A good article from the New York Times attempts to explain this absurd process of presidential candidates-in-the-making first pre-announcing, then officially announcing and then otherwise making news about their declared candidacies.
The obvious answer: The politicians do it because the media eat it up. Great opportunities at free publicity for lesser-known candidates and even more of the same for people like John McCain and Barack Obama.
Here’s the part that bothers me, though: This article’s reporter spoke to Elizabeth Wilner, the political director for NBC, presumably overseeing all of the network’s (and MSNBC’s, too, maybe) news coverage of anything related to these candidates.
From the article:
“Candidates stretch out the announcements because they can,” [Wilner] said.
Twenty-four-hour cable and Internet saturation, Ms. Wilner said, “means there will always be someone waiting to report on every infinitesimal word change relating to their candidate status.”
Just because it’s easy to get a story out of each and every little hiccup about an “exploratory committee” and each time Senator Clinton says a word that rhymes with “candidacy,” that doesn’t mean these news outlets should be reporting on it. And let’s stamp out one of the arguments in their defense right now: Raise your hand if you give a shit about Sam Brownback’s exploratory committee. Anyone? Bueller?
When a candidate hold a press conference or some other event to say, in front of an audience of people who care, then let the cable news anchors ask their “political analysts” about the significance of this announcement. When Evan Bayh forms an exploratory committee, leave that for page A12 of the newspapers — it sure as hell doesn’t warrant the amount of coverage things like this have been getting lately. (The Times article reminds us that Bayh formed an exploratory committee in December, “only to announce a few weeks later that he was not running.”)
News folk: Just because you can get a few minutes or a few hundred words out of something, doesn’t mean you should. For those of you who went to journalism school — or just plain know how to do your job well — you should understand that a big part of your job is news judgement. Figure out what’s important, and tell the people what happened and why it’s worthy of their time to listen to or read about.
On a similar note, I’m sick to death of hearing about Anna Nicole Smith. Some brilliant son of a bitch on MSNBC today — I wish I could remember who — put it best: An MSNBC anchor (who was all too willing to head into “Casual Land” and jump right over the wall separating journalism’s church from its state) asked this guy if the news media are paying too much attention to the Anna Nicole Smith story. After all, she said, the media are supposed to serve the public interest and so on, but really, “we’re a business, too.”
This guy — god bless him — says (and I quote from memory, so excuse slight inaccuracies), “I’m not just saying this because I work for MSNBC but because I believe it’s true. It’s easy to report all day about Anna Nicole Smith and try to justify it by pointing to our competitors, saying ‘they’re doing it, too!’ But we’re better than that. We should be doing what’s right, not what’s easy.”
I want to find out who this guy was and…mail him a Best Buy gift card or something. Seriously. Well done, hombre.
Tags: journalism, politics by Mike Keliher
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