media rising
I love politics. If my cable provider offered a Politics All-League Pass, I’d surely be the first to sign up. The amount of time I can spend watching Chris Matthews, Wolf Blizter, and the rest of the mindless media gang, while reading endless blogs and articles about politics far surpasses that of any of my friends or families. Given this interest, it has been difficult not to mention politics here, but I don’t see this blog as being about whether I like Obama or Hillary. So, I’ve been avoiding it.
However, there is an genuinely sociological issue raised by the campaign that I’d like to discuss. In the past several weeks, the Clinton campaign has been very successful in selling the storyline that the press has been harder on her and, perhaps, even want to see Obama win. Though this idea has gained substantial currency (thanks a lot, SNL), I’m not buying it for two seconds. Here’s why: plenty of research has shown that the American press corps is a highly professionalized group committed to the idea of objectivity, something that is heavily emphasized in J-schools (see Michael Schudson on the American objectivity norm). As Schudson writes in “The objectivity norm in American journalism,”
Journalists grew self-conscious about the manipulability of information in the propaganda age. They felt a need to close ranks and assert their collective integrity in the face of their close encounter with the publicity agents’ unembarrassed effort to use information (or misinformation) to promote special interests.
Many sociologists and former journalists, among them Herb Gans, Mark Fishman, and Leon Sigal, have documented journalists’ almost ideological commitment to objectivity and “common sense” thinking. No insult is greater in a newsroom than to insinuate that a journalist has a political preference. As NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams often says with great pride, “I don’t do opinions.”
That said, journalists are under great pressure to produce new “news pegs.” For example, when one has a primary race where nothing new is happening for weeks at a time, the slightest development can be overblown into a major event. Thus, during a spell in the campaign when little was happening, the Clinton campaign (masters of media manipulation, see The War Room (1993)) was able to provide reporters with a new and interesting storyline: that the press is in love with Obama. The story also offered the added bonus of being able to engage in self-criticism (as anyone who reads The Times‘ public editor’s column knows the press loves to do).
In the past week, the press has fancied the idea that Clinton’s negative attacks against Obama have won her some much-needed momentum (whatever that means). And while it seems likely that he came out of last night’s Ohio-Texas Two-Step with more delegates, the storyline that Obama is winning has grown stale. So, the press will begin to run with the classic Clinton “comeback kid” story.
It’s just important to remember that these stories have far less to do with reality and far more with the nature of news routines.
