So it looks increasingly like McCain or Clinton for the White House. (The Times weighs in endorsing them both this morning—not that it will do McCain’s campaign much good.) Meanwhile, over at Slate, Jack Shafer has some interesting thoughts on the press’ much maligned fixation on who’s up and who’s down:
Horse-race coverage isn’t the devil spawn of the television age. Scholar C. Anthony Broh dates horse-race coverage of campaigns back to 1888, when the Boston Journal reported that a “dark horse” was unlikely to appear in a campaign. While noting horseracisms’ obvious deficiencies, he catalogs its many pluses. Horse-race journalism increases voter interest in campaigns, something you can’t say for the average newspaper’s delineation of a position paper. “The horse-race image encourages reporters to emphasize competition rather than to forecast results,” Broh writes, arguing against the common view that reporters are keen to anoint a winner as soon as possible. Every political reporter I know yearns to cover a deadlocked presidential convention.
Critics of horseracism complain that it isolates on poll results and reports from campaign rallies to the exclusion of discussions of political “substance.” But that’s hardly ever the case. Mother Jones’ Jonathan Stein has been cataloging some of the best of the substance coverage, recently citing pieces about Clinton’s voting record vs. Obama’s and a comparison of the Democrats’ domestic policy. He’s also refuted Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone piece that claims the campaign press corps has bogged itself down in trivialities. But even if the press corps had abandoned substance, no voter is more than a mouse click away from detailed policy papers and unfiltered campaign speeches by the candidates. If you’re not an informed political consumer this year, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
A political campaign is more than a traveling debate society. Beyond the issues, voters need to know why a candidate is (or isn’t) performing well in the polls, is (or isn’t) raising money, is (or isn’t) drawing crowds of supporters, or is (or isn’t) keeping his cool. Candidates win or lose for a reason, reasons that have to do with issue papers but also with how they carry themselves and present their positions. Candidates appreciate this fact, which is why they commission private polls so they can construct their own horse-race results and act on them.
In Praise of Horse Race Coverage (Slate via Mediabistro.com)
No Tags
