28 The Chris Cillizza Media: It Just Looks Bad
Originally published on 2/28/2018
UPDATE: In another chapter in newest manuscript I also discuss Ezra Klein-duplication issues…
UPDATE 2.0: This chapter is pretty tight-well put together, et al
There’s little question that the MSM coverage of the election was in the main horrible and this is part of a longer phenomenon .
What happened in 2016 was a culmination of a process of decay in media quality that had been going on for 25 years-yes, a process that largely correlated with the rise of Hillary Clinton.
Indeed, James Fallows had a book on the decay of the US mainstream media(MSM) back in 1996 called, appropriately enough Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy.
A journalist himself, Fallows knows where of he speaks. And he perceived the deterioration of the media in the early years. The media stopped seeing itself as an arbiter of truth and started seeing its role as an umpire for two squabbling partisans-the Democrats and the Republicans.
No doubt a major piece was the rise of Right wing media. Part of the victory of Right wing media was the cooption of the MSM.
Via false equivalence the media often spent as much time trying to convince Rush Limbaugh and friends it wasn’t liberal-to be sure the liberal media in the way that Rush intends it was always creative fiction-as it did trying to get the story right.
Whether a story is true or wether it’s ‘balanced’ are often two different things. Charlie Skyes-himself a former conservative talk show host-has documented the way in which the Right wing complex has come to oppose the truth itself.
But the Right has also damaged the MSM, via false equivalence. Breitbart-led by Steve Bannon in the 2016 cycle was very successful in setting the agenda for MSM- a glaring example was Dean Baquet NYT’s partnering off with Peter Schweitzer on Clinton Cash this was a homerun for Bannon and friends.
FN: Overall the media has done some things right in the last 34 months since Trump’s fake ‘win.’ But there is much they have stubbornly refused to learn or even discuss and no one has more stubbornly refused to learn anything than Dean Baquet-who’s Times was one of the worst offenders in 2016. As Jay Rosen notes for many of us liberals, the Washington Post is now the paper of record.
End of FN
After the third 2016 debate, Ezra Klein had a good piece on the way the media now conceives its job: not as telling the American people the truth but in sort of reflecting back the public’s own illusions.
Sort of like Keynes’ stock market where investors are not voting on the best picture but who they think the majority of other investors will think is the best picture. Or more like each investor is voting on what other investors will think other investors will think is the best picture.
This is how the media has handled it’s job in recent years: not in telling viewers/readers the truth but in reflecting their own impressions-often wrong impressions-back at them.
Ezra Klein used the example of the absurd things Trump said about trade at the start of the third debate. Much of the media was very impressed even though what Trump said about trade didn’t remotely add up in actual economic terms.
Here is the conventional wisdom about last night’s presidential debate, as I understand it. Hillary Clinton won in a rout, but that’s largely because Donald Trump flagged after an excellent first 30 minutes in which he hammered away at his strongest issue: trade.
“Donald Trump won the first 25 minutes of the first presidential debate,” writes Ross Douthat at the New York Times, in a representative piece. “He was too bullying and shout-y, too prone to interrupt, but he seized on an issue, trade, where Hillary Clinton was awkward and defensive, and he hammered away at his strongest campaign theme: linking his opponent to every establishment failure and disappointment, and trying to make her experience a liability rather than a strength.”
His colleague, Maggie Haberman, made much the same point. “Trump has a strong case to make on trade, when he makes it,” she tweeted. “He made it once and then chased shiny objects for most of the debate.”
“This is how it felt to me, too. Stylistically, this section was Trump’s best portion of the debate. He kept slamming Clinton on NAFTA — “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere” — and spoke with the confidence of a man who knew what he was talking about.”
“But he didn’t know what he was talking about.”
“What was stylistically Trump’s best portion of the debate was substantively among his worst (I say among his worst because it is hard to beat the section where he said he both would and would not honor the NATO treaty, and then said he both would and would not adhere to the first-strike doctrine on nuclear weapons). Trump was arguing the central economic theory of his campaign — and he was just wrong. In a section that began with him demanding solutions for our economic woes, he showed himself completely confused as to the nature of not just our economic problems but the underlying labor market.”
