Yeah, this was less a problem of the Clinton campaign, and more a problem of the soundbyte and surface level media coverage.
I will never forgive media for the dereliction of duty.
So how does the media handle campaign’s better?
I think there are many problems.
1). People just don’t read newspapers anymore. Newspapers have made themselves irrelevant for the most part by reporting news days late. My local paper is so slow they don’t even get the results from Saturday’s big football games into the paper until Monday. Technology (and cost) have left the paper behind.
2). The major cable news channels are crap. Everything is BREAKING NEWS, and that same damn headline will run for days. They are aimed at target audiences who eat their shit up without ever thinking about what and why they are watching it.
3). Sure, you can say the electorate can go online to find any info they want but most have no idea how to determine what is legit, what is factual, and what isn’t. Whose opinion is fact?
4). Many people simply don’t believe anybody anymore. The level of cynicism is just beyond any previous level.
I think you can blame the media for some of that, but not for all of that.
Avoid opinion shows.
Stick to facts not “breaking news” rumors.
Have shows that actually like… discuss policy with policy people.
It will never happen though. You can’t have a discussion of policy when you can just run your own Sean Hannity and get more eyes. People don’t want to learn or improve, they want to be entertained or frightened.
Personally I’d settle for “Breaking News” just dying in a fire. It’s never breaking or important, it’s almost always some random rumor from some unknown or unimportant person. You know what’s Breaking News? A declaration of war. An assassination. Hell, a mass shooting (though giving those fucks airtime is part of the problem imo).
You know what isn’t? That Congressman fuckwit of Mississippi said something on Twitter.
The cynicism originated in this overreaction without facts originally. Jon Stewart used to rake CNN over the coals every night for it and with good reason. Then they went full on “holograms!!!” stupid.
There is better reporting there. You occasionally see it on networks. NPR is the gold standard, Meet the Press can be very enlightening and detailed policy discussion oriented, PBS Newshour is often very good. Actually the Sunday morning non cable network shows tend to be of a far higher quality in general.
Which is probably why the evangelical vote went so hard for dementia Donnie, the only good TV coverage was while they were at church…
Shorenstein Center just released a study on the Sunday shows. They (largely) agree with your assessment - but the quality is declining. :/
We have seven principal findings, as follows:
Content. Politics and process have, over time, increasingly supplanted substantive policy expertise and content, even while the latter types of interview guests and content earn higher ratings.
Guests. Interviews with administration officials and substantive policy experts earn the highest audience ratings on average, and feature among the most substantive, policy-oriented content. Yet they are declining as proportions of all interviews
Subject Matter. We find a similar, yet less pronounced, pattern for interview topics, with topics that earn the highest audience ratings not necessarily corresponding to the most frequently appearing, or most substantive, policy-oriented interview topics. However, the correlations between topic prevalence and Nielsen ratings are modest, both overall and broken out by gender.
Gender Preferences. Women account for a majority of the audience since 1999, yet featured topics somewhat more closely reflect the preferences of men than of women.
Guest Demographics.[1] The vast majority of guests are White men, though there is a noteworthy uptick in African American guests in 2015 relative to 1983 or 1999 and more women appeared in 2015 relative to prior years. Republican guests also substantially outnumber Democratic guests across all three periods.
Agenda Setting by Members of Congress (1980-2003). Rhetoric by members of Congress from the Sunday interview programs grew less likely from 1980 to 2003 to appear in subsequent network news reports—especially discussions of the economy or budget. The exception is foreign policy, which is more likely to be picked up by later news reports.
Agenda Setting Overall (1983, 1999, 2015). Looking across all guests and episodes from 1983, 1999, and 2015, (1) guests were far more likely to be featured in subsequent news reports in 1999 and 2015, relative to 1983, though much of this is attributable to 28 appearances in 2015 by Donald Trump that generated unprecedented levels of subsequent news coverage, as well as the post-1983 advent of 24-hour cable news channels; (2) Discussions of substance are more likely than discussions of process to appear in subsequent news reports; and (3) there is some, albeit limited, overlap between the topics that are the top ratings winners and those that attract the most subsequent attention in the news, with healthcare being the most noteworthy instance of such overlap. (Several additional findings are discussed in Section 7, below.)
When the original networks (I am not sure who was first) decided that the news departments had to pay their own way news coverage declined, both in quality and in it’s objectivism. It became less about news and more about ratings.
Awesome. If only the identity police could help me understand why Hillary lost, that would be great.
Word.
Me, I go back Adam’s Razor.
“If any American political question can be answered by the assertion that the American electorate is fucking stupid, that is the answer.”
Served me well. Well, ‘well’ in the sense that I hate everyone and we deserve the ‘democracy’ that we get.
Setting aside the moral awfulness of the Trump campaign, what this interview drives home is the colossal competency gap between the two candidates.
Any functional electorate would have perceived that. Our electorate is dumb, and prone to demagogues.
In some ways its oversaturation rather than stupidity. I think that’s what Progressives fail to really grok the consequences of the distribution of competency and authority; when the People Who Actually Know are posting on Twitter to 5,000 followers, how does the average person have the time or knowledge to even encounter, much less verify, what is being said is truthful or not? Most Progressives seem to think in at least general terms something like the startup Verrit; if only we had a repository of Truth we could all agree upon! But this is a hopeless and hapless fantasy. You’re never going to get hundreds of thousands, much less millions, of people to all suddenly agree This New Particular Source of Information is always trustworthy. The way forward now is Trust but Verify, and who but the most activist of us is going to do that, personally validate and curate some Twitter feed or stable of reporters or whatever?
