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The New York Times on the day after Barack Obama's second election victory. Photograph: Paul Owen for the Guardian
Coverage by mainstream media of GOP voter suppression strategies was patchy during the 2012 campaign. Photograph: Paul Owen for the Guardian
Coverage by mainstream media of GOP voter suppression strategies was patchy during the 2012 campaign. Photograph: Paul Owen for the Guardian

Big Media's failure to fulfil fourth estate function in 2012 election

This article is more than 11 years old
When beleaguered traditional journalism acts as a stenographer to power, who will hold second-term Obama to account?

As he prepares for a second term as president, Barack Obama faces almost nothing but uncertainty: on the economy, foreign policy, war and peace, and so much more. But there will be at least one thing he can probably count on: what's left of the traditional press corps to do little or nothing to hold him to account, because, as the just-ended election campaign amply demonstrates, America's top journalists have pretty much gotten out of that business.

The performance of America's Big Media in the 2012 campaign isn't quite as bad as the press behavior during the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003. Then, with a few honorable exceptions, our most prominent journalists served as little more than cheerleaders for an administration that lied repeatedly as it steered America into a misguided debacle. But I've never seen a worse performance in a major political campaign. On issue after issue – again, with some important exceptions, many in the alternative or new media – the press simply couldn't be bothered to do its job.

It would take a book, or more, to catalog the failures. One matter was especially instructive: Mitt Romney's tax returns. We'll probably never learn what is in the decade's worth (or more) of returns that Romney successfully blocked the American electorate from seeing this year – because the candidate simply stonewalled. Once it became clear he'd win the nomination, his Republican opponents fell in line. And after a few more perfunctory queries, so did the journalists – despite the withholding of those returns being without precedent in modern presidential campaigns.

What's in those undisclosed tax returns? The likeliest explanation: the documents contain material so damaging that it would have torpedoed Romney's candidacy. But because the press turned into a lapdog at a time when the public desperately needed a watchdog, future candidates got the message that they, too, could keep such information from the electorate.

Big Journalism's tendency to suck up to power, not confront it, were evident in all kinds of other matters our top journalists left mostly at the side of the campaign trail this year. Consider the Republican party's overt and comprehensive efforts to deter voting by people – especially minorities – who have been more likely to vote Democratic. In state after state where Republicans were in charge, GOP legislatures and governors used a variety of voter suppression methods, the most damaging of which were photo ID requirements to tackle a "voter fraud" problem that fundamentally does not exist; reducing early voting days and hours; creating hours-long lines, which is, in effect, a poll tax for people who work by the hour; tendentious, if not outright bogus, voter challenges; and more.

If you were paying close attention, and reading more widely than the traditional media, you will have already known about all this. In the days just before the election, and, of course, on election day itself, the situation became Page One material. But a press worthy of its existence would have hammered the issue home, day-in and day-out, on the principle that the right to vote is up there with free speech – and has been under the most severe threats in decades.

Yet, all we got, for the most part, was sporadic coverage – even if some of the occasional stories were illuminating and deep. (As far as I can tell, only two national journalists gave voter suppression the relentless attention it deserved: Dan Froomkin of the Huffington Post and Ari Melber of the Nation, neither of whom works for an organization that can truly put a topic on the national agenda.)

The most amazing part of this abdication, at least to me, is that political journalists normally love stories about the political process. Voter suppression was the ultimate process story. Had Romney pulled out a win, it would have been the story because voter suppression would have provided his margin of victory in several key states. The Democrats, as it turned out, were better-prepared than I'd realized and found ways to turn out their supporters (often via early voting). And they were so enraged at the GOP's efforts to stifle them that they went the extra miles to keep it from happening.

Another ongoing failure is endemic: political journalists' inability to say, in so many words, when a politician is lying. Stenography has long since been the standard in political (and business) journalism: assuming that every issue has two, more or less equally valid sides and then quoting "both sides", even when one side is lying or occupying an extreme viewpoint. Fact-checking became a fad this year, but even the fact-checkers – weirdly ghettoized, as if vetting things shouldn't be done before publication, but after – have been prone to credibility-wrecking error.

One media non-achievement made me happy, even if it won't have the effect I'd wish: the pundit class's vapors over the statistical work by poll aggregators/analysts, most notably the New York Times' Nate Silver. While he was using rigorous data science, they were using intuition – their feeling that, well, something just had to be askew because, well, they thought it was. Pundits are more entertainers than journalists, of course: they have no shame, and their employers keep paying them, so we're apparently stuck with the ones who would be ignored if their journalistic skills were relevant to readers.

Second-term presidents normally get tougher scrutiny, and this one needs it. Obama has largely been given a pass by news organizations on his own worst deeds, including his hostility to civil liberties (worse than Bush in most ways); continuing rewards, not punishments, for the Wall Street bankers who almost wrecked the global economy; and so many other matters.

And don't look for probing coverage of Congress. On Sunday evening, the once-great CBS "60 Minutes" news magazine demonstrated that journalism hasn't changed, and probably won't. In a segment about Senate gridlock, the report blamed – you guessed it – both sides. (Its fawning treatment of former Senator Evan Bayh, who is a symbol of everything wrong with Congress, was sickening.) I have no brief for the Senate Democrats, who visibly lack principle on almost everything – but there is one, overwhelming reason for gridlock: the filibuster. The Democrats have a majority, but the Republicans have abused the filibuster in unprecedented ways; yet, the news report offered little context.

As the Atlantic magazine's James Fallows has put it, the GOP has decided that it will take 60 votes (a "super-majority") to get almost anything passed, period. This is a shift in the norms that governed the upper chamber in the past and "a de facto amendment/hijacking of the constitution whose effect is to make our democracy dysfunctional". This is the truth. And "60 Minutes" either missed it or didn't bother to tell it.

Again, I want to stress that not all journalists are equally culpable in the failures. There are still many people in the field who do great work, and we need to help ensure that their work is seen by as many people as possible. But the decline overall is simply too stark to deny.

Will the Washington press collectively start doing its job now?

That is doubtful, for many reasons. Journalism resources at organizations that set agendas are still shrinking, and the people – the rich and powerful who run society – have beyond-disproportionate resources of their own directed at influencing public opinion. Increasingly, I believe, we're going to need to rely on alternative sources of journalism to find out what's really happening – and then find better ways to get what they tell us more widely seen, too.

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