PJ: Each candidate in America's race for the presidency has a press corps who follows them, a press corps that is fed information by them and a press corps that is courted by them. But for the GOP, bashing that same media is a right of passage, it is their favourite red meat for their constituents. Proven earlier this week when Newt Gingrich unleashed his latest 'evil' media tirade to the standing ovation of republican voters, this strange relationship continues. It's nothing new, republican politicians who love to see their name in print and their faces on network news have long paraded their false hatred of the media. Several months ago Ron Paul and his supporters complained about his lack of media attention. This was at the same time that Sarah Palin perfected the art of receiving wall to wall coverage. She did so while slamming the 'lamestream' media in every other sentence all the while making sure that that same media chased her around the country in her faux presidential bus tour that enabled her to line her pockets with PAC donations and exorbitant speaking fees.
I suppose when these same GOP politicians call the media stupid they do have a point: the media is stupid to follow them to give them the lifeblood that they need. Without the media these people are nothing and every one of them knows it...without media coverage they are irrelivant and there is nothing that these people fear more.
The Guardian
The GOP race and the media: stuffing the 'newshole'
Unfortunately for all the reporters, editors and anchors following the Republican primaries, it's official: the public could care less
By Bob Garfield
Journalism has, and always has had, an election fetish.
As the last guarantors of democracy and so forth, we mediators dutifully – which is to say, self-righteously – embrace our role of apprising the electorate of the choices arrayed before them. Whether the electorate cares or not – which, by the way, the electorate frequently does not in the least.
The (nominal) nomination race in the Republican party is a sublime and ridiculous example. It is being covered like a very bad earthquake or a very good war, despite a cast of extremely dubious characters and an absolutely foregone conclusion. Why? Because it's fun. It's perversely, deliciously fun.
Don't take my word for it. There is a whole branch of academic research devoted to understanding the role of journalism in shaping public policy, and vice versa. Those researchers have found that the US press has devoted attention to the Republican primaries out of proportion to the public's interest.
On Thursday, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism quantified that conclusion, tracing the trend to allegations of sexual misconduct against erstwhile presidential hopeful Herman Cain. At that time, 20% of (what we ink-stained wretches call) "the newshole" was commanded by the presidential race.
"Coverage of the campaign has only gained steam since," Thursday's Pew report observes. "Thus far in 2012, the campaign has accounted for nearly half, 46%, of the newshole."
Yep, a year before the general election, right on schedule , the boys and girls on the bus got busy reporting poll results, donations, scandals, gaffes, candidates' personal histories, ad claims, lies and mischaracterizations, campaign-staff defections and many, many local menu items. All this, though the pundits among them duly explained the Mitt Romney would eventually win, and though the public – as documented in the Pew report – expressed little enthusiasm. Cable news and every front page made it all sound soooo dramatic … but the body politic wasn't buying.
If you can imagine the improbable circumstance that a complacent, civically illiterate public, substantially in economic extremis, and with a new Kardashian to gape at practically every week, can't hang onto every word of every story of every newspaper they have long since stopped subscribing to in order to follow a nomination process whose outcome has, from the very outset, been obvious.
As if public indifference makes a difference. The news media simply lurve political campaigns, no matter how irrelevant. No matter how many stories of deep and abiding relevance, and profoundly uncertain outcomes, must go begging. No matter how empty the desks are, because the political reporters are chasing from Iowa to New Hampshire, to South Carolina, to Florida – and everybody else in the newsroom has been laid off or bought out.
Mind you, I'm not asserting that elections are unimportant in a democracy, or that the press shouldn't perform due diligence on the candidates. But due diligence is one thing and compulsive trivia mongering is another. Our sober responsibility to promote civic health does not include hyping non-events – especially when in so doing, we also trivialize the underlying policy issues and, worse still, ignore the alarming larger story.
In this case, the alarming larger story is that three of the four remaining candidates have a long history of espousing political views that were deemed the province of the lunatic fringe even when Goldwaters roamed the earth.
I must equally point out that the public's lack of interest should be no measure of what is journalistically worthwhile, to news organizations or Pew. In the physician-patient relationship, the doctor is presumed to know better. Because, in fact, she or he does know better. Doctors are trained. They are experts. Nobody complains that they're an elite, because nobody wants Joe the Plumber doing colonoscopies.
By the same token, however, nobody wants the doctor to perform procedures just because they're easy, or remunerative, or impressive-sounding, or fun. There is no such thing as a recreational colonoscopy. So why must the poor body politic endure recreational journalism? It's just murder on the newshole.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/20/gop-race-media-stuffing-newshole
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