Fifth in a series
In the previous installments of we’ve considered various components of today’s practical politics, including election legitimacy, campaign inefficiency, voter uncertainty. But there’s one element that’s barely come up: the media. And there’s a reason for that: Namely, that the media don’t have that much to do with actually winning or losing elections. Don’t get me wrong: I fully understand that the media drenches everything, that this is the information age, and that everyone in politics is obsessed with spin, narrative, news cycle, and so on.
And yet as we can demonstrate, the media don’t really help win election campaigns. So by this reckoning, the media are superfluous. To which the immediate response could be, Of course the media don’t help win election campaigns. That’s not its job! And that’s a fair enough point, but it is our job win campaigns. So let’s pursue the point: Why shouldn’t the media helped us win? And if the current media don’t wish to help, okay. In which case, we probably need new media.
That is, a media that is consciously aware of the need to help our campaign. And if that’s not “media” as we think of it now—if it seems more like advertising, or p.r.—so be it. Our goal is to win, not to bow down to old visions and modes. So if we need some sort of new start-up, so be it. Yes, it’s the information age, but nobody said what kind of information it has to be, or who has to produce it. Campaigns can put forth their own information, aiming to help their candidate(s) win.
In the meantime, the extant media is perfectly free to do what it does. Even as, of course, the business model for much of it is faltering, amidst the glut of information in this, yes, information age.
The key point here is for campaigns to realize that the media are superfluous, and, in fact, often harmful. How so? Because the media tend to accentuate the negative. That is, reporters and pundits and social-media mavens are, more often than not, critics. Some might think of themselves as friendly critics—and a very few might even define themselves as cheerleaders—and yet very of them see themselves as actually part of any campaign. Indeed, on the right, the negativity is especially noticeable; the cutting edge of conservative media is, for the most part, profoundly hostile to Republican leadership. There’s simply not much media space for a right-wing journalist who says, “Go, Republicans!” Not much space and, in fact, much derision.
And of course, there’s no great need for a campaign to have them around, because the campaign is about winning elections, not about spewing content. That’s right: campaigns are about getting the most votes. That’s what’s intrinsic to a campaign, or at least it should be. By contrast, media coverage is extrinsic (even if the egos of the candidates and campaign domos thrill to coverage).
In the meantime, the sooner campaigns and parties wake up, the better. And one can, in fact, see stirrings. For instance, after a Fox News-hosted debate among the Republican presidential hopefuls, veteran anti-tax activist Grover Norquist wrote for The Daily Caller on August 27, “The debate ill-served the Republican party (and the nation) by failing to focus like a laser on the one important question: Which candidate is most likely to win a general election against Joe Biden or whoever the central committee of the Democrat party chooses when/if polls show Biden cannot win.” In a later comment to me, he added that the media—at least the media that purports to speak for and to the right “needs to be a self-aware participant in politics.”
There’s a phrase to ponder: self-aware. As in, consciously seek out the advancement of the Republican Party and conservative goals overall. But is that journalism? It would depend on who you ask. Most “journalists” would probably say “no.” Okay, fine, then they have made themselves extrinsic to the functioning of campaigns. So long as campaigns understand that, everyone can be happy. (Although again, the business model of most journalism is failing.)
In the meantime, others in the media are starting to fill the void. For instance, on October 4, The New York Times considered the impact of Steven Bannon and his “War Room” internet show: “He is a vital part of a feedback loop of red-meat media hits and social media posts, online fund-raising and unfettered preaching.” There we have it: Bannon as an activist, helping Republicans—at least the ones he likes. But is Bannon a journalist? Not by most people’s definition, that’s for sure. For those who like him, Bannon might be called an “activist,” or an “advocate,” or perhaps even a “player.” Or if they don’t like him, they might call Bannon a “rabble rouser,” a “demagogue”—and it gets worse from there. And yet it seems fair to say that if Bannon visibly sets out to move the needle on intra-Republican politics, he can. (Whether he can actually help Republicans defeat Democrats is iffier.)
