Brendan Nyhan focuses in on "chickengate," a perfectly (to mix metaphors) nothingburger incident involving Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, as a prime example of the brainless "authenticity narrative" style of political reporting:
The incident, just the latest entry in the growing pantheon of political food gaffes, reveals how the media too often covers presidential candidates on the trail. With most candidates’ speeches and rallies generating relatively few headline-worthy sound bites, reporters and commentators often instead turn their focus to theater critic–style assessments of a candidate’s strategy and campaign skills. In its most dangerous form, this form of coverage centers on manufactured narratives about a candidate’s personality.
These narratives often center on whether the candidate is “authentic” — a media construction that ignores the reality that all candidate behavior is strategic. Bizarrely, many reporters appear to believe they can determine candidates’ inner beliefs by observing their behavior in the artificial, high-stakes world of presidential campaigning. Those candidates who are less skilled in campaign trail rituals are often skewered as inauthentic, especially if their failures seem to reflect a character flaw... (our emphasis)Nyhan then references how such reporting came to define John Kerry (and, we might add, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton). That worked out well for America, didn't it?
Will Bunch identifies some of the egregious behavior and has a suggestion, based on an argument forwarded by media maven Jay Rosen:
There’s still nearly a year before the Iowa caucuses — plenty of time for political scribes and their newsroom bosses to change their ways, and there’s no shortage of good ideas. Jay Rosen, the New York University professor and media critic, has argued the answer isn’t exactly “more issues coverage,” which has become such an eat-your-broccoli chore that it’s usually done poorly. Instead, Rosen has called for newsrooms to canvass their communities to develop “a citizens’ agenda” of what voters actually want to know about the candidates — and then deploy their resources accordingly.
That’s a great idea. It’s a lot easier to focus on what we know journalists shouldn’t be doing — “horse race” reporting and polls, turning one-day stories into one-year scandals, and of course “the chicken thing” — than what we should be doing. But I think it’s critical to remember that good coverage is more than just “where do the candidates stand on climate change” (which is still important, though) but also telling readers what would this woman or man be like as president. Because we need to do better than Tweety McTweetface. (our emphasis)This upcoming election is too important to trivialize candidates and issues, and to offer false equivalencies and "both sides" narratives. Journalists covering the campaigns need to do a better job than they did in 2016. They'd be truer to their profession, and they might just help save what's left of American democracy.
