Tag: political journalism
If You Run for President, You Should Talk to Journalists

If You Run for President, You Should Talk to Journalists

 

Earlier this month, my husband, Sen. Sherrod Brown, went on a listening tour of four early-primary states as he considered running for president. I traveled with him to Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, as did a caravan of political reporters waiting to see if he would announce that he was in. (He’s not.)

After one of Sherrod’s news gaggles, a reporter pulled me aside and said, “How long before you guys shut down access?”

“To whom?” I asked.

“To us,” he said, pointing to the pool of journalists behind him.

This was in late February. At every public stop, Sherrod and I talked on the record with reporters. This has always been my husband’s practice, and long before he married me. I’m less accustomed to being on this side of an interview, but it would be an act of unforgiveable hypocrisy if, after nearly 40 years as a journalist, I were to start avoiding reporters.

Besides, we trust journalists.

“Why would we stop talking to all of you?” I said.

The reporter shrugged and rolled his eyes, as if I were putting him on. “Because every presidential candidate does,” he said. “You know that.”

Over the next few days, I made a point of asking veteran political reporters about this, and to a person, they agreed. Virtually all presidential candidates — and plenty of congressional candidates, too — regularly treat journalists as vermin to dodge and mislead. This is as true of Democrats as it is Republicans.

That’s disappointing — that’s not the word I want to use — but I can’t say I’m surprised. This disdain for journalists is increasingly common in the very people who have always needed our coverage to reach voters.

I have stood in the back of a rally and watched one of my husband’s colleagues praise freedom of the press to the cheering crowd. An hour later, at a private event, I listened to that same senator bash journalists as malicious and willfully stupid, as heads nodded.

Because I’m married to a senator, too many members of Congress, from both houses, have felt free to recite their litany of complaints about how journalists make their jobs harder. My response is always the same: If you think accountability to the American public is a hardship, journalists are not your problem. I’m not the most popular Senate spouse, but that’s never been an aspiration.

One of the things I noticed during our few weeks on the trail was how hard journalists work to cover these presidential races. Sherrod had a lot of events and meetings, and long drives to get to them, but we had a crew of staffers traveling with us. Their job was to make our lives easier. We never had to book our flights or drive ourselves, nor did we have to worry about directions or the healthy meals that miraculously appeared just when we needed them.

The journalists on the trail, including photographers and videographers, had to get themselves to everything. That’s a lot of schlepping, and a lot of caffeine, too. They had to stay awake on those long drives. We catnapped on the road.

I’m pointing this out because most of the America public has no idea what they ask of the journalists they expect to keep them informed. They also don’t know about all the obstruction and outright abuse inflicted on journalists by campaign staff members following their bosses’ orders.

 

Not all coverage is fair or accurate. Some of it is plain stupid. Journalists are human, and make mistakes. But what other profession so immediately and publicly admits its errors?

Every Democrat running for president should give journalists the access they deserve. We keep saying Donald Trump is wrong to call journalists the enemy of the people. It’s time to act like we mean it.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

IMAGE: Photo of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) by Ohio AFL-CIO/Flickr

Yes, The Media Spent The Election Teaching Americans How To Love A Dictator

Yes, The Media Spent The Election Teaching Americans How To Love A Dictator

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

For a majority of Americans, feeling traumatized and terrified are reasonable responses to the words “President-elect Donald Trump.” But even if his inauguration marks the demise of the star-spangled mythos we grew up on, being catatonic is no way to spend the next four years, especially if we’re lucky enough to survive, oh, a nuclear war. But acceptance of Trump—acceptance is the last of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of dealing with death—is hardly chicken soup for our souls. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, Trump: That can’t be the best we can do.

Why not love? Those thousands at Trump’s rallies, those millions who voted for him: Many of them do seem to love him. Well, maybe the rest of us can, too!

