OTTAWA—As the presidential election looms south of the border this fall, some Americans are casting their attention to the broken state of political journalism in their country.
A Daily Kos/SEIU poll released this week showed that a whopping 78 per cent of respondents had an unfavourable view of the political media in the U.S.
“Everyone agrees — the political media sucks,” Daily Kos pronounced.
The poll didn’t probe the reasons for this antipathy to political reporting, so it’s hard to assess whether people are turned off by the content or the whole business.
Here in Canada, it’s highly likely that a similar poll would produce similar results.
We know, for instance, that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has not suffered any real backlash for its hostile — or, to be more diplomatic, let’s say “minimalist” — approach to dealing with the press pack in Ottawa these past six or so years.
Harper has not held a news conference around Parliament Hill since 2009 and has succeeded in drawing strict limits around media access to his government. “It’s not that he hates the media,” one Conservative MP said to me earlier this year. “It’s more that he has no respect for them.”
Why has this worked so well for Harper? Probably because the public buys the idea, frequently put forward by the Conservatives and their allies, that the media is little more than a delivery system for the “spin” the politicians like to spout.
Watching most of those MP panels on TV, or wading into the daily scrums in the foyer of the Commons, it’s hard to disagree with that assessment. That’s not debate we’re seeing — it’s just people reciting well-rehearsed lines, speaking past each other, and certainly not answering any questions.
In the print realm, meanwhile, politicians and their handlers are now fond of replying to media questions with sparse, fact-free emails, timed to arrive just before deadline, so there is no opportunity for follow-up or subsequent queries.
All of this has been rightly dubbed “churnalism” — the practice in which journalists simply take the PR material handed to them and churn it out to their readers or viewers. It seems to happen a lot, especially in the hurry-up world of all-day online reporting. There’s a fun website in Britain, in fact, churnalism.com, that allows you to copy and paste press releases into a search engine that tells you how much of the material has been recycled through the media.
Ira Basen of CBC Radio has probably spent more time than most journalists thinking about how all this spin and churn has infiltrated the media, especially in the realm of political reporting.
Basen did an excellent, six-part documentary called “Spin Cycles” a few years ago and he continues to talk to public-relations professionals to probe how their business intersects with journalism.
One such conversation, with PR expert Judy Gombita, was published this week on a website called “PR Conversations” and it makes for some thought-provoking reading. Basen believes that PR spinners know a lot more about how journalists work than vice-versa, and have used that knowledge to simply detour around deeper coverage.
“Our obsession with speed and ‘breaking news’ played right into the hands of people who were looking to get their story out without a great deal of scrutiny, and that didn’t serve our audiences very well,” Basen said. “The need for speed and the lusting after ‘scoops,’ no matter how dubious, is part of the genetic code of most journalists, but we pay a price for that.”
The price, if that Daily Kos poll is correct, has been paid in public-opinion terms.
So what can be done about it? The New York Times, even before that poll came out, recently launched a project called “The Agenda” — a deliberate effort to delve deeper into political issues surrounding the presidential campaign, away from personalities and polls. In Canada, the Samara organization, a non-profit effort to improve democracy and public service, has launched several projects specifically aimed at the current problems of political coverage in this country.
Any solution, though, is going to have to address this issue of the “churn” and the spin. It won’t be easy. By any rough count, the growing number of communications professionals on Parliament Hill (about 1,500 in government alone, according to a Hill Times tally) vastly outpaces the ranks of the media (around 400 in the press gallery, and shrinking, it seems, monthly.)
The number that should focus the collective media mind, however, is that 78 per cent figure south of the border — all those people who now view political reporting in the same, dim light as they view the politicians.
And that may not be because the media is the enemy of politicians, but because it’s grown too accommodating to the spin and talking points.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Susan Delacourt
A Daily Kos/SEIU poll released this week showed that a whopping 78 per cent of respondents had an unfavourable view of the political media in the U.S.
“Everyone agrees — the political media sucks,” Daily Kos pronounced.
The poll didn’t probe the reasons for this antipathy to political reporting, so it’s hard to assess whether people are turned off by the content or the whole business.
Here in Canada, it’s highly likely that a similar poll would produce similar results.
We know, for instance, that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has not suffered any real backlash for its hostile — or, to be more diplomatic, let’s say “minimalist” — approach to dealing with the press pack in Ottawa these past six or so years.
Harper has not held a news conference around Parliament Hill since 2009 and has succeeded in drawing strict limits around media access to his government. “It’s not that he hates the media,” one Conservative MP said to me earlier this year. “It’s more that he has no respect for them.”
Why has this worked so well for Harper? Probably because the public buys the idea, frequently put forward by the Conservatives and their allies, that the media is little more than a delivery system for the “spin” the politicians like to spout.
Watching most of those MP panels on TV, or wading into the daily scrums in the foyer of the Commons, it’s hard to disagree with that assessment. That’s not debate we’re seeing — it’s just people reciting well-rehearsed lines, speaking past each other, and certainly not answering any questions.
In the print realm, meanwhile, politicians and their handlers are now fond of replying to media questions with sparse, fact-free emails, timed to arrive just before deadline, so there is no opportunity for follow-up or subsequent queries.
All of this has been rightly dubbed “churnalism” — the practice in which journalists simply take the PR material handed to them and churn it out to their readers or viewers. It seems to happen a lot, especially in the hurry-up world of all-day online reporting. There’s a fun website in Britain, in fact, churnalism.com, that allows you to copy and paste press releases into a search engine that tells you how much of the material has been recycled through the media.
Ira Basen of CBC Radio has probably spent more time than most journalists thinking about how all this spin and churn has infiltrated the media, especially in the realm of political reporting.
Basen did an excellent, six-part documentary called “Spin Cycles” a few years ago and he continues to talk to public-relations professionals to probe how their business intersects with journalism.
One such conversation, with PR expert Judy Gombita, was published this week on a website called “PR Conversations” and it makes for some thought-provoking reading. Basen believes that PR spinners know a lot more about how journalists work than vice-versa, and have used that knowledge to simply detour around deeper coverage.
“Our obsession with speed and ‘breaking news’ played right into the hands of people who were looking to get their story out without a great deal of scrutiny, and that didn’t serve our audiences very well,” Basen said. “The need for speed and the lusting after ‘scoops,’ no matter how dubious, is part of the genetic code of most journalists, but we pay a price for that.”
The price, if that Daily Kos poll is correct, has been paid in public-opinion terms.
So what can be done about it? The New York Times, even before that poll came out, recently launched a project called “The Agenda” — a deliberate effort to delve deeper into political issues surrounding the presidential campaign, away from personalities and polls. In Canada, the Samara organization, a non-profit effort to improve democracy and public service, has launched several projects specifically aimed at the current problems of political coverage in this country.
Any solution, though, is going to have to address this issue of the “churn” and the spin. It won’t be easy. By any rough count, the growing number of communications professionals on Parliament Hill (about 1,500 in government alone, according to a Hill Times tally) vastly outpaces the ranks of the media (around 400 in the press gallery, and shrinking, it seems, monthly.)
The number that should focus the collective media mind, however, is that 78 per cent figure south of the border — all those people who now view political reporting in the same, dim light as they view the politicians.
And that may not be because the media is the enemy of politicians, but because it’s grown too accommodating to the spin and talking points.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Susan Delacourt
No comments:
Post a Comment