Pater Familias

“BEAT-SWEETENER PIECES.” Almost two years ago, I posted on Mickey Kaus’s use of the term “source-greaser” for an article that is slanted toward an anonymous source. In the November 10 Washington Post, Howard Kurtz quotes a former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, who uses the term “beat-sweetener pieces”, which are used to “cultivate sources” (apparently new appointees). The term has been around for at least eight years, since here is a link to a Slate contest which challenged readers to write a paragraph from a “beat-sweetener” article for an imaginary Bush cabinet appointee.

THE CULT OF THE SCOOP. James Surowiecki wrote here about how hasty misreporting of a speech by the CEO of GE led to a drop in the stock market of 370 points on the Dow-Jones average in ten minutes. He concludes: “[T]his is yet another example of how the cult of the scoop—of making sure your story crosses the wire five minutes ahead of your competitor’s—in business journalism can wreak amazing havoc.” I am pleased to see a journalist question the importance of scoops, especially the value of getting the report out five minutes early. Reporters value that kind of scoop more than I do, and, I suspect, more than most readers do. The cult of the five-minute scoop leads—in addition to inaccuracies— to leaks of a public document five minutes early and leaks of embargoed books two or three days early. I remember journalistic awards being given for coverage of a scandal several years ago. The awards went to the two journalists whose coverage had seemed to me notably partisan, but not otherwise very good; they had been a few hours of everybody else because they had been chosen by their respective sides as recipients of competing leaks.

POLITICAL CONVENTIONS ARE NEWS. At the beginning of the year, I expressed my frustration here with the refusal of the networks to show the political conventions directly. I have resolved to post only once on the subject during the conventions, and this is the post. This article describes how the major networks did not give Nancy Pelosi’s speech any significant air time. When the Speaker of the House gives an address at a convention that is held every four years, giving arguments for her candidate, that is news. Chatting among journalists is not news.

WHY JOURNALISTS SHOULD NOT MODERATE DEBATES. I have posted several times, including here and here, that Presidential debates are spoiled by journalists who get in the way of discussions between the candidates. This article by Michael Schaffer in The New Republic, with the subtitle “Why journalists are so bad at running presidential debates”, supports my position. Schaffer praises the recent debate between Obama and McCain which was moderated by Rick Warren, the minister. The key: Warren “asked the candidates to walk through their positions.” For example, he “lobbed” a question “about where the balance between security and freedom lies.” The result was, apparently, “an interesting conversation.” Scheffer points out that reporters are looking for scoops with the result that “something billed as a debate, an opportunity to watch aspirants explain or criticize one another’s important positions …[morphs]… into parallel grillings or desperate searches for “gotcha.”

ARE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES AS INTERESTING AS JOURNALISTS? Another excuse that journalists find for not let letting candidates address voters is that candidates speaking in their own words are not as interesting as journalists are. The Chief Leader Writer of the London Times (”leaders” in Britain are like editorials) opined on the controversy I described yesterday: “Well, political pieces by elected officials or candidates can often be very boring - safe, unrevealing and tediously partisan. In general I required such pieces to jump over a pretty high importance barrier before I ran them.”

IGNORING WHAT THE CANDIDATES HAVE TO SAY. Consider what the above post implies for coverage of the current campaign during the remaining months until the election. Important journalists believe that any position the candidates have already taken—even on very important issues–is not worth printing. Since the candidates have already made their positions known on most important issues, journalists are not likely to find these policy positions interesting. Is it any wonder that the coverage of past campaigns has focused on meaningless “gaffes” or bizarre side issues? Or on the “horse race”, which after all seems to change from day to day and is therefore “news”?

MUST NEWS BE NOVEL? I posted here on an article by Brian Stelter about television coverage of a debate between Obama and Hillary Clinton. The article began, “A serious discussion on pressing national issues may be good for the country. But it isn’t necessarily good television.” Serious discussions of policy by candidates are unappealing to print journalists as well, and journalists have developed various excuses for avoiding them. One excuse is that policy arguments are not “news” unless they are novel. Here is a current example. The New York Times printed an op ed by Obama on his position on Iraq; it rejected a rebuttal piece by McCain. I am not interested in whether the Times was favoring one candidate over another. What I find significant is the standard that the Times applied to both candidates. The op ed page editor of the Times said that “The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it appeared before his speech).” Apparently, if Obama’s speech had occurred a couple days earlier, Obama’s op ed would not have been worthy of publication.

PRESS INTERVENTION IN THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES. I began posting here about how I wished that there could be debates among the Presidential candidates like the one I saw in France in which the candidates debated without a media figure interrupting. Today’s New York Times has an article by Brian Stelter describing the frustrations of CNN producers because the debate they had promoted as “fight night”, turned into a discussion of policy. Stelter says, “That left CNN producers looking for ways to stoke the competition, using the tricks they had learned broadcasting previous debates during this long primary season.” The producers told Wolf Blitzer during the debate, “You have to become part of this, Wolf.” What does the audience want from a debate? Interestingly, Stelter concludes by quoting Jonathan Klein, the President of CNN, “People love to hear the candidates talk,” he said. “They love to hear more from the candidates and less from us.”

DO JOURNALISTS TRY TO DISENFRANCHISE VOTERS? I have posted here and here about how the primary system has operated to disenfranchise voters who do not live in New Hampshire and Iowa because the winning candidate is chosen before people in other states get to vote. I see that Mickey Kaus (on January 17) and John Ellis (on January 17, Item 4) have argued that journalists have an incentive to eliminate candidates quickly because coverage of each candidate is so expensive and that this is what they have done in the past. Kaus says that “one of the important mechanisms of hounding-out [is] increasingly negative coverage that turns off your funders….”

LIFE IN NEW YORK. The New York Times reported here on how two men in New York tried to cash a man’s social security check and presented the man’s corpse as identification evidence. What is notable is that the Times covered the incident. I can remember when The Post, The Daily News, and the Village Voice reported on this kind of story, but the Times did not.