November 12, 2008

The Rosenbaum-Jarvis smackdown

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My first reaction upon reading today’s old-vs.-new media tussle between Ron Rosenbaum and Jeff Jarvis was to wonder “can’t we all get along?” A tiresome sentiment, I know. But is it any more so than replaying the arguments that these two heavy-hitters bring to the endless circular discussion about 21st century journalism?

Shorter Rosenbaum: Jarvis is cruel to those traditional journalists and old media outlets getting hammered by job and budget cuts. Jarvis ignores what they bring to the table -  reporting on real life events - while focusing on the new forms journalism should take. And his self-regard has become unbearable.

Shorter Jarvis: I’m just telling it like it is: if traditional journalists don’t stop whining and adapt to a rapidly changing environment, they’re doomed. And I’m not unbearable; the truth hurts. Nyah.

Rosenbaum is his typically entertaining self: Jarvis’s oracular pronouncements and descriptions of his jet-setting do sometimes verge on self-parody. But I think Jarvis is, on the whole, correct: radical innovation is the only way forward for journalism, and is incredibly promising. Whining about the bygone days (five years ago!) of newspapers and magazines may provide a necessary emotional outlet, but it’s a huge waste of energy and a distraction from the challenges at hand.

But Rosenbaum does identify a weakness that runs through the pronouncements of many a new media guru: the obsession with, and fetishization of, technology and new forms. That’s good as far as it goes, but it’s still not clear what truly great post-dead tree journalism looks like. Oh, there are more and more examples out there - TPM, Spot.us, Grist.org - that combine reporting with technology, Internet, and social networks in compelling ways. And examples of the big media outlets adapting, such as the Washington Post’s decision to include blogger Chris Cillizza as part of its incoming White House team.

However, there’s a certain chicken-or-the-egg factor here. Do emerging technology and the social changes that follow from it naturally beget quality journalism (if you build it, they - journalists and readers - will come)? Or is there a risk that if you focus on technology and the changing relationship between the journalist and the news consumer, the fundamentals get lost in the shuffle? This is a problem at many newspapers, which in their relentless race to cut back and innovate simultaneously are literally trading journalism talent and experience for technical expertise.

The focus on technology, form, and social networking is a big part of the puzzle. But content should be given its due. What are the problems - in communities, the nation, the world - that deserve investigation and exposure with these wondrous new tools?

 

November 11, 2008

Farewell

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From 11/7/08:

THIS IS THE FINAL REPORT OF NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

THE MISSION OF THE NEWS SERVICE HAS BEEN TO PUT THE FINEST JOURNALISM IN FRONT OF AS MANY EYES AS POSSIBLE. FOR NEARLY HALF A CENTURY, WE HAVE DONE OUR BEST TO PROVIDE YOU WITH ARTICLES THAT INFORM, EDIFY, EXCITE AND AMUSE YOUR READERS. WE BID FAREWELL WITH THE WISH THAT THE NEWS BUSINESS WILL BE KIND TO YOUR PUBLICATION AND ITS HARD-STRIVING EMPLOYEES.

 

September 25, 2008

What would Broder do?

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One more brief observation about John McCain’s decision to temporarily suspend his campaign. It’s hard to believe this will have any practical effect on the matter at hand, passing a bailout bill. It could have the opposite effect, by injecting presidential politics and posturing into an intricate, and politically volatile, matter of policy. But influencing the policy, for good or ill, doesn’t seem to be what McCain’s after. It’s all about optics: he wants voters to see him as a leader capable of overcoming the partisan divide.

This doesn’t make much logical sense coming on the heels of nearly six weeks of divisive culture war politics. But it amounts to an appeal to one of the most dearly-held big media assumptions - that partisanship is always the problem and bipartisanship always the answer. In this view (reiterated, predictably, in today’s David Broder column, which blames both Congress and the White House for the government’s lack of credibility in the crisis) grand bipartisan gestures - bringing everyone together to solve the nation’s problems - are the way out of gridlock. Making these gestures is a sign of true leadership. Needless to say, this is a highly symbolic and unrealistic approach in a political landscape largely shaped by partisan Republican policies.

The McCain campaign tried to exploit the media’s tendency to seek out false equivalencies in fact-checking its ads and rhetoric. When that didn’t work so well, it attacked the media. Now it’s betting on another political media tic, the yearning for a kind of bipartisan utopia. Will it work?