“The tone of his voice and the confidence of his delivery shouldn’t distract us from the hollowness of his remarks.”
Ideally, that’s the role you’d like to see the media fill: they should cut through the noise and give the people the facts. But they are very often themselves taken in by the noise.
During the entire campaign a lot of bad economic theory on trade was given and the media didn’t even attempt to do any analysis on it but they did feel that the American people were in a protectionist mood-though even here there weren’t clear poll numbers proving THAT.
FN: But this is a central contention of this book: the MSM is not so much about the facts and the truth as its narrative. Facts and the truth are only compelling to them to the extent that they seem to confirm their narrative-and the narrative is selected on the totally scientific basis of what they feel makes them sound savvy-as Jay Rosen explains.
NAFTA in particular was seen as a dirty word. Yet as Klein documented the truth is a little more complex than that.
To Trump, NAFTA is some kind of original economic sin — a core cause of our current economic troubles. So let’s talk about NAFTA.
“Economists disagree as to the exact effects of the treaty, but virtually every paper published on the subject finds the effect on the American economy was small. A review of 11 econometric studies of NAFTA finds effects ranging from a modest reduction in wage growth for blue-collar workers to a 0.17 percent increase in overall American wages.”
A separate overview of the evidence from the Congressional Research Service concluded that NAFTA “slightly increased growth in output and productivity” and “had little or no impact on aggregate employment.”
On some level, all this is obvious. NAFTA was enacted in January 1994 — a few years before one of the strongest economies in American history. It would be foolish to credit NAFTA with the ’90s economic boom, but it is yet more foolish to pretend NAFTA devastated the American economy given the fact that unemployment fell from 6.6 percent in January 1994 to 4.0 percent in January 2000.
Klein then shows how the idea that the problem with the US economy is a loss of manufacturing jobs is simply dead wrong.
“Trump’s efforts to connect his trade-first theory of the American economy to the present day failed perhaps more obviously. In the first question, he was asked how he would raise the wages of American workers. His response is worth quoting at some length:
Our jobs are fleeing the country. They’re going to Mexico. They’re going to many other countries. You look at what China is doing to our country in terms of making our product. They’re devaluing their currency, and there’s nobody in our government to fight them. And we have a very good fight. And we have a winning fight. Because they’re using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China, and many other countries are doing the same thing.
So we’re losing our good jobs, so many of them. When you look at what’s happening in Mexico, a friend of mine who builds plants said it’s the eighth wonder of the world. They’re building some of the biggest plants anywhere in the world, some of the most sophisticated, some of the best plants. With the United States, as he said, not so much.
“It’s a simple fact that none of this is true. Jobs aren’t fleeing the United States. August marked the 78th straight month in which the US economy added jobs — we’re in the single longest streak of private sector job growth in American history. China isn’t devaluing its currency — in fact, it’s propping it up to stop investors from fleeing the country. The biggest plant in the world is being built by Tesla in Fremont, California, and the existing biggest plant in the world is a Boeing factory in Washington state.”
“And these are just the narrow facts that Trump got wrong. He also seems confused about the basic structure of the US economy, and that’s led him to focus on the wrong issues entirely. “You would never know from Trump’s discourse that the vast majority of Americans work in jobs related to domestic service provision,” wrote Vox’s Matthew Yglesias. “They work in hospitals and restaurants and schools and stores working with nearby customers, not internationally traded manufacturing.”
“If you believe the American economy is broken, you’re simply not going to fix it with trade deals. Trump’s promise to bring the jobs “back” is all the more hollow because he doesn’t seem to know where they are.”
While this is another point, this points to something I’ve argued a lot: that while Hillary has been accused of not talking about the economy or not talking about it in a way that inspired people the central fact is that she was much closer to the truth on what ails our economy than Trump OR Bernie.
