The Harmful "Emptiness" of Political Reporting
Jamison Foser details how the Media, especially its political reporters, are simply incompetent. I especially like the Frederick of Dollywood red pickup story:
So when longtime lobbyist and Hollywood actor Fred Thompson -- a man who once rented a red pickup truck in order to campaign in Tennessee as a man of the people -- indicated this week that he would seek the Republican presidential nomination, we knew how the media would describe him: Authentic. Folksy.
Let's back up a moment: Thompson didn't even drive the rented pickup, as The Washington Monthly reported in 1996[.] . . . . The pickup was, literally, a rented prop designed to help a wealthy actor/Washington lobbyist/trial lawyer play the role of salt-of-the-earth populist. . . .
The point of the story is how the political Media will just swallow it all:
But Chris Matthews and the Beltway pundit crowd don't encounter many actual working-class voters as they stroll the dunes of Nantucket. A wealthy lobbyist/actor who rents a red pickup truck to play the role of a regular guy strikes them as "authentic" and "folksy." Mark Halperin wrote this week that Thompson won his first Senate race "after driving his trademark red pickup truck all over Tennessee."
But this is really the least of it. The Freak Show of political reporting would be less harmful if the political reporters actually knew something about the issues that they are supposed to be covering. Thus, Newt Gingrich is portrayed as a man of new ideas:
In a media landscape where nobody bothers to explain policies, all policies may be new, or they may be old, or they may be stolen, or unworkable, or brilliant. All that matters is the appended adjectives. Given that there aren't media protocols for routinely talking through the details and evaluating the worth of policy proposals, they exist entirely in terms of their throwaway descriptors, which are in turn functions of candidate narratives, atmospherics, the reporter's familiarity with the concepts at hand, etc. And because fairly few reporters are actually policy experts, it's sadly easy to construct a reputation for big thinking out of loud talking. Newt can spin old ideas into new ones because we have a media that doesn't much traffic in ideas, and thus doesn't know how to tell the difference. What they do know is that most candidates don't talk about policies, and Newt does, and that makes him different. That his policies are generally bad is, again, a level of analysis we rarely reach.
I would go further, WHETHER the policies even are coherent are questions our political Media does not even ask. The reason? They simply are incompetent and not very smart. People are quick to charge the Media with bias. I think that is wrong. Bias implies intention. The Media is not biased. It is incompetent. Political reporters are not qualified to report. They simply do not have the intellect, knowledge, predispostion or ability to actually report on substance.
Chris Matthews, et al. are not capable of reporting on actual substance. So they go to their "strengths" - Matt Drudge issues.
There is a reason he rules their world.
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