Russert and the Crystal Ball Media
Joseph Loconte
The death last week of political journalist Tim Russert prompted a brief burst of media reflection, not only on Mr. Russert’s professional legacy but also on the chronic superficiality of virtually all the major broadcast media. Yet this moment of reflection was merely that—it could not survive a 24-hour news cycle. Meanwhile, media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign arguably ranks as among the most vapid, irrelevant, and poll-driven in American history. At his best, Mr. Russert swam against this tide during his long tenure at NBC’s Meet the Press.
In the current issue of The National Interest, Glenn Greenwald takes pundits and journalists to task for this self-inflicted problem. In “The Perilous Punditocracy,” Mr. Greenwald sees the same vices afflicting the print media.
“Predicting the future is a completely inappropriate role for political reporters to play, yet it composes virtually the entirety of their election coverage. If one reads Time or the New Republic or the Politico or the Washington Post, one is hard-pressed to find any examples of straight-factual reporting about the remaining candidates, their positions, anything substantive—as opposed to endless, groupthink gossip about tactics and campaigns and winning/losing ‘horse race’ predictions. The distinction between reporters and opinionists—particularly when it comes to campaign reporting—has been eroded almost completely, so that reporters now act as though they are commentators whose principal role it is, clairvoyantlike, to declare who will likely win and lose.”
What explains this culture of pettiness and prognostication? If the nation’s media gatekeepers fail to believe that moral and religious truths powerfully shape our national debates, they will look for substitute sources of meaning—such as coded political messages, byzantine power plays, and futurology. It’s all starting to look like a return to the age of magic, horoscopes, and seances.
Fodder, Global Culture, Media, Mon 23 Jun 2008