Bernie-while more refined than Trump in his version of protectionism-still said false things like ‘We have to bring back manufacturing.’
But manufacturing is here: the sector has never been stronger. It’s just much less labor intensive than it used to be.
Hillary alone understood that the fundamental problem with our economy in recent years has not been trade deals but automation.
To digress, this is why I-as a candidate for Congress-am running on a new New Deal which will bring workplace protections and regulations into the 21st century.
FN: I was but I dropped out soon after that.
But so much for economic illiteracy. The larger point vis a vis the media, is it’s approach to the news: like a Keynesian beauty pageant where they try to guess what people at home are thinking rather than try to get people the truth as best as it can be ascertained.
Back to Klein. He touches on the fundamental problem: the media’s own subjective understanding of its role. The media likes to think ‘we just report the news.’ But they don’t just report it they also shape it in terms of what stories get the most coverage and the nature of that coverage:
“There’s a deep tension in the way the media judges presidential debates. On the one hand, we know that our coverage affects the public’s ultimate view of the event — in that way, we are key participants in the debate, not merely observers of it.”
“But that knowledge is uncomfortable. It’s not the role we are meant to play. The press wants to reflect reality, not shape it.”
“And so we attempt, peculiarly, to recast ourselves as observers of voter reactions we can’t observe. We judge the debate based not on what we think to be true about it but on what we think the public will think to be true about it. And so we end up asking not whether the candidates made good arguments given what we know to be true but whether they made good arguments given what we imagine voters know to be true. And once you’re in that mindset, a section where Trump sounded good can be a win even if nothing he said made sense — after all, fairly few voters are trade policy or labor market experts.”
“But the public isn’t relying on us to tell them what we thought they thought watching the debate. They’re relying on us to tell them what we found when we compared the candidates’ answers to reality, and to the best analysis on offer from experts, so they can make a better-informed judgment on what actually happened in the debate. And sometimes there’s a very big gap between how good a candidate’s answers sounded and how good his or her answers actually were.”
“That’s the case for Trump’s opening section last night. He was speaking on the issues where he’s supposed to be strongest — his whole pitch is he’s a businessman who knows how the economy really works and what is really needed to fix it — and he showed he didn’t have any real idea what he was talking about. Voters deserve to know that.”
During the election I had this argument with a number of media folks on Twitter. Regarding the emails they’d fire back ‘Surely we have to report that Comey reopened the email investigation.’
Of course-Comey didn’t reopen it just suggested he MAY-or may not-reopen it.
But this is a cheap deflection. One story on page A25 in the NYTimes would count as ‘reporting a story.’
But. of course, this was not what the NYTimes did.
They didn’t report Emailgate they obsessed over it. Indeed, there is on comparison between what they did after Comey’s maybe maybe not reopening of the email probe and any story about Trump and Russia. There is no story about Trump that has ever reached this level of saturation.
UPDATE: Of course, we since learned it’s much worse than that as Baqeut ruined what should have been a big scoop by Eric Litchau three days after the Comey Letter freakout. Instead Baquet’s ‘tweak’ changed the entire meaning of the story to ‘anti Clinton FBI agents assure us there’s no there there between Trump and Russia.’
End of UPDATE
And the sick thing is they would trumpet the polls showing people didn’t trust Hillary Clinton without ever even admitting to themselves: we built that.
After all, she was very popular as Secretary of State. Chuck Todd himself-as we documented in an earlier chapter-had said ‘I don’t think the public has Clinton fatigue, I do think the media does…’
Yet the media would act as if the public not trusting her was some sort of self evident fact about the Universe rather than something they themselves did so much to foment.
Like Chris Cillizza-who had posted 50 stories about the email server by September, 2015-they prefer to sit back and feign innocence: we’re just the stenographers.
FN: Or was it 60 stories?
And that email server, you know, there may not be anything there but it just looks bad.
I pick on Cillizza as he’s almost the perfect archetype of Krugman’s Very Serious Media. Even among conventional minds his mind is exceptional in how conventional it is.
