from the new west blog: Presidential Campaign

The Distortion of Election Reporting

By Jill Kuraitis, 9-18-08

	These bloggers in Denver used words, photos and video in their reporting

This story on Politico is a good start in explaining why election reporting is increasingly irrelevant, distorted, and shallow.

According to Mike Allen and Carrie Budoff Brown, reporters are more cut off from the candidates than ever, with even the press on the official campaign planes unable to talk directly to the candidates.  Apparently, the days are gone when reporters and candidates played poker and hung out together after long, exhausting days of campaigning.

Allen/Brown: Not only do the reporters have little interaction with the candidates, but increasingly they are having little impact on the broad campaign narratives and daily story lines that supply most voters with their impressions of the candidates.



That’s more often taking place in cable studios or on Web sites far removed from the ceaseless grind of the press bubble — in which reporters schlump on and off the plane, in and out of buses and gymnasiums-turned-filing centers, several times a day, dozens of times a week.



A combination of technology and iron message discipline by heavily centralized campaigns has consigned these reporters – once the storied “boys on the bus” – largely to feeding off the public material available to almost anyone over the Web, with very little interaction with the next president of the United States.

It’s distressing, but not surprising.

National television coverage seems more shallow than ever.  At the Democratic Convention in Denver last month, network anchors and reporters were rarely seen.  They seemed to be holed up in their glass-fronted booths overlooking the action, while the floor reporting, digging around for good stories, vigilance for breaking news and contact with delegates was visibly being done by print and internet reporters, and bloggers. 

The results were clear when watching network coverage of the convention, which seemed to be reporting from a different convention altogether.  CNN was especially distorted, but the traditional media (the “tradmed” in internet language) wildly exaggerated the so-called conflict between Hillary and Obama.  Some of us ran around the first few days trying to find Hillary delegates who were ready for a big floor fight, and found few.  There was no atmosphere of Hillary vs. Obama; it wasn’t in the zeitgeist.

Yet the networks insisted that Democrats were “having a unity problem.”

It’s partly that television news is supposedly more interesting when there is a conflict to report – “if it bleeds, it leads” – but it’s not the whole story. 

The world of news media and reporting is in a confusing upheaval.  Not only are newspapers in financial trouble, the impact of the internet and bloggers who often do a better job than the tradmed took some of them by surprise.  A few years of denial followed, while the new media improved its content and impact. 

Since 2004, the number of new, “citizen-generated” media and reporters at the US political conventions has significantly increased. It has become more difficult to differentiate between independent bloggers and traditional ones as traditional media is adopting a “multi-platform” method, according to Media Shift’s Mark Glaser.

“Perhaps the more interesting question is whether indie bloggers and new media folks are now becoming a part of the mainstream at the same time the mainstream is reaching out and using the tactics of the independents,” says Glaser.

Detailed reading on the subject:

Media Shift

Center for Communication and Civic Engagement

“The Power of the New Media” at pajamasmedia.com

Wikipedia on new media

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