News as Commodity: Selling the 2008 Race for the Presidency

Politico’s John Harris recently gave some insight into what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call commercial blogging (How small stories become big news, May 27, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/1004.html).

His point of departure was the recent dustup involving Hillary Clinton’s comments about the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, shortly after his primary victory in California. Clinton cited his assassination in June, along with hubby Bill’s not having wrapped up the Democratic nomination in June, 1992 as reasons for her continuing on at this relative late date in the 2008 primary. In other words, she was saying, the race ain’t over ‘til it’s over and it would be premature for her to leave when so little separates the candidates in terms of pledged delegates and popular vote, especially when neither candidate can be elected based on pledged delegates alone.

Harris said that when the news of Clinton’s words to a South Dakota newspaper editorial board came in, on May 23, he exhorted fellow Politico writer, Jonathan Martin, who was already furiously blogging away to get something about it on the site as soon as possible. His blog, like many other large blogs, wanted to get anything, whether right or wrong, or in or out of context, up on the site because the posting of a potentially controversial post can be a primary driver of traffic to the blog, in general. Or, as Harris himself writes, “The truth about what Clinton said—and any fair-minded appraisal of what she meant—was entirely beside the point.”

In other words, who cares if it is correct, and whether the post amounts to creating news out of something trivial or minor or reporting it? Harris says that in retrospect, Politico’s entry as well as many others on the Internet about the RFK assassination were hype, piffle, and lacked “proportionality.” Clinton’s words, while poorly chosen, were references to events that occurred late in a campaign and, as such, the reference simply to a point in time in which the Party’s nominee was still not decided. You could almost see Harris wringing his hands as he bemoaned the haste to post the dramatic and breathless RFK post and the practice, in general, though to his credit, he at least admitted that he is “unapologetic in our premium on high velocity” and that in this regard “we are not different from nearly all news sites these days.” Still, I would have felt a lot better if he’d simply said this wouldn’t happen again. Unfortunately, there was no such pronouncement, just a self-serving blog that, in this context, is little better than navel gazing.

The frequently uncritical, unresearched, and shamelessly dramatic blog postings are bad enough but, even worse, is the fact that this also affects, more generally, the television news programs and the print media. The cable network, MSNBC, is a case in point. On May 23, the day of HC’s RFK comment, Keith Olbermann devoted one of his vapid “special commentaries” to the situation in his program, Countdown, accusing the Democratic candidate of implying that Clinton was waiting around for Obama to be assassinated, that she was a racist, and that she was relying on Republican bogeyman, Karl Rove, for many of her campaign tactics. “We have forgiven you for these things,” Olbermann pontificated but for the assassination remark “we cannot forgive you this,” he continued.

While Olbermann, who James Carville once said was about “2 degrees short of self-combustion,” finally did explode in his silly tirade, his behavior was simply a more wacko version of the reportage that was taking place in the blogs and the television news: dramatic, self-righteous, lacking in context, and, most disturbingly, almost certainly a function of not reporting the news and informing people but rather attracting viewer and reader traffic for the sake of advertising dollars. Chris Mathews, Olbermann’s colleague and host of his own program, Hardball, engaged in similar hyperbole, mischaracterizing and losing all sense of proportion. Mathews has continued to devote significant segments of his program to this non-story.

A cursory search of the Internet or a few minutes of channel surfing the cable news networks even today, one week after the fact, reveals the same—lots of hype about a story that doesn’t have any legs or wouldn’t anyway, were it not for the media trying to wring every last dollar out of what would otherwise be a non-event, or, at best, an event worthy of a couple minutes of discussion. More important than any of these, which have little reader/viewership, are the big three television news programs and national newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post. All of these had, as soon as possible, articles or segments devoted to the RFK remarks that distinguished themselves from one another only by the level of breathlessness each exhibited.

So what, if anything, are we to make of such crass and commercial behavior? One thing to take away from this is that a wealth of information, doesn’t necessarily mean better information. With many blogs and television news programs driven primarily to be first or most dramatic, it is just as likely that the information you are reading is, like the RFK remark, much ado about nothing, and may well say less about the candidates or substantive issues than it does about the people reporting it and the organizations for which they work.

It is inevitable that there will continue to be shoddy reporting delivered in an entertainment atmosphere—to spice things up Olbermann, for example, intersperses his rants with dwarf tossing, images of the world’s largest latrine, and the like—as long as blogs, print and television news and anything that can generate ad dollars are bought by large companies and consolidated to the point where they have little or no independence and where there primary motivations are advertising dollars.

The implications of such reporting aren’t trivial, though. One need look no further than the speed and ease with which the media embedded themselves with the Bush administration and helped not only the push to war with Iraq but its prosecution. Or to the uncritical acceptance of the PR flak generals the television news programs hired for their supposedly unbiased analysis of the war in Iraq. In his recently published book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, even Scott McClellan, Bush’s former press secretary for Pete’s sake, calls the press out on the carpet for being weak, uncritical and, almost to a fault, under the sway of the Bush Administration’s dangerous gibberish concerning the war in Iraq, among other things.

So, given this track record you wouldn’t expect the media to act any differently in the 2008 race for the presidency.

And, of course, they do not disappoint, focusing on artificial ups and downs, trivial comments blown into “Bittergates” class warfare, and race baiting instead of the candidates’ positions on the various issues, whether their policies would be feasible, or who would be most electable, based on the demographic information, voting patterns, and other quantitative information available to anyone with the time to look at it. In the world of today’s media it is, unfortunately, completely believable and even expected that the focus is more on Michelle Obama’s comments about being truly proud to be an American for the first time, or Bill Clinton’s remarks comparing Obama’s victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s victories there in 1984 and 1988 than George W. Bush’s statement that he fully approved of the various methods of torture, including waterboarding, that the clandestine services have been engaging in under the auspices of Dick Cheney and others when interrogating supposed terrorists.

In the end, with the media’s increasing focus on entertainment and advertising dollars, drama without content, and race to be the first no matter the cost, it’s buyer, reader, and viewer beware.

Just as when you assess the wares of any greed head interested only in how much money they can extract from you.