In defense of horse race politics
January 26, 2008
Everyone agrees that cable news sucks, and that the political coverage from CNN, et al. is laughably bad. Usually, people blame this on the media’s overemphasis on horse race coverage. I don’t think that’s right.
At least, I don’t object to horse race coverage. I like it. And I imagine that a significant percentage of people who follow politics as a hobby enjoy it too.
Give me the details! Will the Nader vote in Dane County cost Gore Wisconsin? Have the precincts from Long Island reported yet? What do the exit polls from upstate Nevada say? How much support does Huckabee get from Catholic voters?
I remember watching some election results a few years back, and Michael Barone was analyzing the results from Indiana on a ward-by-ward level. It was incredibly interesting stuff, even if Barone’s politics have taken a recent turn towards crazy town. If political coverage was like this, I would watch it more often.
The problem with much of the media’s political coverage — especially on cable news — is not that there’s too much horse race coverage. It’s that the horse race coverage is bad.
It’s so superficial and banal that it’s not useful or interesting to anyone who follows politics (and since the analysis is directed at, e.g., people who follow primary results as they come in, it’s a pretty good bet that no one finds it useful or interesting). Cable news analysis consists of predicting the future by making straight line projections from the present; and it consists of commentators trying to influence people’s opinions (*).
When Chris Matthews calls Senator Clinton a “she devil” (!) and a “strip-teaser”, “witchy”, and “not a convincing mom” (!!), he’s not doing fair and balanced political analysis. When he calls her “Nurse Ratched” or “Madame Defarge”, and calls her “unacceptable to Midwest guys” (who only support her if they are “castratos in a eunuch chorus”), he’s abandoned all pretense of objectivity, and is simply trying to get other people to dislike Clinton as much as he does.
This sort of thing is completely different from horse racing, or talking too much about polls, or over-analyzing the latest gaffe from a candidate, all of which is fine.
While it would be great if there was more coverage of, for example, the details of the candidates’ health care plans and energy initiatives, those things obviously can’t drive political coverage. Unless you’re Mitt Romney, you don’t have a new health care plan every day.
But there’s a right way and a wrong way to talk about polls, and politics, and campaign strategies, and the unimportant details of the latest news cycle. And I suspect that there’s a sizable market here for a news organization that’s willing to fill it.
(*) I’m talking about the regular news media. Fox News is in a class by itself, inasmuch as it exists first as a Republican propaganda machine, and only second as a purveyor of news and information.
January 29th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
I think CNN did some of that coverage during the NH primary. They were talking about rural NH vs the cities, and how they were not going to call the election until the college students in such and such a district had their votes in. During the coverage, I realized I know virtually nothing about the geography or people of NH, and I sort of got a kick out of learning that this ward is a classic Republican stronghold because it has such and such an industry. Well, I did….and now I’m sort of sad I can’t remember any of it.
January 30th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Yeah, that’s the good stuff. And the thing is, the people running the Washington bureaus and hosting cable news shows, are by and large knowledgable about politics. Even the much-maligned Chris Matthews occassionally veers into a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy about why Literary Digest predicted Alf Landon to win in1936, or something.
It’s just so infrequent, and mixed in with so much garbage, that I find myself never tuning in except for background noise on election night.