 

September 23, 2008

The newspaper-less city

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The Newark Star-Ledger’s financial troubles are obviously profound. It’s a daily newspaper in a poor, chronically troubled city - what more do you need to know? But things took a truly alarming turn when the Star-Ledger’s owner, Newhouse-owned Advance Publications, announced in July it would either sell or shut down the paper if it didn’t achieve the cutbacks it deemed necessary through buyouts and significant union concessions. This week, the Newhouses reiterated that they’re dead serious:

Is it a negotiation tactic, or real?

That’s what Media Mob asked Advance publications president Donald Newhouse today regarding the memo that Star-Ledger publisher George Arwady sent out to staff saying that if a drivers union didn’t agree to a new contract, the paper would be in danger of closing.

“That’s what we’ve told our employees and we do not bluff or lie,” he responded.

This is one scary game of chicken. It’s not clear there is a potential buyer for the Star-Ledger, so there is a not-insignificant chance the venerable paper - Tony Soprano’s paper! - may be shuttered come January. Of course, if I had to put money on it, I’d bet that it won’t come to pass - the unions will make concessions, or a buyer will come forward - or perhaps the Newhouses are, in fact, bluffing.

But the closure scenario is extraordinary. Through endless rounds of newspaper downsizing, it still seemed unthinkable that a major daily would actually shut down. No longer. And ponder the implications of a newspaper-less city. Dailies are part of the civic glue that make American cities …. American. They hold institutions accountable. They provide essential information about what’s happening in the business, arts and NGO communities, and the city’s connection to the state government and Washington. Their columnists, if they’re good, can become a voice for the city itself. Without all that, what happens?

Does Newark even have an alt-weekly? Not according to these lists. That means just local TV, radio - and bloggers - regularly covering the city council, the mayor, and agencies in a city of 300,000. And that doesn’t include the sprawling suburban areas also in the S-L’s circulation area that would also lose coverage - and an important source of local information. Many have their own local papers, but most of those don’t have the regional perspective of a major daily.

With a deep recession looming, things are going to keep getting worse for the newspaper industry. Even if the Star-Ledger stays afloat (and surely the Newhouses don’t want to be the first owners to kill a major American daily), other papers may well go under in the coming months and years. And we’ll have to think harder about the implications of the newspaper-less city.

 

September 22, 2008

Lost credibility in government and the media

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Expanding on one point in my Prospect piece:

The faux-objective style of the traditional newspaper is increasingly useless in a political landscape in which spin has leeched from campaigns into every aspect of politics and policy. The result: the prestige beats in Washington — campaigns and the White House — are increasingly detached from reality. The coverage tends to be impressionistic and insidery, a weird mash-up of Maureen Dowd, Karl Rove, Drudge, and cable news. And it has almost nothing to do with the day-to-day concerns of most people or the functioning of government itself.

It’s obvious to anyone watching cable that campaign coverage is its own universe, operating by its own internal rules, obsessed most of the time with hour-by-hour tactical advantage and hot-button cultural trivia. Not even hot button issues that matter, like abortion or affirmative action or the place of religion in the public square, but questions like Obama’s lipstick-on-a-pig comment. But has this same trend also shaped coverage of the White House and other more substantive government beats? I’d say yes.

With the Clinton psychodramas, one man’s personal failings became the stuff of right-wing obsession, and an impeachment effort that ignored the more judicious views of the public. The Drudge era began, and the media realized there was a reliable source of ratings gold in the mashup of the trivial and the presidential.

Later, with the runup the Iraq war, most of the media fell in line behind a series of spurious ideas: that Saddam Hussein was a strategic threat to the United States, that he had WMDs and was ready to use them, and that Rumsfeld, who deplored nation-building, could successfully manage the invasion’s aftermath. Meanwhile, as the Bush administration actively sought to delegitimize the “media filter” and pursued various radical projects - torture, the unitary executive, the surveillance state - the media reacted with caution and uncertainty. (There are, of course, exceptions to this - McClatchy, or the Gellman/Becker Cheney series, now a book.)

