Here’s a nice story about how the flacks seduce coverage.
May require free registration, be warned.
God knows I’ve gone for it time and again. Every industry does it.
Why do news outlets cover candidates? So their customers can now the stances of people who might become president. Sharpton, Kucinich, and Moseley-Braun have as much chance at the presidency as I do. So why should any news agency waste valuable resources covering vanity candidates when they could be using those resources to cover viable candidates? At the debates Koppel knows that 1/3 of the time will be given to candidates who have no chance at the nomination, so why should he ignore that and pretend that Kucinich has any realistic shot at the nomination? Every moment that is devoted to Kucinich is one taken away from Dean or Clark.
I just hope Grllnz is to young too vote.
I respectfully disagree.
I would rather a paper endorse a candidate than pretend to be neutral.
That way I can cast a jaundiced eye at all stories about the endorsee being able to cure the lame with a touch, single-handedly eliminate crime and poverty as we know it, and prove String Theory using nothing but Legos and a rubber band.
Conversely, all stories about the Noble Opposition (he smokes crack, you know…) producing Mexican snuff films, being a houseguest in Sadaam’s spidey-hole, and slipping tongue while kissing babies will be taken with a grain of salt (which he probably wants to raise taxes on…)
Thanks to everybody for clarifying my positions in the OP. I never meant to suggest that there was a monolithic media conspiracy to underreport certain candidates, just that the media does influence who people hear about, and they generally don’t report on the candidates’ stances on the issues.
But the larger question is, who are they to decide who is an “electable” candidate vs. who is “unelectable” before a single primary has been held? The fact that Dean (a “liberal” high-profile Democrat) is polling so much better than Leiberman (a “centrist” even more high-profile Democrat) seems to suggest that the Democratic voters are seeking a liberal candidate. So, polled on the issues rather than simply name recognition, I bet Kucinich’s platform would find a lot more supporters than the polls now would suggest. So what determines who is electable?
Is it just money?
Not at all.
It’s some mixture of public interest, good flacks, money (admittedly), and the personal leanings of the respective news ‘gatekeepers’.
Mix those together liberally (HAH!) and simmer for a while.
Then give the people what they seem to want…a good story.
The simple fact is that Dean defined himself as the ‘outsider’ better than Kucinich ever could and that pushed Kucinich to the ‘unelectable’ margins.
Last summer I saw Larouche workers campaigning for him… in a small town in Quebec.
When last I looked, the Quebequois are not eligible to vote in American elections…
Well, at some point they have to draw the line. Take the CA recall governor’s race last summer. Were they supposed to give print/air time to all 135 registered candidates? If the media gave a mouthpiece to everyone declaring themselves, we’d see hundreds of nutcases looking for their time at the mike.
Dean had hardly any money at the start, but he sold himself well and was interesting.
Ask yourself the same questions in regard to the general elections. Should the media give Nader the same coverage they give the big parties? Harry Browne? Bo Gritz and John Hagelin?
On the one hand, they deserve repect as for-real candidates. (I voted for one) … on the other hand, it would cast doubt on a newspaper’s credibility if they spent as much time on the Natural Law part as on the Democrats.
Actually, it’s the polls that do, to a large extent, decide. And the sort of funny thing is that, in general, I think a good random poll is actually a MORE accurate guage of public sentiment than is an election. If I were writing the constitution, I actually would be sort of indifferent between actually having people come and cast votes, vs. simply randomly polling people. In fact, polling would be better in a lot of ways, but it would capture everyone, rather than just those who get the chance to vote, and we wouldn’t have to worry about widespread and dispersed fraud and mistakes: only the scientific validity of the one single polling effort. I think it’s mostly only people’s misunderstanding of how statistics works that would bias them against this method.
No, it’s not. Part of the responsibility of the media, traditionally the print media, is for the editorial board – which is in most papers totally divorced from the day to day reporting journalists – to assess and recommend to its readership the best candidates running in an election.
People read editorials and think that the paper is “biased” towards A in its reporting because its editorial board took a position on A. But in any moderately large paper the staff of the editorial board and the beat-level and desk reporters are not the same people, and probably only cursorily know each other. Often the editor in chief isn’t even a member of his paper’s editorial board.
