Glenn Close, A Fatal Attraction
Fatal Attraction was the swan song of the “woman scorned” movies. Much of the 20th century was spent telling the story in film and fiction of white, middle-class men confronted with the stress of romancing women not their wives and dealing with the aftermath of affairs. From Graham Greene to John Updike, these chronicles of privilege took up a lot of space.
When I encounter complaints from Chris Cilizza and the White House Correspondents Association, I can’t help think of the relationship between the press and politicians. Monetarily speaking, the press has been struggling with its own relevance for years, but the 2016 presidential campaign is the first time the press has had to face its declining relevance in the political arena. And they’re not happy about it.
For the second half of the twentieth century, the press call the shots. Once television took hold, television news and debates and advertising were crucial for a campaign. The press did important work exposing Joe McCarthy’s twisted campaign, holding up a mirror to American racism and empowering the Civil Rights movement, exposing the Vietnam War, and Watergate. As the century came to an end, the press became less of a medium and more of a lens that too often distorted reality. The Clintons lived through this era. Al Gore and John Kerry later faced similar distortions. Candidates, however, had to live with the coverage they received. The media could be manipulated, and it became paramount to learn how to manipulate it. The media, for its part, enjoyed setting the rules. They didn’t mind being manipulated if they could also manipulate. Campaign coverage shifted had less and less to do with issues and more and more to deal with how well candidates played the media game. Swift Boat accusations were lies, but the issue was not the truth, but how well John Kerry dealt with the accusations. In debates, the focus was on how well the candidates performed, not whether their answers were substantive or truthful. The media seems to have been happy with this set up. They set the stage for candidate performances, and then turned around to be the political theatre critics. They didn’t have to worry about offending candidates with uncomfortable questions about their mistruths. Not if they appeared “presidential” or like someone you’d like to have a beer with.
Things have begun to change in the last 10 years. The press has begun fact-checking candidate and politician statements. The process and product aren’t always perfect, but they have begun to focus on facts, rather than performance. To his credit, ABC’s Jake Tapper aggressively challenged Trump about his accusations that a federal judge’s Mexican heritage was the cause of bias against the candidate. And the media has even begun to look into and step up its own fact-checking. These are welcome developments. Real-time fact checking is now happening. The ability to catch a candidate in mid-lie is technically possible, and the media is actually starting to do it. This is progress.
These developments make the complaints of the White House Press Corps Association look ridiculous:
“The White House Correspondents’ Association defends the First Amendment in the context of the presidency, and, as such, speaks up when a presumptive nominee from either party falls short. Our op-ed laid out legitimate and different concerns that we have about each candidate with regard to the press. We did not render a verdict on which candidate poses more of a problem; people can draw their own conclusions about that.
The First Amendment guarantees the press’s freedom, not its convenience. Press conferences are, as several BMGer’s have pointed out, a circus, with much more to do with political dramaturgy than producing information for an audience. President Clinton will, no doubt, hold press conferences, but she doesn’t need the practice. She will owe American citizens clear, open, honest communication. She won’t owe the press anything. Reporters and the White House Press Corps Association don’t have to like. They don’t have to stay quiet about it (that’s where the First Amendment comes in), but they better get used to it. The role of the media is changing whether they like it or not. And it might just be changing for the better.
They did NOT do the fact-checking they should have with him and gave him oodles of free air time they did not give other candidates. Also, they should not have used polling IMO to determine who participated in the early GOP debates, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then once they had the debates they did not balance speaking time. The point of debates is to compare answers, not stir up trouble. They should have given each candidate a couple of minutes to respond to the same question, rotating which candidate goes first.
Without somehow whittling down participation, the debates, such as they were, would have been even less revelatory. There’s another thing operational here: We have a number of Republicans who seem to be supporting themselves or their careers by the addition of “former Presidential candidate” to their resumes. Would anyone really be listening to Newt Gingrich or Mike Huckabee if neither had starred in a recent Republican primary show?
Maybe a round with all Senators, one with all Governors, and one with the non-politicians (just thinking out loud). As much as I wouldn’t vote for any of them the GOP actually had a strong field of qualified candidates, some of whom got suffocated by Trump. Not sure about Huckabee, but Gingrich will always be the first GOP Speaker after 40 years who practically became Prime Minister so I think he’d have an audience either way.
You really must be thinking out loud!