Impossible? Recall what the Queen of Hearts told Alice when she said it was impossible to believe that the queen was 101 years old: Believing impossible things takes practice. “When I was your age,” the queen said, “I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Try it. (1) Trump won an electoral college landslide. (2) Trump won the popular vote. (3) Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil are the best friends of forgotten Americans. (4) No one has more respect for women than Donald Trump. (5) Mexico will pay for the wall. (6) Up is down, black is white and day is night.

Facts getting in the way of that? That’s why post-truthers have more fun. But put in half-an-hour a day, and by Inauguration Day you’ll be believing every word that comes out of Kellyanne Conway’s mouth.

No? So what’s your real problem with Trump? The gilt? Get over it.

From Beverly Hills to Short Hills, there are taste tribes for whom there’s no such thing as too much gold leaf, gold paint or bling. As a 12-year-old, I was fully complicit in my mother’s choice of a “conversation piece” for the gold-carpeted living room of our new suburban split level, a tower of three “antiqued” gold cherubs with a jeweled lampshade sprouting from the forehead of the chubby child on top. If gilt like that was regal enough for Kaplans, surely it’s fitting for our 21st-century roi soleil, so please park the snark when the new White House decorator goes a little Versailles on us.

Or is the problem the guilt? You can get over that, too.

You watch “Say Yes to the Dress,” don’t you? “Real Housewives of Atlanta”? You keep up with the Kardashians? Like those nominally unscripted soaps, the Trump Show is a guilty pleasure, too digital junk food, political empty calories, the “reality” formerly known as reality. Trump’s hat may say “Make America Great Again,” but his meta-hat says, Let me entertain you. The twitter taunts, the billionaire boys club, the mayhem at rallies, the humiliated rivals, the insulted, dishonest media: As Russell Crowe asks in “Gladiator,” “Are you not entertained?”

Look at the promotional campaign MSNBC is running for its anchors. The print ad features a tight close-up of Trump’s face. The text reads, “What will he do?” Beneath that, “What won’t he do?” And beneath that, an indictment not of him, but of us: “This is why you watch.” At the bottom, flanked by photos of its anchors, are the MSNBC logo and a tag line: “This is who we are.” New York magazine writer Joe Hagan tweeted about it, “This ad nails everything that is wrong with the media. Fascism as ratings spectacle.” If you grieve over the audience’s addiction to disaster porn, if you mourn the news-as-entertainment business model that fostered it, then you’re bound to feel guilty about watching, and you’ve got a rough ride ahead. But if, instead, you treat boredom like a fate worse than tyranny, if you medicate civic ADHD with always-breaking BREAKING NEWS, if you mistake engagement with social media for actual citizen participation, you’re gonna rock these next four years.

Trump voters love the rupture with the American political narrative that he ran on. But if the popular vote is any guide to the country’s mood, I suspect that fear of the future is now more widespread than exhilaration that anything can happen. The truth is that no one has a clue what’s next. That’s not fun; it’s frightening.

The next commander-in-chief is an impulsive, deceitful, corrupt, intellectually lazy megalomaniac. That’s a delicious character disorder for the villain of a comic book, and it’s ideally suited to a news industry whose audience is addicted to melodrama and whose narrative technique maximizes suspense, surprise and dread. Though horror is a thrilling genre, and real-time tension is irresistible to our animal appetites, there’s no guarantee that the scary story we’re living through will have a happy ending.

“This is why you watch.” Really? To torture ourselves wondering how bad things can get? To have a front row seat for the last days of American democracy?

There’s an awesome opportunity that responsible journalism can rise to right now. The repeal of Obamacare begs to be framed not as a retributive power struggle between political parties, but as a moral struggle for a diverse people to define a good society. Climate change cries out to be covered not as a farce about ignorance, but as an epic about the survival of our species. Explaining economic policy requires risky honesty from the media about inequality, and a fearless, patient commitment to educating its audiences. That’s not the same as keeping the country watching by keeping it on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

An avalanche of coverage of the first 100 days of Trump is imminent. How will the media do? We know how brilliantly they did covering the primaries and the general. They made a lot of dough doing it. It’s wishful thinking, I know, but imagine if there were a different yardstick for how well they tell the next part of the story. That would really be something to love.