The Old Models
Interestingly, the roots of political journalism in America are, well, Bannon-esque. That is, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, most journalistic outlets (newspapers) were frankly partisan in their outlook, oftentimes subsidized by one kind of partisan or another. That is, they came into existence as pamphlets of a kind; pushing a party line or label. (Former NBC News and Fox News reporter-anchor Eric Burns ably chronicled this history in his 2007 book, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism.)
Yet by the end of the 19th century, newspapers had mostly changed. They might still have favored one party or the other, but their business model shifted to mass circulation, often in hot competition with other newspapers. In this environment, what mattered was being entertaining, informing—and, one way or another, compelling. In the 20th century, these changing news values were augmented by two new factors; first, the progressive era, which put a new and high-minded premium on information and uplift; and second, with the coming of electronic media, the federal government stepped in to assure some sort of fair and careful take on the news (the FCC’s “fairness doctrine” began to take shape in 1941).
So as TV came to dominate media, these newer values came to dominate as well. The media might have been left-of-center, and yet it was for the most part at least somewhat veiled and subtle. Instead, what was most obvious was the growing “glamour” of TV news. That is, the news was made flashy and the reporters, at least some of them, became stars, big-name celebrities. This was a point made by Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic Ron Powers in his well-titled book from 1978, The Newscasters: The News Business as Show Business. As he wrote, “Anchormen, weathermen, and reporters all, each represented a radical discontinuity with journalistic tradition. Each was a curious hybrid of personal magnetism, looks, showmanship and—in some cases—newsman. Each, to the degree that he was successful, was a bigger audience ‘draw’ than the news he reported or read.”
To anyone of a certain age, this is familiar: National TV anchors such as Diane Sawyer, Jessica Savitch, and Arthur Kent became, well, sex symbols. And the same was true for local TV news, where hotties came to abound. In his book, Powers continued, “But the usurpation of television news reached a far deeper level than that of anchormen's personalities. It attained the status of a covert and insidious reversal of the very journalistic process itself. Instead of striving to impart information to the viewers, the salesmen-managers of television stations were engaged in a tacit conspiracy to extract information from the viewers—information that would serve the managers in their efforts to maximize audience size and thereby establish their respective newscasts as the top-dollar advertising draw in the market.”
We’re starting to see, here, that the news—including news-as-entertainment and news-as-titillation—was becoming a profit center. And the pursuit of profitability further mutated the news, as the quest for ratings resulted in bidding wars for talent. More from Powers: “What did people want (not need, but want) under the rubric of ‘news’? What pleased them most? Amused them? Gratified them, charmed them, or provided them with the sort of vicarious cheap thrills that kept them mesmerized during prime-time entertainment? What colors did they like? What faces, voices? Conversely, what did viewers not want to know? What sort of news displeased them, threatened them, bored them, impelled them to switch away from a disturbing confrontation with harsh reality and into the lulling glades of television torpor?”
Was the news still liberal? Sure. But idea that the news should be entertaining came first. So even after the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the news stayed focused on entertainment, including star power.
So can see: The media had come a long way since the time when newspaper were seen as arguments for, even propaganda for, one party or the other. That is, by the late 20th century, the media had become its own power center, and a huge power center at that—some would say, in fact, that media was as powerful, or even more powerful, than anything else. Perhaps so, and yet whatever its power rating, that’s not the same thing as aiding campaigns.
The coming of cable news changed this dynamic somewhat. That is, Fox went right and MSNBC went left, each taking a piece of the increasingly fragmented media market. And yet neither Fox nor MSNBC saw itself as a mouthpiece for the Republican or Democratic parties. In fact, the anchors were more typically ideological than the parties and the party leadership; talking heads preferred to make sharper and edgier points than the mainstreams of either party. Once again, the press/media should be free to conduct itself any way it wishes, but we’re seeing that the Fourth Estate isn’t necessarily helping candidates and their campaigns. Different function, different missions, different impacts.
Indeed, it can be argued that cable news, and niched ideological media overall, actually hurts the parties. That is, mainlining cable news makes most elections—that is, elections other than the presidency—boring. If the big contest, the one that gets the national attention, is the presidential election, then elections for lesser offices must matte less. Even an attuned voter might not know the names of the candidates, especially as one moves down the ballot.
