend much time in the part of the business. But it is very useful to commentators, pundits, and anyone seeking basic data. I think Danny's right that the reporting this cycle did help on some of the stuff people always complain about: where's the policy substance? It was reported in analyzed in detail, and if you missed it, that's your bad. As to the horse race, well, many of this year's campaigns were real competitive horse races and I think that made for compelling coverage all the way, from the primaries to the rematch between Gregoire and Rossi (only the result was an anti-climax).

I also note that daily newspaper sales locally seemed to soar yesterday--almost every newsrack was bare all over town. Clearly there was a hunger for the political reporting of 11/5/08. (Total aside: props to my alma mater Seattle Weekly for an awesome post-election cover this week.)

Lines often drawn between mainstream journalists and bloggers are increasingly blurred, which is good. People note that blogs are heavily dependent on the journalism produced by the mainstream media. True. But I think the mainstream media is increasingly reliant on bloggers for tips, ideas, story lines, trends, and reads on public opinion. And sometimes old-fashioned reporting. David Goldstein of Horsesesass.org breaks political news stories every election that that make their way in the newspaper headlines (Doug Sutherland's sex harassment problems, Dave Irons' mommy-slapping). I think readers care less about the source (objective, mainstream, highly partisan or opinionated) than in the truth and relevance of the content, a truth that will be tested by the readers, journalists and other bloggers.

I do think that while there are some real flaws in the model of traditional political reporting, I suspect that some of the bigger problems are due to reporters wasting their time because editors and news producers make poor judgments about what to focus on (not to mention news execs who spend to much time thinking about demographics). This is one reason I find cable TV news almost unwatchable. The pressures of being inside the news-bubble can do damage, over the long term, to one's brain and sense of connection to the real world. I know that from first-hand experience.

"This year we saw exhausting coverage of Sarah Palin's wardrobe, of Joe the Plumber's lack of a plumbing license, of John McCain's rantings about Barack Obama's past associations."

I note the contrast: not "coverage of Barack Obama's past associations" but "John McCain's RANTING about Barack Obama.'s past associations." As far as it goes, quite accurate.

We have two political parties. We get our election coverage from a population of media folks that vote overwhelmingly for one of these parties. This cannot be a good thing. Maybe people who are sympathetic to Republican talking points are, by genetic makeup, not attracted to journalism or even to holding a microphone in front of their face at some public building. The bottom line is that it's a lousy way to report an election (making it last for two years just electrocutes any possible remaining virtue). I am thinking some sort of lottery would work equally well and save considerable aggravation, not to mention, money.

A substantial segment of the public does not differentiate between reporting and opinion writing. This morning in the PI David Horsey is drawing criticism for being one sided in a cartoon criticizing Dino Rossi's campaign ads. Many simply do not recognize that editorial writers, political cartoonists and columnists are tasked with expressing their opinions.

As to reporting bias, in politics some campaigns make more mistakes than others and will receive more attention from the press because of it. That is why more reporters followed Palin than Biden and why more was written about her.

Rats! I blathered on without listing the people who continue to do terrific journalism – political and otherwise. Danny Westneat has become Seattle’s best columnist, and he’s at his best when he’s trying to make sense of the political landscape. And there’s the late great David Postman. And there’s Crosscutters like Knute and Ted… . Nationally, we have David Brooks and James Fallows and a long list of smart people doing their best to make sense of it all. But my point is this: None of us knows with any certainty how to identify, let alone report the qualities that make a good president, or a good governor. Experience? Between them, Bush and Cheney had stronger credentials than most candidates… and they were a national and international disaster. Clinton had the smarts and skills, but squandered them for a blowjob. My gut feeling is that that Obama is up to the task. But ultimately my gut feeling is no better than Joe the Plumber’s. As journalists, we pay attention, do our homework, take our best shot, and hope we get it right. --Ross Anderson

Germane to this piece and the comments, as well as the "change" our President Elect initially didn't much have in mind--but which is now critical--an outstanding job of reporting appeared late in the election season, accurately billed as opinion primarily because of some labeling words in its lead and close.

Because of Crosscut's new approach to comments, readers will have to type in this link http://www.ibdeditorials.com/Editorial.aspx then scroll down to October and then click on 10/30/08 "Why the Mortgage Crisis Happened." It took three entire pages of newprint to adequately itemize the long history of how both parties and, almost as if in retaliation, financial institutions escalated into a global implosion an initially minor difficulty of how to distinguish sound lending practices from redlining. Amazing.

Good discussion. Thank you to Ross for getting it going and to all you smart people for commenting.

I agree with Danny that this was a good year for political journalism, and with Chuck and others who noted that it can be difficult to find it. Sjenner has a terrific suggestion for Crosscut: Aggregate and organize this stuff for us! Danny and I once embarked on a project, maybe just a little ahead of its time, that tried to do something like this, and except for making any money it seemed sort of successful.

Many readers have pointed out bias in the political media this election (and every other). I found myself agreeing this year, for the first time. Maybe it's just that I'm not in the game anymore so I'm not as defensive about it.

Good, objective-aspiring political reporting is still important, and I'll go one step further and say that I think old-school on-the-bus reporting is a key element. It gives reporters insight about how candidates handle themselves in various situations, how their message gets developed and changed and, perhaps most importantly, how actual people respond. Some of the best reporting around here this year was Danny's on-the-bus-ish solo drive-around of the state, chatting with voters.

As to Ross's main point, that it's hard to predict what kind of leader a politician will be: True dat, and so it always was and will be. But so what? I'm not sure that was ever our job as reporters anyway. Tell the people what up and let them figure out for themselves what it all means to them.

Just one objection to Danny's comment: Journalism didn't really die until I got out of it, not Ross. Actually, it's my hope that the vast interest in this election and in the new president will encourage newspapers to keep at it just a little longer, and for the many fine blogs and sites like this one to keep giving all those newly engaged voters something worth reading.

It should be noted with extreme surprise that the Washington Post admitted it was completely biased in favor of Obama. Of course, anyone with half a brain knows the overwhelming majority of the media are ultra-liberals who do not report the news but file opinions which they try to pass off as news.

The New York Times is the prime example of unabashed liberal bias and hopefully, as their revenues continue to decline as well as their ratings, they will fall into the dustbin of history where they belong. Their treasonous support of our enemies and exposing the tools we use to defend ourselves against terrorists should be the focus of an investigation the likes of which we have never seen. Their entire ediotiral board and owner should be jailed and then hanged from the nearest tree.

Good lord, this is pathetic -- a bunch of old white guy hacks simultaneously attacking and praising themselves as journalists, with a tired sprinkling of routine rants about media bias. Is Crosscut trying to outdo the mainstream media for self-referential irrelevance?