In a nutshell, both political institutions and media institutions behaved very badly, and neither has really recognized the problem, let alone done much work to acknowledge and recover from the inevitable loss of credibility. Most of the traditional media - the big papers, the networks - still go about their business as if they were still institutions commanding unparalleled respect and credibility, in part because they believe they are covering institutions that also have unparalleled respect and credibility. Today, after Iraq, Katrina, and the banking debacle, they don’t. You can sense this dissonance in many newspaper stories on the White House, which are infused with a kind of awe and written in the staid language of a bygone era.

 

September 19, 2008

Farewell to the newspaper Washington bureau

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I have a piece up on the American Prospect site on the demise of a venerable institution: the newspaper Washington bureau. I’ve read a lot of these pieces, which invariably lament the passing of an era, the threat to democracy, the human capital sucked out of the journalism world. All true. The problem is, though, that we’ve known for some time now that the traditional newspaper structure, including the Washington bureau, is doomed. Newspapers should have started thinking about this a decade ago, when the technology became available to blog, to post various forms of digital content, to tap into social networking. But they didn’t. Instead, they hung on, hoping to ride out the changes.

Meanwhile, the whole political-media ecosystem was buffeted by various political/social events. The Bush administration treated it with contempt. Cable news and Drudge drove political coverage, rewarding fluff and cultural hot buttons over the actual business of government.

The result: the whole Washington media infrastructure - bureaus, beats, and Broders - is in upheaval. What will replace it? A fascinating question.

 

September 15, 2008

The outrage campaign

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The McCain campaign has the political world transfixed on its parade of falsehoods and culture war attacks on Obama. But the overarching theme here is actually outrageousness. By flagrantly, repetitively lying and putting out anti-Obama ads that run 180 degrees counter to reality, the McCain campaign has exploded the etiquette of presidential campaigns. Or, to put it another way, it’s violating what were considered immutable political laws - and amounts to a giant and risky bet that those laws are no longer operative.

It used to be, campaigns had a message. In making their arguments they routinely stretched the truth, but there was usually some slender factual basis for their statements. They tried to get favorable coverage for themselves and generate unfavorable coverage for the opposition. Finally, if your guy was behind in the last 2 weeks of the campaign, you started lying and sliming with abandon - and attacking the media.

Now McCain has skipped over all the other stuff and gone straight to the last-ditch, desperate phase. I doubt this will work, because it usually doesn’t when employed in the last 2 weeks. But of course, by that time it’s always too late. Now, maybe not. So who knows?

But there’s one law that, seemingly, hasn’t changed - the law of the news cycle. When a campaign does something audacious and outrageous - no matter how objectionable, or for that matter, stupid - it dominates the news cycle. The idea is, any news is good news. And with this kitchen sink approach, McCain dominates it on several levels beyond the usual attack-response-counterattack. It’s not just McCain attacks Obama. There’s also: McCain crosses line attacking Obama. McCain goes where even Rove wouldn’t go! Is the media covering McCain well, or does it lack a spine? Obama responds lamely. Obama vows to do a better job responding. McCain attacks Obama even more outrageously/dishonestly/incoherently. And the cycle repeats.

But I doubt this can continue for another seven weeks, because of a couple of other iron laws of media. One, the news cycle always changes, especially in a close race. The media get bored, or impatient - or maybe, in this case, disillusioned and outraged. Real news happens. The polls shift. A gaffe occurs. The other side “finds its voice.” The “narrative” changes. If the race remains close, I don’t see how McCain can, in effect, keep topping himself. And that’s the final iron law: outrageousness gets old.

 

May 4, 2008

The specter of 1988

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I covered the 1988 presidential campaign. I was in my 20s and had no idea what I was doing, though I did enjoy myself. And watching as the George H.W. Bush campaign turned it into a referendum on prison furloughs and the pledge of allegiance (the reductio ad absurdum being Bush’s visit to a flag factory), I learned some fundamental lessons about politics: Democrats must never be outflanked in the culture wars. A Democrat must never allow him/herself to be portrayed as less than 100 percent patriotic; must always express outrage at crime, even hypothetical ones; and never be photographed riding in a tank. (The coda being: Never allow yourself to be photographed in a flight suit. Politicians may control the military and exploit it symbolically or bureaucratically - but they shouldn’t literally cloak themselves in it.) The final lesson: at its highest levels, politics is most effective when reduced to the trivial and sentimental, to cultural hot buttons divorced from the actual functioning of government or the presidency.