Here he had a very interesting discussion with Norm Ornstein-talk about a contrast in styles.
Norm Ornstein:
“I think the coverage of Clinton has been stupid — an obsessive focus on press conferences, on the Clinton Foundation, on emails, the latter legitimate stories but way overdone, with almost nothing on her major policy proposals. There, it is the Times and AP, who are the serious actors. But I am complaining less about the coverage of Clinton and more about the type of coverage given to Trump. I do not believe he has been treated as a serious candidate, or held to serious standards. That includes the people around him, like [Stephen] Bannon and [Roger] Ailes. [Wednesday] was a prime example of Pavlovian behavior by journalists, jumping at his health reporting machinations, and taking too seriously a snake oil salesman like Oz (see Chris Wallace’s comments, as an example).
What’s amazing is that post election there are some who have actually tried to accuse her of not talking about issues. But during the campaign you heard things like this:
Ornstein is also right about Trump-his biggest asset was precisely because the media DIDN’T take him seriously. As he wasn’t going to be President anyway, why focus on Trump U, or the tax returns, or sexual assault-or Russia?
In any case Cillizza defended this focus on anything but her actual policy issues.
“You argue that the coverage has been “stupid” because it has focused more on her emails and the Clinton Foundation than on policy proposals. But isn’t that your own view of what people care about when they vote? That they necessarily prize policy and issue positions over resume and what each of the candidates have said and done in the past?”
“I’m a big believer that the key to covering the presidential campaign is to have a goal of showing voters who the people running for the highest office in the country actually are — beyond the talking points, beyond the prepackaged policy proposals. (I’m of the Richard Ben Cramer school on that one.) To me, how a candidate has acted in the past — particularly when fewer people were looking at them — or how they think on their feet when questioned by the media are essential to understanding who these people really are. Therefore, covering some of the things you describe as stupid strikes me as far more important as a window into how she thinks, how she acts and who she is.”
Well clearly the focus on emails was important in sussing out what a future Hillary vs. Trump Administration would look like. Oh wait:
“At least six of President Trump’s closest advisers occasionally used private email addresses to discuss White House matters, current and former officials said on Monday.”
Oops.
Ornstein’s response to Cillizza:
“You are suggesting that your coverage — and I use “your” to mean more than Cillizza and more than the WaPo — is driven by what people care about when they vote. I am not sure at all that that should be the standard for press coverage of a presidential campaign, but how do you measure that? Does [WaPo editor] Marty Baron or [NYT editor] Dean Baquet do a survey of what people care about, and assign reporters based on that? I doubt it, and I don’t think anybody would accept that.”
That’s the other thing-the media tries to base their focus on what they think voters care about but it’s not clear what their assumptions on what voters care about comes from.
FN: Rosen has some proposals on how the media can actually find out what voters do care about-rather than simply creating a self fulfilling narrative like Cillizza and Friends and assuming this is what voters probably do care about.
“You and your colleagues make value judgments about what you want to cover, based often on the stories’ importance (see “Spotlight“) but also what brings readers and eyeballs and clicks, and what brings recognition and prizes, and on gut judgments. The coverage of Clinton emails and the Foundation, measured not just in number of stories but in placement, allocation of resources and column inches (again, not WaPo) and in lead stories, minutes on air, is in my view over the top. And the fact that many stories have been wrong, in some cases because of a reliance on leaks from Republican staffers and members of the Benghazi Committee, or a rip and read of a Judicial Watch press release, makes it much worse.”
