Attention Journalists: You're NOT An Indispensable Part Of The Presidential Campaign

[kpete]

Campaign reporters: you are granted no “role in the process.”

It is your powers against theirs.

There is no guaranteed “role.”

That’s a fiction you and your colleagues created to keep the game the same every four years.

Jay Rosen's right. The "press" (#notallpress) have this weird notion that they are an indispensable part of the choreography that is modern presidential politics. They aren't. They have no established and designated "role" in this process. And much of their whining about "access" is basically whining that they aren't the first people to get the equivalent of press releases. I mean scoops!

I'm all for journalism, but holding the microphone or printing the release isn't journalism. It's just being a middleman. And it's always good for everybody if we cut out the middlemen.

..........

Compare: “We’ll just leave a big block of white space next to your name, okay?” vs. “Answer our questions because that’s part of the process.” Or Swisher’s “somehow I write” vs. “Hey, the role of the media in this process is…”

Look: I think candidates should engage with the press and answer tough questions, reducing the importance of any single encounter with journalists by having lots of them. The fact that they increasingly don’t is partly a sign of the news media’s diminished hold on the audience and partly a sign of weak and overly cautious candidates intimidated by a staff that preserves its own power by controlling access and message. A more freewheeling style might serve some candidates equally well, but the handlers would become less important that way so they argue against it. Shutting off almost all access has become the accepted way to win. It is not necessarily a better way to win, but it is far better for a risk-adverse staff, and consultants who make money off advertising. It also persuades weak candidates that they’re fine as they are. Of course none of that matters, because timid candidates, controlling staff and an over-the-top messaging system is what we have.

Nothing about the political press makes it an inherent “part of the process.” The sooner that fiction is abandoned the better off producers of campaign coverage will be. You have to compete. Or as Jack Nicholson says in The Departed: “No one gives it to you. You have to take it.”



MORE:
http://pressthink.org/2015/05/campaign-reporters-you-are-granted-no-role-in-the-process-its-your-power-against-theirs/

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Who defines "journalism"? Is anybody alive who remembers...

that New York had hundreds of daily papers- each slanted for a particular constituency? Today, you might find a Jewish Daily Forward or Irish Echo around next to El Diario or that Greek paper, but nothing like it was in the 30's.

Anybody remember where the term "yellow journalism" came from? Or how that Hearst guy influenced everything from how to start a war on down?

The simple truth is that even Edward R. Murrow doesn't live up to his reputation if you look hard enough, and the press has always been more Walter Winchell than Walter Cronkite. Even Cronkite would most likely be skewered today for holding back some things he knew about during the war.

There is an unfortunate, and most likely wrong, presumption that the reading/listening/viewing public has enough intelligence and education to filter the news by itself.

[B2G]

2. They actually are

Who else is going to get the public information on their policies and ask questions of the candidates?

The campaign itself?

[MisterP]

3. they're already setting up for a Clinton "front porch campaign"? while the planet falls apart?