Even worse, national campaigns, including media razzle-dazzle, might generate more heat that is actually needed. That is, to turn a turbine, water must rise to 212 degrees Fahrenheit to make steam—and then it’s best to stop there, heat-wise. Any more heat doesn’t turn the turbine any faster, it just causes trouble for the system. This, by the way, is a big problem with nuclear reactors; the temperature of the radioactive core is a couple thousand degrees, and so disposing of that excess heat is a systemic challenge that can break down and melt down. In political terms, too much heat can distort party primaries, rewarding extremists who are less likely to be electable in a general election. And our goal, of course, is to win the election with a rational, or at least amenable, pro-Framework candidate. For all these reasons, it behooves us to disintermediate the media from our GOTV operation. People, journalists, and pundits can do as they please, but our campaign wishes to build a tight relationship with actual voters; voters are the signal, the media are the noise. The pursuit of that clear-channel signal means direct candidate-to-voter contact. Which, of course, is cheaper than TV advertising.
OODA
Lots of things seem like good ideas in one era and like not-such-good-ideas in another era. And yet it’s oftentimes hard to see when some idea or practice or machine passes from optimum to sub-optimum. After all, the wave of the future doesn’t come with a label.
The challenge, in assessing events, is to achieve some degree of ecstasis. That’s the ancient Greek word that refers to the capacity to stand outside oneself. (And yes, ecstasis is the root of the word “ecstasy,” which has taken on different meanings than what Plato or Aristotle had in mind.)
So as a healthy exercise in self-assessment, one needs to step outside oneself. We might think on the question posed by Peter Drucker in his book from seven decades ago, The Effective Executive: “If we weren’t doing this now, would we start?” That is, is what we’re doing, whatever it is, such a good idea that we should keep doing it? To apply this Druckerian wisdom, we could ask ourselves: “If the media as it is today didn’t exist, would campaigns want to invent it?” More likely, campaigns would say to themselves, “Surely there’s a better way!” And so let’s start thinking of that better way.
To further illustrate the point about thinking anew, we might follow the mental tactic developed by the U.S. Air Force to help pilots decide on a course of action in real time: The OODA Loop. That is, Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. The idea being that each new moment in flying forces the pilot to consider the situation in the air, especially if it involves aerial combat. Am I in the right place? Am I at a disadvantage? Is my opponent at a disadvantage. Only a constant process of evaluation can maximize the pilot’s chances of survival, let alone victory. To be sure, it’s exhausting to be looking around all the time, questioning everything, but it’s the only way to survive.
So with Drucker and OODA in mind—and we considered Ockham’s Razor in the previous installment—let’s consider campaigns’ relationship with the media. What’s the goal here? The media, including the news media, have its goal: To entertain, including making the news entertaining. That’s all fine and good, but the goal of the campaign is different: The campaign wants to win elections. If the media can help that goal, fine. If the media can’t help, or if it hurts, then campaigns need to keep thinking.
This is not a slap at our friends in the Fourth Estate. It’s just an observation that as we focus on the core transaction of a campaign—the fundamental unit is the vote—we realize that we don’t need to focus on non-core transitions. The voter’s relationship with our candidate matters to us. The voter’s relationship to the media does not matter.
To restate that a bit, we can say that the voter’s non-granular relationship to the media does not matter. Pols can win an election without media, but they can’t win it without the most votes. If pols have the votes, they don’t need the media. Of course, some will insist that the media are vital to the electoral process. After all, they are delivering news, affecting opinion, carrying advertising. And yes, the media do all those gerunding things—delivering, affecting, carrying—and yet that doesn’t make them vital to a campaign. After all, it’s perfectly possibly to consume a lot of media and not vote—or to vote for the wrong party or candidate. You don’t need media any more to win elections. You just need to win elections.
So what if the media did want to help? Then it would be, as Grover Norquist suggests, a self-aware media. And that would be great for campaigns. A media that actually helps candidates win.
Next: Politicians' Unaccountability
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