Optics and an engaged electorate
Ahead of one of the biggest stories of the week in the realms of American politics, Margaret Sullivan began her Monday column in The Washington Post like this: “In political media, as in love, there aren’t many chances to correct a serious wrong.”
Sullivan was referring to the testimony of former special counsel Robert Mueller before the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees in Washington — the story that would receive the most attention wherever news was consumed. One would have been forgiven if it appeared Mueller’s appearance was the only story that was happening that summer Wednesday near the end of July, even though it wasn’t.
As coverage unfolded and analysis came thick and fast, optics became the buzzword as media outlets faced criticism from writers and commentators of how Mueller’s testimony was covered.
“Reporters could thus have used yesterday’s hearings as a chance to clearly communicate what Mueller found. Instead, they leapt immediately to prognostications about the effect of the hearings on public opinion and on Democratic lawmakers’ appetite for impeachment.
This kind of coverage is more straightforward than wading through the sometimes dry substance of the 448-page report or six hours of hearings, and many journalists presume that the odds-making is of greater interest to readers and viewers. Covering whether impeachment is up or down, what President Trump is tweeting, and what Democrats are saying among themselves is comfortable terrain for many reporters.” — David Graham in The Atlantic,
July 25, 2019
The optics of the media coverage also got the attention of late night comedians, particularly Stephen Colbert, who devoted a portion of his Thursday Late Show monologue to discussing the coverage.
Criticism also extended to within journalism itself. As the Mueller hearing continued to be debated, along with how it was covered, a Twitter thread emerged from journalist Heidi Moore, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, the public radio program Marketplace and other outlets, about the coverage and what can be improved more broadly in American political journalism.
However, in a piece on the Post’s The Fix section, Aaron Blake defended the coverage of Mueller’s testimony, saying that while political coverage does focus too much on optics, the criticism in the circumstance of this story was overblown.
Blake argued that major news had been absent from Mueller’s testimony, as his remarks did not go beyond the 448 page report his office issued earlier this year. The other reason was that the hearing, Blake wrote, was about optics, considering that House Democrats thought it would help their arguments regarding any obstruction of justice claims against President Trump.
“It was always going to be a struggle to get something new out of him, but Mueller’s performance made it even more difficult. Given the lack of new developments that came out of the hearing and the hope that Democrats had invested in this whole exercise, that was the news.” — Aaron Blake in The Washington Post, July 25, 2019
It is no secret that journalism circa 2019 has its challenges — particularly how to restore trust with audiences along with morale in the industry itself, with the rhetoric of “fake news” and “enemy of the people” still rampant and broader economic questions that are trying to be answered.
The industry knows there is a problem, yet many appear to be reluctant to change course for the sake of not just morale but for the sake of the people who they are supposed to serve — the audience — suggesting an ingrained culture hesitant to adapt to change.
Yet, there are journalists willing to step up and make the change happen.
This was especially the case this past April, when Matt Pearce circulated on Twitter a Google doc that had one simple question: “Tell me how you think I should cover 2020!”
Pearce, a correspondent with the L.A. Times, wanted to bring something useful to coverage, and also a means to engage readers and potential subscribers to the Times. The form garnered a plethora of responses.
“If I have a group of readers that are kind of organized behind a concept or a project I’m pursuing, that’s a way in which I can build leverage to go to these campaigns and say, ‘Look, I have all these people who told me this was the most important issue to them. You need to answer my questions about this, because I’m not just some reporter sitting in an office in Los Angeles or a fancy building. I represent thousands of people who have told me they want to hear about this, and I happen to be the guy who’s paid to go on planes and dig up documents and ask these questions for them, because they’re busy living their lives.” — Matt Pearce, L.A. Times correspondent, on engaging with audiences in an interview with Nieman Lab, May 13, 2019
A little over a month later, New Hampshire Public Radio, inspired by the work that Pearce did, set up its own Google doc to help with coverage of the state’s presidential primary, one of the first primaries in the nation and a closely followed contest nationwide to decide a party’s presidential candidate.
The Times and NHPR were on to something, and these initiatives were among many which caught the attention of the engagement journalism organization Hearken and the journalism research organization Membership Puzzle Project. As a result, they announced in June a call to action to change the current culture of campaign and political coverage through a citizen’s agenda model.
“No longer as news organizations can we presume to understand what our public needs from us, nor can we assume that being first with the latest salacious turn in a campaign is what actually matters.
This is disciplined, this is rigorous, this is not easy. Yes, it will involve making tough choices — anything worth doing always does. Yes, it will require shifting practices that have been in place for years, if not decades. But we all know what the consequences are if we get this wrong again.” — Jennifer Brandel of Hearken in a Medium essay, June 12, 2019
Despite being on opposite ends of the country, the Times and NHPR showcased something that is necessary for journalism, both on the local and the national level, needs to survive — engagement journalism, something that the citizen’s agenda model clearly represents — and the model has potential to work in other newsrooms from coast to coast.
Political journalists, particularly the Washington press corps, are looked upon as inspiration to those who pursue journalism.
Indeed, journalists in local communities across the United States have looked to them as inspiration, and in the realms of what it means to do good journalism, much attention has always been paid to national journalists in how their work is conducted.
Attention has also been paid more so to national journalism as a means to answer the broader questions that journalism has. Yet, the answer that can be a solution to journalism’s woes comes not from those national organizations, but from the journalists in communities nationwide who deal with the implications of the politics and policy developments from Washington reported on by these national reporters.
These local journalists and organizations — in L.A., New Hampshire, Minnesota, and every place in between — have the solution, and they’re ready and willing to share it with the national media.
They’re willing to share it because journalism in their minds was never about them or their metrics. It was about their neighbors. It was the reason they got into journalism like their national counterparts.
Yet, journalism will not thrive if local journalists are the only ones willing to embrace opportunity while national journalists and organizations still remain obsessed with optics — and if they choose the latter, come November 3, 2020, should a mistake be made, they’ll have no one to blame about the negative impact of journalism’s obdurate culture but themselves.