The real problem, paradoxically enough, is universal suffrage. We’ve reached a point where giving everybody a vote is a classical fantasy at deep odds with the apolitical, greedy, consumeristic lifestyles fostered by society that leaves most people with neither the education, inclination or time opportunity to fully educate themselves and understand the increasingly technical and complicated problems being faced. There’s a real tension between duties as a citizen and “i wanna watch Game of Thrones, and 5 more hours a day of entertainment” consumerism. That why to me the real danger of the 21st C. is that voters are going to increasingly see the stable, long term policy making capacity of a non-democratic Chinese system of government to be the best system for achieving the policy goals democratic systems are simply unable to.
Or more succinctly put;
So… we need to coalesce into a Voltron of the 21st C; the Body Politic. One voter, 300 million people. Also, can crush the moon and fly in space.
Alternatively: Facebook Borg.
I can think of a couple of uses for a blazing sword, at least
Sigh. Reading that just brings home the absolute insanity of Trump’s victory over Clinton. Half-way through, I realised I was relieved the sentences of the interviewee were actually more than gibberish.
FTFY.
This is excellent. Quoting at length because not a few people on this forum are guilty of doing the very same thing. It illustrates that Clinton had to be perfect. No verbal gaffes. No strategic decisions that in hindsight proved miscalculated. She can’t even articulate her own feelings on the loss without getting pilloried for being self-serving (which no other losing candidate in political history has had to face.)
Well, I’ll let Dave Roberts do the talking:
Should Clinton have just not said that dumb thing?
If you read Clinton’s answer to the town hall question in full, it’s all pretty garbled and inarticulate. She was clearly not at the top of her game at that event. "You say millions of words in a campaign and you do your best to be clear and accurate,” she writes. “Sometimes it just comes out wrong.”
Of course, even at her best, Clinton was never adept at the poetry of campaigning. You could never imagine Obama fumbling words like this. Even in his alleged gaffes — like “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion” — he said exactly what he meant. Even speaking spontaneously, he delivered complete sentences and paragraphs, with uncommon command over his tone.
Clinton lacks the kind of verbal dexterity her husband and Obama have, and their ability to connect to any crowd. She made up for it by studying, by knowing more, forging deeper relationships, having more detailed policies. But it was inevitable that during a long campaign, she would mix a few G.W. Bush-style word salads.
But garbled sentences, in and of themselves, are not significant. As discussed, Clinton’s actual intentions toward coal communities are clear. What does it matter, in the grand scheme of things, that she misspoke about it? Does it reveal anything about her character or her policies that is germane to what kind of president she’d be? “Occasionally misspeaks” has not typically been a barrier to higher office in the US, or else there’d be very few politicians.
There is one and only one reason to pluck out that sentence and make a story of it: to try to hurt Clinton politically by lying about her meaning and intentions.
I guess I’m just stating the obvious here, but this point is also worth belaboring: It was a political hit job. It wasn’t a revelation of relevant information; it was a distortion, a lie.
From the media’s perspective, “Clinton garbled a sentence” is true but not particularly newsworthy. “Clinton boasted about putting coal miners out of work” is false but definitely newsworthy (and damaging to Clinton) if it were true. In other words, there’s no honest reason to make this “gaffe” a story at all.
“But Dave,” you’re saying. “This got covered everywhere, including the MSM. Are you saying they were all lying in order to damage Clinton?”
No. That’s not how the game works. The game works like this:
Right-wing operatives and media figures watch Clinton intensely. Anything she says or does that can be plausibly (or implausibly) spun to appear maleficent, they spin. A vast echo chamber of blogs, “news” sites, radio stations, cable news shows, and Facebook groups takes each one of these mini faux scandals and amplifies the signal.
If one of the faux scandals catches on enough and dominates right-wing media long enough, then a kind of alchemy occurs. The question facing mainstream outlets is not, “Why aren’t you writing about what Clinton said?” That question is easy to answer: It’s a nothingburger. The question becomes, “Why aren’t you writing about the scandal over what Clinton said?”
Reputable mainstream journalists don’t have to pretend that Clinton meant the ridiculous thing right-wing media says she meant. They can just report that “some interpreted Clinton to mean [ridiculous thing],” and hey, that’s technically true. The fact that a bunch of right-wing political and media hacks feigned outrage becomes the story.
The coal gaffe followed that well-established trajectory. The second Clinton said the words, right-wing media yanked them out of context and spun them as cartoonishly evil. Then it’s, hey, CNN, why aren’t you covering the scandal over Clinton’s coal comments?
The groove is so well-worn that the whole cycle has compressed to hours now. Writers for purportedly nonpartisan outlets, desperate for clicks, eagerly hoover up the faux scandals, their journalistic sins washed away by the transformation of Thing to Scandal-About-the-Thing. The former does not need to have any significance, or even to be real, for the latter to flourish.
…
But note that when mainstream critics talk about these things, it’s never the things themselves that are the problem. It’s always the optics: “how it sounded” or “how it looked.” If you unpack that a little — “she should have known how it would look” — here’s what it means: She should have known that anything she does or says that can be spun to look bad will be spun to look bad, and the MSM will pass along the spin uncritically, so she shouldn’t have done or said anything that can be spun to look bad.