But are these rules still in force today? With the exception of the tank/flight suit rule, I’m doubting it more and more. But 1988 won’t go away:

That year, the Republicans used the symbols of nationhood (notably, whether schoolchildren should be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance) to bludgeon the Democrats, challenge their patriotism and utterly redefine their nominee, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts.

The memory of that campaign — reinforced, for many, by the attacks on Senator John Kerry’s Vietnam war record in the 2004 election — haunts Democrats of a certain generation.

The 1988 campaign was, in many ways, the crucible that helped create Bill Clinton’s centrist philosophy and his fierce commitment to attack and counterattack, which drove the politics of the 1990s.

Things have changed. It’s the attitudes of the political class and the media that haven’t.

Unlike ’88, there are now some real issues before the country, and a record level of political engagement among Democrats, and, with conservatism in the ditch, a sense that some kind of political-cultural change is afoot. The main question now is not about the cultural resonance of, say, Obama’s absent flag pin. (It does have some.) It’s that much of the media is still stuck in 1988, and that 1988 itself has gained a kind of mythic resonance with the campaign press corps.

Back then, the press corps was a bit stunned at the success of such tactics (which were very self-consciously, almost ironically, employed by the otherwise temperamentally and politically moderate elder Bush). Today, by contrast, the media almost revels in it when the culture war’s long knives are drawn. There’s a weird bloodlust to it.

The media won’t give up its flag pins easily. The “1988 forever” bit of conventional wisdom is the cornerstone of the current campaign press sensibility. But by definition, the conventional wisdom is, and must be, several beats behind what’s actually happening.

 

May 3, 2008

The political media freakshow: what went wrong?

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Here’s something I wrote on the HuffPo earlier this week:

With so much at stake — Iraq, the economy, global warming — how is it the presidential campaign descended into a parade of irrelevancies? The media know better. Is there is anyone working for a media organization (new, traditional, left, right) who genuinely believes that Jeremiah Wright’s views on HIV, race, or Israel would have any impact whatsoever on how Obama conducts himself as president?. The standard explanation is that “character concerns” of voters drive this type of coverage — but this isn’t an explanation as much as an excuse, as the polls show voters care a lot more about, well, issues with a direct impact on their lives.

Obama’s been the been getting this treatment lately, but they all get it sooner or later. Part of the problem, of course, is the never-ending Democratic race, which has created a maw that must constantly be fed on cable chat shows, which trade on character-driven morality plays for their ratings — celebrity crackups, missing white girls and sinister black guys. But obviously, the problem is bigger than that.

What went wrong?

I’ve been thinking about this for a piece I’ve written, not yet published. And it’s a strange convergence of trends. One of those trends is … Maureen Dowd. More than anyone else, Dowd legitimized “character” — not character, but a kind of flip shorthand for reading surfaces and political images that passes as insight into character. Twenty years ago, this was a great innovation — you could write impressionistically about campaigns! You could dig underneath the carefully-crafted image, revealing some truth beneath the hucksterism! I loved Dowd for this, and still do — but less and less these days. This technique — call it ripping off the mask — has become the alpha and omega of political journalism. It assumes the mask is a lie designed to mislead, and there is always going to be an embarrassing truth lurking underneath it.

MoDo came on the scene in the 1980s. In the 1990s, there was the rise of the right-wing media, with its culture-war obsessions. Fox, Drudge, Coulter et al took “character” journalism and gave it a brutal twist: No matter how dull Democratic candidates were (and, with the exception of Bill Clinton, man, were they dull), the politician’s bland mask came to obscure all the transgressions, real and imagined, of the 1960s.

This politics-as-innuendo approach generated great fodder for cable chat shows, generating high ratings and billions of page views — and, most important, lots of money. The mainstream media, meanwhile, was fumbling and adrift — willing to try anything to reclaim its cultural primacy, or at least its political savvy. So, to its shame, the MSM bought into this approach too.

I think most of the voting public isn’t paying much attention to all the current BS, and in a year with such big issues, and such stark differences between the two parties, the culture war stuff won’t ultimately swing things one way or another. But the media spin has simply become disengaged from reality. I wonder what it will take to get it back on track.