USA: Media Cynicism Is Behind the Hatred of Politicians (Pressens Tidning, 1994)

Published in in 1994 in Pressens Tidning (a Swedish newspaper trade paper)

Clinton's problems with the press are just one example of how ruthlessly the US media treats its politicians.  But the media goes too far and contributes to the growing contempt for politicians, says Thomas E. Patterson, a media researcher at Syracuse University in New York State.

The autumn election campaign in the US was characterized by cynicism, excesses, and large buckets of populism. Radio, newspapers, and television were filled with sports style news and reports of the public's growing dissatisfaction with their politicians and Clinton in particular. Now hatred of politicians is nothing new in American politics, nor is the mutual distrust between the press and politicians. But several leading journalists and media scholars have recently spoken out to criticize the widespread cynicism among journalists. They have also pointed to the media's responsibility - or rather lack of responsibility - for what they serve to the public.

"If we describe the world from a cynical perspective and assume that everyone is Machiavellian, driven by self-interest, we invite readers and viewers to reject journalism as a form of communication, because it must also be cynical," mass media scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson told the New York Times (October 9, 1994).

Perhaps the sharpest criticism of the mass media's political coverage comes from Thomas E. Patterson, who last year published the book Out of Order - An Incisive and Boldly Original Critique of the News Media's Domination of Americas Political Process (Vintage Books, 1994).

According to him, the US media play a unique role in organizing the election campaign, but it is a role for which they are not suited.

Paradoxically, giving the media such a central role was an attempt to get away from the previous domination of bosses in American politics. The democratization of the nomination process meant that candidates had to address voters directly at an early stage, with the media taking over the kingmaker role of the increasingly weakened political parties.

But the news media's focus on the negative, on crises and disasters, and its search for excitement and drama makes it a poor tool for building coalitions and conveying complex messages. Maintaining public interest during the more than year-long campaign is also not an easy task. You can only write about the candidates' programs so many times before people get bored.

The media have therefore chosen to describe politics as a horse race, where the content is reduced to a tactical game to come first. This perspective is attractive to journalists, as news can always be found about who did what and how his/her chances are affected by this. But it also contributes to the blurring of politics and public frustration.

"It is the negative news that is valued in journalism and the worse the revelation, the better the reporter's reputation," says Patterson.

"News coverage was 60 percent negative during Clinton's first 18 months in office," he says. (The corresponding figure for George Bush was 51 percent, my note HS).

"There are those who say that it's because of Clinton, that he hasn't done anything, or hasn't stuck to his guns and so on, but if we compare what he promised to do during his campaign with what he has done, we can see that he has done quite well. Last year he won 88% of the vote in Congress, which was the best figure since 1965 when Lyndon Johnson was president. Reagan had a year when it was over 80%. Neither Nixon, Ford, Carter nor Bush reached over 80 percent. "Political reporting, however, ignores such facts and focuses on a few issues on which Clinton blundered," says Patterson, who argues that it is a misconception that politicians make promises they cannot or will not keep. In his book, he argued that, on the contrary, they usually do their utmost to fulfill their election promises."

“The Whitewater scandal is an example of digging up relatively small things and blowing them out of proportion. I see this as a manifestation of today's journalism. Reporters are driven to produce the kind of dramatic stories that hurt politicians.”

Thomas Patterson also attributes the shortcomings of today's political journalism to Watergate and the Vietnam War. Journalism became increasingly aggressive, and the healthy skepticism was replaced by a professional cynicism, an "adversarial culture".

“The press isolated itself and came to identify with ‘the other side.’ It came to define itself negatively.”

To put it crudely, the recipe for a successful political shotgun journalist in the 1990s could be summarized as follows: It's all a game, it's all a scam, they're all egoists and I'm going to expose them!

One might expect journalists to be equally critical of their own institution, but this has not been the case, says Patterson.

"The self-criticism is extremely mild and, like other groups such as doctors and lawyers, they do not want any transparency in their activities. It is an irresponsible elite, with insufficient tools for feedback. It is possible to vote out a politician we don't like, but what does the public do when it gets angry with the press?”

Many reports have highlighted public skepticism about the media. Most recently, an independent media think tank called Freedom Forum, in its report 'Politicians and the News Media', said that public trust is declining in both the media and politicians. They are perceived as children of the same spirit: just like politicians, they are only after power and money.

It's not surprising that this perception is common, given that television's star reporters earn up to $6 million a year, in addition to taking $20,000 to $30,000 every time they hold an event. (David Gergen, the Republican who switched sides and became Clinton's press advisor, earned $466,625 in 1992 as a speaker alone.)

It was television that turned top journalists into celebrities, which in turn led them to increasingly put themselves and their opinions at the center of the story.

“Journalists have, perhaps unintentionally but not unwillingly, gained more and more power over the election campaign. For every minute a candidate was allowed to speak on the evening news during the 1988 and 1992 campaigns, journalists spoke for six minutes," says Patterson.

That's why Clinton relied heavily on talk shows during the 1992 campaign, which of course raised the ire of many political journalists.

"It turned out that the public who attended these shows were interested in completely different things than the journalists. They were more interested in factual issues than the possible sexual affairs of politicians.”

But this is not an all-weather solution.

“Public town-meetings with the president work better when the president's popularity is high than when it is low. People are less likely to watch them, and the audience's questions tend to be more hostile. For example, Clinton tried to turn the health care debate around in the final stages via CNN, but it didn't work," he says.

The most common defense of the media against criticism is that they are just doing their job. They have no choice but to continue as before.

“The only people who believe that are the journalists themselves. I do not believe for a moment that the news is only a reflection of reality. That argument doesn't hold water. There is certainly much more public concern and anger today and there is nothing wrong with reflecting that. Politicians themselves also bear some of the blame, but the press tries to evade its responsibility by saying that we only report on what politicians do.”

Thomas Patterson suggested in 'Out of Order' that the election campaign should be radically shortened to allow coverage to focus on the issues and better present the candidates' policies. But the chances of such a reform passing are not too high.

"I am quite pessimistic in general about the media. There are some newspapers that are experimenting with more responsible journalism, but these are just undercurrents," says Patterson, whose next project is a comparative study of the press in five countries, including Sweden.

By Hans Sandberg