Kasich was the best qualified and he was extremely far to the Right. How many of these folks were electable by the country as a whole? Bush was a terrible candidate. No one liked Cruz and he was unelectable. Fiorina? Joke. Rubio? Extremely light-weight. They had a lot of candidates, but this was not a strong field.
I agree that Bush didn’t run very well this particular race, but he WAS Governor of Florida. Cruz may not have spent much time in the Senate, but about the same as Obama when he ran after all. Fiorina I would not say is qualified – no previous office and one losing campaign to her name. I never got the attraction of Rubio, but again he was a Senator. The way I see it, if you have been a Senator or a Governor that’s points in your favor in terms of presidential qualifications by default. I was not commenting on how electable they might be, or how extreme, but such people are objectively better suited to be President than Trump.
> They did NOT do the fact-checking …
There’s a difference between written and visual press… Cable TV fell into Trump’s trap, posting wall to wall coverage of him all the while they were mocking his candidacy. These are CNN, MSNBC, of course Fox… But not only – CBS, NBC, ABC were not far behind.
These TV channels must have made a lot of money selling advertising in between Trump clips.
A typical example was Saturday Night Live, which billed itself as a social critic of the election, then succumbing to the temptation to invite Trump to guest-host the show. There was a lot of pressure from civil rights organizations to persuade SNL to disinvite Trump. But no… SNL had to satiate its hunger for ratings. The result was one of the dullest shows in a long time – but, perhaps, with one of the largest viewerships.
SNL gave typical wink-wink to the viewers – they appear to be saying, look, Trump is disgusting, but still they could not refrain to give him prime display, and make him the center piece of their entertainment offering.
The written press was a lot more critical of Trump, and a lot more balanced in its coverage, but little did it matter, given that Trump was on continuous loop on TV.
between the press and the media than there might seem.
It was the Times that reported Clinton was the target of a criminal probe. Put aside any harm done to Clinton, and consider how much this helped readers understand the actual issue.
Or the continuing false equivalence on the parties, global warming denial, and voter ID.
Clinton was target of an FBI criminal probe, in the end… I fail to see the harm done by the New York Times.
I’m not seeing, in the written press, global warming denial. That might have been the case five or ten years ago – but the debate has, since, moved, and the news reflects instead a dispute about what to do to resolve global warming. It’s a longer subject that does not have much to do with the press release from the WHPCA.
I’m not completely sure of this, but I believe news programs in the fifties and sixties were not money makers for the networks, but there was some ulterior, licensing-related issue that got them on the air. That requirement has ebbed, and so I believe the reality-show/sporting-event style is the result.
Thus, press conferences and debates become contests, perhaps like balance challenges on Survivor.
Networks assumed that news divisions would not be profit generators and there was either greater requirement or greater cultural expectation that news was the public service provided in exchange for broadcast licenses.
From what I know, the networks pay a small percentage of the value of the portion of the airwave spectrum that they use. The government could make a mint selling those rights, and doesn’t. In return, those airwaves need to have some public good from their usage, to wit, news.
Corporations in the last couple decades have figured out that our government will almost never call them on poor behavior, and when they do, the fine will not outweigh the benefit. So we have cartoons presented as “educational” and infotainment as “news”.
As long as the TV news reports negative stuff from both sides in rough equilibrium, neither Democratic nor Republican control of the regulatory mechanisms will get them into trouble.
I suggest that this is why Trump’s connections to organized crime don’t make the news very much. It’s very difficult to find a balancing Clinton story.
> The government could make a mint selling those rights, and doesn’t.
> In return, those airwaves need to have some public good from their usage,
> to wit, news.
The way to look at this is from the perspective of political representation: who gets to influence how government treats broadcasting rights?
The broadcasters have a direct, strong interest in picking their own lineup. Viewers have a low-level, indirect interest in balanced coverage, and in good quality news not being overcrowded by entertainment.
Numerically, there are much more many viewers than broadcasters – if the issue was put to a ballot question, there would be no contest. The interest of viewers would come into focus, and strict rules protecting the viewers would be passed.
But, as it is, viewers don’t get to pay attention to this problem, and they don’t get to influence Congress or the regulatory agencies on this matter… The broadcasters’ interest is much more direct, and the result is their interest gets heard.
…It’s how democracy works! Direct, strong interest always beats diffuse, low-level interest, even when from a vastly larger majority of constituents.
