Live from the Journamalists' Self-Made Gehenna: Jay Rosen: Asymmetry:
I thought I would write down some of the precepts and maxims I have used to understand press behavior..
Trump is not a normal candidate and can’t be covered like one. Journalists have finally accepted that.... Here are the major propositions....
Political journalism rests on a picture of politics that journalists and politicos share... in which the two major parties are similar actors with, as Baquet put it, “warring philosophies.”... To report successfully on such a system you need sources who trust you inside both parties.... The simplest way to guarantee that is to look at politics in the same way that people in the party establishments do....
Asymmetry between the parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press.... Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein developed in their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.... Four years later, Dan Balz... admitted that Mann and Ornstein were onto something. “They were ahead of others in describing the underlying causes of polarization as asymmetrical,” he wrote. Why did it take four years? (In 2012 and 2014 Balz was noncommittal about the thesis.) Two answers: asymmetry fries the circuits of the mainstream press… and Trump....
Campaign coverage had problems akin to the build up of “technical debt.” This is an analogy I picked up from Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. (Technical debt is Ward Cunningham’s concept.)... "If we do a project in a rough and ready way, which is often what we can manage under the time and budget constraints we face, we will build up a 'debt'.... We’ll later have to go back and rework or even replace the code to make it robust enough for the long haul.... If you build up too much of this debt the problem can start to grow not in a linear but an exponential fashion, until the system begins to cave in on itself with internal decay, breakdowns of interoperability and emergent failures which grow from both." Josh thought this had happened with the Republican Party.... I read Marshall’s analysis and thought: the same thing happened in a different way to political journalists....
Trump’s campaign upends the assumptions required for traditional forms of election-year journalism even to make sense.... Up to now campaigns for major party nominees tried to make sure that what the campaign was saying (and the campaign manager, the running mate, the chair as titular head…) reflected what the candidate was saying.... The Trump campaign breaks this practice. If Donald Trump calls NBC’s Lester Holt a Democrat (in fact he’s a registered Republican) and attacks him as part of an unfair system, Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is later free to say that Holt is a “respected, brilliant newsman” who will do a great job.... An on-the-ball journalist can ask: hey, which is it? But that’s a practice with a premise... that a presidential campaign wants to put out a consistent message to avoid confusing people....
Hillary Clinton would like to avoid the press. Trump is trying to break it....
A candidate the likes of which we have not seen requires a type of coverage we have never seen....
If journalists are to rise to the occasion in the final six weeks of this campaign, they will have to find a style of coverage as irregular as Trump’s political style. There are powerful forces working against this. But if they don’t try, they are likely to regret it for the rest of their careers.