Marty Kaplan is the Norman Lear professor of entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Reach him at martyk@jewishjournal.com.

IMAGE: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump holds a campaign rally in Fort Myers, Florida, U.S. September 19, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Why Political Journalists Can’t Take Criticism

Why Political Journalists Can’t Take Criticism

Published with permission from Washington Monthly.

I get why Washington journalists respond to criticism in partisan fashion. When readers complained last week about a botched AP report, they were mostly supporters of Hillary Clinton. Naturally you’re upset, the reporter thinks. You don’t like news that reflects poorly on your preferred candidate.

By now, we know that report was wrong.

It claimed that half of private individuals who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state were also donors to the Clinton Foundation. But Clinton met with hundreds of people, public and private. Worse, the AP reporters used as their villain in a story of corruption a Nobel Prize-winning economist who’d known Clinton for more than 30 years.

This is old news, but the Washington media continues to disappoint. On NPR this morning, “Morning Edition” host Steve Inskeep asked Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake if he shares Clinton’s view on immigration. According to Trump, Inskeep said, his opponent favors “open borders” and “amnesty.”

This is an example of a statement that’s technically accurate, but entirely misleading. And dangerous. Yes, Trump has said, time and again, that Clinton wants “open borders” and “amnesty.” It’s also true that this claim exists only the realm of fantasy. Indeed, in an interview — just yesterday — NPR’s Mara Liasson told Inskeep those claims were false.

Journalists, I believe, are beholden to the truth. If they are unwilling to pay deference to the authority of the truth, even when that deference conflicts with the profession’s other guiding principles, there isn’t much point in being a journalist.

Again, I understand why reporters respond to criticisms in partisan fashion. It’s natural. Indeed, I was sympathetic to Business Insider’s Josh Barro when he quipped on Twitter that Clinton supporters are among the whiniest supporters.

But in this case, vocal complaints by Clinton supporters are not empty. They are based on something. They are based on demonstrable instances of journalistic malfeasance.

Journalists of Steve Inskeep’s high caliber say they privilege getting the facts right, as they should. But holding them accountable to those standards can be nearly impossible.

I got in touch with Inskeep on Twitter this morning to make him aware of his mistake. (I do not subscribe to the childish claim, as Glenn Greenwald does, that the American media is in the tank for one or the other candidate). It was an honest mistake. So I asked: Will you be offering a clarification?

I didn’t expect Inskeep to reply. When he did, it was not a good faith exchange between journalists about the concrete facts of the matter. He offered instead a series of bewildering deflections, obfuscations, and, to be frank, playing dumb.

Here is some what he said:

“The recording shows me noting that Trump claims his ‘opponents’ favor ‘open borders.’ I then ask Flake, a reformer, if he does.”

(Yes, we know this.)

“Nowhere was a false charge simply repeated unchecked.”

(Actually, that’s precisely what you did. You said as much.)

“Doesn’t asking a question allow someone to state their true position? Should we never ask?”

(Flake’s position is beside the point. The question was based on an NPR-reported falsehood. How about a clarification?)

This is Hannity’s technique interviewing Trump, whom he backs. But as a journalist I prefer to let Flake give evidence.

(I didn’t know what to say. The presumption here would seem to be that a politician is responsible for the truth.)

I know how it feels. I hate — just purely blindly hate — being called out for a mistake. Mistakes chip away at a journalist’s credibility. Credibility is a journalist’s lifeblood. Ideally, it would be better for the journalist never to be aware of it.

But that’s not the world we live in. Indeed, we live in a world in which a candidate for the presidency of the United States can give a policy speech on immigration based on the fever dreams of nativist-white nationalists, and the entire media apparatus does not report that it is unadulterated racism.

We need a better media.

We’ll see if that begins with a minor clarification.

John Stoehr is a lecturer in political science at Yale, a journalism fellow at Wesleyan, and US News & World Report contributing writer.

Photo: Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign event with Vice-President Joe Biden in Scranton, Pennsylvania. REUTERS/Charles Mostoller