“truly bizarre. It begins with this statement:
In fact, only a free press is guaranteed by the First Amendment. SCOTUS found in Branzberg v. Hayes (1972),
And in Pell v. Procunier (1974), the Supreme Court found that the press did not have a constitutional right of access greater than that afforded to the public. (Source is here).
It’s hard to believe anyone representing the media could write this sentence about a presidential election with a straight face.
These are the same folks that gave us “Al Gore inventing the internet” and acted as stenographers during the Iraq War.
With great privilege comes great presumptuousness.
sources. Here’s the actual press release. It’s actually an op-ed.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/07/14/trump-clinton-both-threaten-freedom-press-reporters-first-amendment-questions-white-house-correspondents-column/87027090/
Wait, Al Gore did not invent the internet?…
I don’t understand why you’re upset with the White House Correspondents Association press release. The job of the press is to keep the feet of Clinton & Trump under fire.
It should be pretty clear at this point that Clinton looks set to win the general election – and that the press will keep up Primary election-level pressure on Clinton during her whole term.
I don’t think she can expect the usual ‘first 100 days’ honeymoon, usually awarded to new and lesser known Presidents. Which means she has very little margin of error, once elected.
In fact, that’s not such a bad thing. Historically (spanning this and the previous century…) both Clintons have performed better with than without tight public scrutiny.
I understand, truly, why political people hold the press in such contempt.
But political activists being happy about its diminishing power is truly disturbing to me. Sorry, I can’t just agree to disagree on this. You guys are flat out wrong. We are worse off with a weak press, and we do a disservice to the country when we support our own candidate in her attempts to weaken it further.
I think the issue for me is that I want to see strong and rigorous journalism, but the press has mostly stopped providing that.
On the other hand, I’d urge friends to buy paid online subscriptions to The New York Times and other institutions likely to do actual journalism.
I most emphatically agree with you that we need a strong press. I fear you perhaps unintentionally bias your comment when you refer to “political people” who hold the press in such contempt. It’s not just political people, it’s pretty much anyone who has to deal with today’s press.
The plain and sad fact is that “the press” is, today, mostly contemptible. I offer the current Boston Globe (including boston.com) as exhibit A. I note, for example, that the paper announced late Friday its decision to sell its iconic headquarters building on Morrissey Boulevard:
This is just another brick falling in the collapse of a formerly excellent, if not great, newspaper. What the piece doesn’t include is the headcount of the new offices, compared with the number of people who used to work in the Morrissey Boulevard location. When “reporting” is, in essence, aggregating press releases, then there is no need for reporters, editors, and the small army of people that used to support them.
Do you notice the self-serving fluff in the first quoted paragraph? Rather than providing information that might matter to people (such as the headcount of the old and new locations), we are served a sentimental and meaningless piece of treacle about “Newspaper Row”. Pretty much all of downtown Boston is “less than a quarter-mile” from 238 Washington Street — a decent editor would have axed that bit. What’s there, instead, is lipstick that attempts to cover up the pig that the old Boston Globe is dead and buried.
The print industry utterly failed to adapt to the modern communications era. Its business model imploded, and print revenues plummeted along with that. It is a case study in how not to handle disruptive technology.
The “press” that we have today is a ragtag collection of amateurs who are barely able to read, never mind understand, most of what happens around them. They are driven by corporate masters who place no value AT ALL in the role of a free press that we are discussing here.
In my view, we are still waiting for something new to emerge from the ashes of this industry crash. I haven’t seen a viable business model for this new entity yet. A typical “Google News” page has on the order of 20-50 top-line stories, and many of those have 5-10 sources within them. A growing number of those demand monthly subscriptions of $10-20 each. I’m not sure how many people are ready to pay hundreds of dollars a month for news.
To address your specific complaint about Ms. Clinton, I remind you that neither you nor I deal with the press each and every day and neither of us must correctly manage it for our career success. I think Ms. Clinton is far more knowledgeable about the strengths and weaknesses of today’s press corp and about how to manage a press conference.
I see no evidence that one or more press conferences, today, would add any new information at all. I agree with you that I miss those old-fashioned press conferences where substantive questions were asked and substantive answers offered (and where it was newsworthy when a substantive answer was NOT offered). In my view, those old-fashioned press conferences were jettisoned along with the rest of the industry down-sizing.
