Journalists aren't potted plants
by digby
Nate Silver had an interesting piece today warning that we shouldn't take all the breathless coverage of various "game changing" events in campaigns too seriously. He goes back to the dullest race in my lifetime, the 1996 GOP primary, and shows some of the ludicrous reporting that made it seem as if something interesting was actually happening when it clearly was not. His point is that people should keep their wits about them and not get ahead of themselves.
I thought this was particularly revealing though:
The other big difference between the general election and primaries is that polls are not very reliable in the primaries. They improve as you get closer to the election, although only up to a point. But they have little meaning now, five months before the first states vote.
It’s not only that the polls have a poor predictive track record — at this point in the past four competitive races, the leaders in national polls were Joe Lieberman, Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton and Rick Perry, none of whom won the nomination — but also that they don’t have a lot of intrinsic meaning. At this point, the polls you see reported on are surveying broad groups of Republican- or Democratic-leaning adults who are relatively unlikely to actually vote in the primaries and caucuses and who haven’t been paying all that much attention to the campaigns. The ones who eventually do vote will have been subjected to hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of advertising, had their door knocked on several times, and seen a half-dozen more debates. The ballots they see may not resemble the one the pollsters are testing since it’s likely that (at least on the GOP side) several of the candidates will have dropped out by the time their state votes.
Some reporters object to this by saying that the polls are meaningful to the extent that they influence the behavior of the campaigns: If Joe Biden enters the race because he reads the polls as indicating that Clinton is vulnerable, that could matter, for instance.
So reporters defend the breathless reporting of meaningless polls because their breathless meaningless reporting influences the behavior of campaigns, which they then dutifully report. Breathlessly. Can we see the problem here?
I think people sense the press puts its thumbs on the scale in a number of different ways in campaign coverage. They even admit it, as when USA Today's Susan Page told Chuck Todd that journalists were yearning for a Joe Biden candidacy. Now it may be that they don't have an ideological agenda but rather a bias toward drama, but the effect is the same. (And frankly, I do believe a sort of negative or positive group-think takes hold in the media that also tilts the playing field.)
The point is that what the press chooses to report is just as important as the reporting itself. If they knowingly publish or broadcast information they know is suspect and they also know that it influences the way campaigns are forced to deal with this suspect information, they are knowingly influencing our politics in a direction it would not necessarily go if the coverage, which they admit is suspect, was different.
They have agency in this --- they are not potted plants. These polls can be presented in context and the analysis that flows from these polls can be presented in context. They can choose not to run screaming headlines about campaigns being in "free fall" or talking about dumb things like word clouds all day on cable as if they mean something real. The coverage is not some abstract thing that has a life of its own.
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