Yellowest of yellow journalism

If there's one thing I can appreciate at 18 that I couldn't at 14, it's how Goddamn awful the news media is at covering a presidential election. (However, I did get a sense in 2004 of this trend when the Swift Boat thugs were given an equal voice on John Kerry's Vietnam record as the senator.) The news media is constantly evolving; during the 2000, nobody on Earth knew what a blog was. But the continuing patterns of media coverage do not bode well. Many bad trends in journalism, especially on campaign politics, have been exacerbated in recent years.

The New York Times just ran a story about the declining numbers of newspaper writers who follow the presidential campaigns. Print newspapers have been hit hard in recent years by the rise of the Internet as a popular news source. As a result, more and more newspapers have decided to restrict most of their news staff to just local events and fluff pieces.

It's really just as well that there aren't more newspaper reporters. The press makes it easy on themselves by following narratives throughout the campaign, making every news story fall into these categories whether they belong there or not. They also tend to report every story the same way in every outlet -- a phenomenon known as "pack journalism."

Pack journalism is compounded by the fact that television still plays the largest role in campaign news. TV news is where actual journalism goes to die. Because the news media is a business, networks and 24-hour news channels are discouraged from going out on the front lines and reporting -- it's much easier to just have people talk! And so they do, to no end. And the pack journalism means that the play the same video clips over and over again on every channel -- like with the recent Jeremiah Wright controversy -- in such a way as to lure in viewers, but not to educate and inform.

And this leads to yet another problem with coverage of the race and all elections: horse-race journalism and sensationalism over substantive debate. When the presidential candidates have debates, what lines are repeated endlessly in the news cycle? Not the distinctions in health care policy. No, that's much too boring. Instead we get all the zingers and one-liners that mean really nothing. Since when does anyone have the right to criticize Americans for being ill-informed when the media make it so difficult to be informed? The press is truly in a state of ruin. But progress has been made -- at least Crossfire was canceled.