I think Ms. Clinton is doing the right thing with the press that she, and we, have to deal with today.
What difference does it make where the Globe is printed from? More important is the quality of the coverage. And no, the Globe is not written by amateurs… Reading the press daily for the past three odd years – NYT, WSJ, WaPo, RealClearPolitics – has pretty much persuaded me that Globe has the best quality coverage in terms of state and regional politics.
Globe is more equidistant; Globe pays more attention to subtle things that are happening; Globe does a lot more long form, detailed journalism.
It is sad Globe had to relinquish the old building… but that is the economic reality. Keep in mind that the Globe patron is a businessman schooled in the local venture capital economy. Small companies of the size of the Globe regularly rent, rather than own their place of business, simply because it is cheaper to do so. Moving their business regularly, once every few years, allows them to get rid of spaces they don’t need, and acquire new space they do need.
If there’s decay in the business model of the Globe, that does not automatically translate in lesser coverage quality. Much of this rides on the quality of the readership. If the readership changes, in response, the news coverage changes. We do not seem to have statistics available, but it is possible that a whole stratum of readership was lost by the Globe to internet news or to other media outlets. Still, whoever does politics or is in local or state government uses (or should use…) the Globe as their main source of information.
Perhaps – and I say perhaps, because hard data is lacking… – perhaps this means that the readership of the Globe is more specialized, and more interested in government workings than, say, in local social life, or local economy (both areas where coverage in the Globe has not reached the extent and quality of their state & regional political coverage).
lives up to its image of itself.
That the WHPA has to refer to non-existent constitutional rights demonstrates the intellectual bankruptcy of much of the media. There is no right to gather news. There certainly isn’t a right of the press to have candidates make their job easy for them.
For the last 40 years or so, we’ve not only had a media uninterested in the truth, but a media that has been calling the shots on what is appropriate political discourse, a media for which issues and the truth were secondary.
I don’t know if everyone read my entire post, but I think the press is starting to find its role with fact-checking. We need the media to do newsgathering, but we need context with events. Why is a coup attempt in Turkey important? You’ll never learn that from the press. We need a press that makes it possible for people know and understand more. Ironically, Trump is making the press reconsider its role.
The Democratic Strategist notes:
The WHPCA opinionators could have made a clear distinction between Clinton and Trump’s treatment of the media. Alas, that’s not how these folks play the game.
What Trump and Clinton are doing is not equivalent… But it is representative for the difference between the two, and totally in-character to both.
Trump bans select reports from coming to his events – ‘punishing’ them by not providing access. He openly mocks reporters, threatens, intimidates them. Wants to be able to sue reporters at will for ‘defamation’ – as if his character needs any more defaming we have not already heard about.
Clinton will not do any of that. But what does she do? She refuses to open herself up to unprepared questions from unstaged journalists – some, potentially, who might ask embarrassing questions designed to drive up her negatives.
Typical Trump, typical Clinton. She’s better than him, but then again, who wouldn’t be?…
presidents portray them as equivalent, when, as you say, they are not.
The Clinton campaign hasn’t threatened, encouraged its supporters to threaten, or, in fact, assault reporters.
Where did you get the idea that Clinton doesn’t answer unscripted questions?
…difference, meet the distinction…
If they’re not equivalent, but you spend the equivalent amount of time, effort and virtual ink kvetching about both of them, and damning the good for not being the perfect… are they not equivalent? In what meaningful way are they not equivalent if all you say is ‘a plague on both their houses’…?
They’re different all right, but she should have more room for improvement than Trump. Trump is hopeless.
…Does that make sense?
Reality is not relevant here – if a Republican and a Democrat are both doing something progressives disapprove of, it is primarily important to show why what the Republican does is worse. Somehow.
Must stink that reality tends to have a liberal bias!:)
the Republican candidate might do better never to speak to the media again.
The leader of the GOP and its nominee for President gave an interview to the NYT in which he says he wants to abrogate the North Atlantic Treaty.
I have a heck of a lot more respect for President Reagan and the first President Bush than, likely, do very many of the posters here. I cannot believe the degree to which that party has taken a giant steaming dump on their legacy over the last three days.
So much for “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Now its “Mr. Kohl, please pay the bill.”
The limited government, low taxes, strong defense and competent foreign policy GOP has now utterly ceased to be.