Is Media Coverage of the 2020 Campaign Repeating the Old Mistakes?
Is Media Coverage of the 2020 Campaign Repeating the Old Mistakes?
Paul Waldman
February 10, 2019
Coverage of the 2016 election was an epic media failure. Will 2020 be any better?
The race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination is officially on. And it's already not going well.
I don't mean that as a knock on the candidates, who are an impressive (and large!) collection of officeholders. I'm talking about the way the media cover the race. And heaven help us, they seem to have learned nothing from what happened in 2016.
Or any year before that, for that matter. All this has me thinking back to the aftermath of the 1988 election, when news organizations decided that they had been manipulated into focusing the discussion on things like Willie Horton instead of more substantive issues. They held panel discussions and wrote essays about what had gone wrong in their coverage, and promised to do better. One of the results was the creation of the "ad watch," in which candidates' TV ads would be dissected to judge if they were accurate and fair. Reporters and editors promised that next time they'd focus less on the horse race and more on what the election would actually mean for Americans' lives.
Ad watches proliferated in 1992, but eventually became less common. Later on we saw the creation of projects like Politifact and factcheck.org, along with many fact-checkers employed by newspapers, in an attempt to not only correct the record when politicians lie but provide a disincentive to dishonesty. But as a whole, news coverage didn't change all that much: It was still poll-driven, centered on the horse race, and consumed with trivia. "What kind of president would this candidate be?" was a far less important question than "How will this latest gaffe play with voters?"
And it still is, despite what any sane person understands was a gigantic media failure in 2016. Faced with a candidate who was more blatantly dishonest than any politician in American history (he'd go on to make 8,158 false or misleading claims in his first two years in office), had zero relevant experience or understanding of government, had obvious disturbing ties to a foreign adversary, and was quite possibly the most corrupt major business figure in the country, they decided that the topic that required limitless journalist resources, column inches, and air time was the question of … whether Hillary Clinton used the wrong email account.
more...
https://prospect.org/article/media-coverage-2020-campaign-repeating-old-mistakes
= new reply since forum marked as read
and likely unfixable.
I CAN’T TAKE THE BS. I’ll watch Rachel, and may-be Lawrence.......but all the rest of it, I’m done.