The Editorial Board of a newspaper isn’t like the guy sitting down the bar from you – they debate their endorsements carefully, and base them on the whole shape of the campaign – a shape that most people don’t see, because they’re too busy, but journalists do, because that’s their job. Though sometimes corporate owners pressure boards to endorse the owner’s preferred candidate, generally what you see in an endorsement editorial is an informed, carefully articulated reason from a group of persons not part of either campaign discussing why Person A deserves to be elected.
And that’s an invaluable resource to any body politic. Particularly in modern times, when readers can easily compare endorsement editorials from across the nation. Judicial leaning on informed endorsement editorials could allow a voter whose a week before didn’t even know the names of the candidates to make an informed decision at the polls.
Does anyone know if he really said this? I think it’s probably a legend. In any case, Jonathan Chance, something William Randolph Hearst said more than a century ago doesn’t have a lot of bearing on today’s media. Very different time, and there isn’t really anyone like him now.
I’d love to hear an explanation for this. Exit polling worked badly, but there are about half a dozen things I’d blame for this more than “the media.”
We already talked about that. Do you think that someone who’s last in the polls is suddenly going to win contrary to all odds? The reason polls are done randomly and often is to make sure they’re more accurate. The media didn’t decide Kucinich couldn’t win. The people did.
That might be a little too simple. I think voters choose specific issues, not who is more liberal than whom. Dean and Kucinich disagree about many things even though they’re both “liberals.”
How many pro-life Democrats do you think there are?
Quite a few, but most of them wouldn’t vote for the likes of Kucinich, and are probably supporting Gephardt or Lieberman.
And I’d like to point out that it wasn’t me who introduced Hearst to the equation (even though I dig the quote). I never mentioned him in any context. Chicago Faucet brought him up.
Though I do believe it’s true that perception of candidates can be influenced via the media. And the gatekeepers there can do a certain amount of make-or-break (though the total effect is usually overestimated).
- Why would polling be any more safe from violations and fraud than voting? If anything, it’s less so, being as there are moe people involved.
- What if the statistical sampling is screwed up? Some math whiz overestimates the number of seniors, latinos, males, whatever, and we get a skewed result. Nearly every census leads to surprises – the actual numbers come out different than the demographers thought they would.
- Most important of all, legitimacy. Think how often you hear people say “Well, I didn’t vote for X, so don’t blame me.” As it stands, most of the people can’t say that: either you voted for the guy who won, or you didn’t bother to vote, for which you blame yourself. You’re suggesting a situation in which the majority of people would never be given the oppportunity to cast their vote – maybe never in their lives – but would just be told by “experts” who they would have chosen. Are they supposed to accept that this is somehow “their” government?
Sorry, Jonathan Chance. Chicago Faucet’s post was right above yours.
Three points. First, the fact that Dean is outpolling Lieberman does not mean that Democratic voters are seeking a liberal candidate. Not that the current polls mean much in the long run, but if you were to group the candidates as “liberal” (Dean, Sharpton, Moseley-Braun, Kucinich, Gephardt) and as “centrist” (the rest), the current Democratic preference is (slightly) for a centrist candidate.
Second, sadly enough, the voters in Democratic primaries are not representative of the nation as a whole. Thus, even if the Democratic primary voters clearly want a liberal candidate, that does not mean said candidate will be electable in the general election.
As to who are the media to decide who is electable and who is not electable, they are (a) entitled to their opinion, particularly where (b) their opinion is based on solid historical trends - to wit, the further left a Democratic presidential candidate runs in the general election, the more solidly he is trounced.
Third,
This does not follow. Approval of a platform and approval of a candidate are not the same thing. So, while Kucinich’s platform might get more supporters, that does not mean that Kucinich will get more supporters.
To be hyperbolic, if Charles Manson ran for office on a platform that agreed to the last decimal place with my positions on the issues, I would still not vote for him. OTOH, I will vote for a candidate I think will do a good job, even if I agree with his/her position on only a little more than 1/2 the issues.
Sua