There is, I would suggest, something circular in your defense — this is what people want, she is viewed as untrustworthy, but could it be that a significant part of the reason she is viewed so negatively is the overwhelming ratio and prominence of the email and Foundation coverage relative to everything else — and the fact that many stories that have been front page above the fold with pages inside have as their conclusion “questions are raised.” That is not to whitewash or defend Clinton’s secrecy, parsing of language, hostility to the press. But imagine if there had been comparable coverage of George W. Bush’s White House using a private server and erasing hundreds of thousands of emails including sensitive ones about the Justice Department and voter suppression. What would be the relative standing of Bush in its aftermath? And keep in mind that Clinton had a high approval rating when she was in office, and has seen it drop sharply when she is a candidate. The coverage is a part of that. Of course, these are stories to cover. But the question is how much and how much emphasis relative to other things, given the finite and limited bandwidth given to each candidate and campaign. All send signals to voters, and I see the balance seriously off here. Your obligation as the fourth estate, I believe, is to report the facts and explore stories that can shed light on how the two presidential candidates would govern.”
Back to Cillizza:
I take your point. I guess I would argue that writing and reporting about what Clinton did as secretary of state and since she left office IS a good indicator — perhaps the best indicator — of how she would govern. At the heart of governance is judgment. At the end of the day, your judgment going into office matters a whole heck of a lot more than what your policy proposals are. Why? Because so much of being president is having to make calls on things that you had no idea might be put on your plate when you were running for the office. Policy proposals are great. But they aren’t terribly instructive — at least to me — on how and what a candidate will do as president.
I fundamentally disagree with the idea that Trump has received a different sort — and a better sort — of coverage. I actually think some elements of the media have been overly critical of Trump because they cannot believe that someone with Trump’s views — and approach — has become one of the two party nominees. There is a disdain and a dismissiveness bordering on elitism in some parts of the media directed toward Trump.
Trump was treated so unfair. After all the media talked incessantly about Russia and the NYT’s dismissed the email story. Oh wait.
But fundamentally Cillizza is exactly wrong that policy doesn’t tell you what someone will be like in office. It’s the best indicator as we can clearly see during the Trump era.
Cillizza’s idea that during 2016 policy didn’t matter that what matters is an email server is a classic example of the meme ‘that didn’t age ell.’
The idea that judgment matters more than policy is ironic as Trump has terrible judgement and zero knowledge of policy.
And it’s not clear why Cillizza and friends saw Clinton’s server as the main point to analyze her judgment-as use of private email by public officials is the rule not the exception. As Ornstein says this defense of the Emailgate obsession was terribly week-tough for Cillizza to hear as he wrote more about the emails than the anyone in the country.
“Chris, I hate to say it, but I find your response incredibly weak. Yes, her performance as secretary of state is a good, perhaps the best, indicator of how she would govern. And somehow, you and your colleagues in the media have decided that the emails and the Clinton Foundation are the be-all and end-all of her judgment and the indication of how she would govern. Not how she ran the State Department, how she structured and dealt with the team of people around her, how she interacted with the president, the secretar(ies) of defense, the national security advisers, the DNI, etc. Not what she accomplished and did not accomplish. Not her judgments on policy or other leaders. I should add, not all of those stories would be flattering or laudatory. I don’t have the time or resources to count up the column inches since the nominations were decided that have been devoted to email and the Foundation, compared to the other issues above, but I would wager the ratio is, as they say, huge. The Post has been better than its competitors, but as I recall, even you, for example, bit on the ridiculous AP story making something sinister out of the meeting with Mohammed Yunus. The need to go on the Web immediately, the new world of traditional print journalism, has its own pathologies built into it.
The Post was better than the Times for sure, and late in the game, in September, 2016, WaPo’s editorial page actually called Emailgate what it was-a minor email scandal-though Cillizza was the outlier, again, he wrote more about the damn emails than anyone.
FN: Since Cillizza left WaPo the average quality of their product has risen even higher and by a good amount-he was bringing it down.
But Ornstein’s larger point is correct: the media’s Emailgate obsession was simply obscene.
Studies agree: Media gorged on Hillary Clinton email coverage.”
But what’s just as curious is post election there’s been nary a word about the emails. As much as the Beltway was email obsessed prior to the election the silence about it since the elections is deafening-as is the lack of focus on Comeygate-as noted in (Chapter A) you can count on one hand the number of stories on Comeygate-and all three of them came in the period just before or after Trump fired Comey.