Covering Politics in a "Post-Truth" America

Susan B. Glasser

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2016
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780815731337
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a new Brookings Essay, Politico editor Susan Glasser chronicles how political reporting has changed over the course of her career and reflects on the state of independent journalism after the 2016 election.

The Bookings Essay: In the spirit of its commitment to higquality, independent research, the Brookings Institution has commissioned works on major topics of public policy by distinguished authors, including Brookings scholars. The Brookings Essay is a multi-platform product aimed to engage readers in open dialogue and debate. The views expressed, however, are solely those of the author. Available in ebook only.

the brookings essay

the brookings essay

In the spirit of its commitment to high-­­quality, independent research, the Brookings Institution has commissioned works on major topics of public policy by distinguished authors, including Brookings scholars. The Brookings Essay is a multi-­­platform product aimed to engage readers in open dialogue and debate. The views expressed, however, are solely those of the author.

You can access the entire Brookings Essay series online at www.brookings.edu/essay

Copyright © 2016

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ISBN 978-0-8157-3134-4 (pdf)

ISBN 978-0-8157-3133-7 (ebook)

Contents

Reporting Like It’s 1989

When News Traveled Slowly . . . Washington before the Web

Disrupting the Disruptors

Transparency—without Accountability

About the Author

FOR THE LAST TWO DECADES, the rules of political reporting have been blown up. And I’ve cheered at every step along the way.

Not for me the mourning over the dismantling of the old order, all those lamentations about the lost golden era of print newspapers thudding on doorsteps and the sage evening news anchors reporting back to the nation on their White House briefings. Because, let’s face it: too much of Washington journalism in the celebrated good old days was an old boys’ club, and so was politics—they were smug, insular, often narrow-­minded, and invariably convinced of their own rightness.

The truth is that coverage of American politics, and the capital that revolves around it, is in many ways much better now than ever before—faster, sharper, and far more sophisticated. There are great new digital news organizations for politics and policy obsessives, political science wonks, and national security geeks. Today’s beat reporters on Capitol Hill are as a rule doing a far better job than I did when I was a rookie there two decades ago, and we get more reporting and insight live from the campaign trail in a day than we used to get in a month, thanks to Google and Facebook, livestreaming and Big Data, and all the rest. Access to information—by, for, and about the government and those who aspire to run it—is dazzling and on a scale wholly unimaginable when Donald Trump was hawking his Art of the Deal in 1987. And we have millions of readers for our work now, not merely a hyper-­elite few thousand.

But this is 2016, and Trump has just been elected president of the United States after a campaign that tested pretty much all of our assumptions about the power of the press. Yes, we are now being accused—and accusing ourselves—of exactly the sort of smug, inside-­the-­Beltway myopia we thought we were getting rid of with the advent of all these new platforms. I’m as angry as everybody else at the catastrophic failure of those fancy election-­forecasting models that had us expecting an 85 percent or even a ridiculous 98 percent—thanks Huffington Post!—chance of a Hillary Clinton victory. All that breathless cable coverage of Trump’s Twitter wars and the live shots of his plane landing on the tarmac didn’t help either. And Facebook and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-­searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.

As editor of Politico throughout this never-­to-­be-­forgotten campaign, I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century and what we could have done differently. (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.) But journalistic handwringing aside, I still think reporting about American politics is better in many respects than it’s ever been.

I have a different and more existential fear today about the future of independent journalism and its role in our democracy. And you should too. Because the media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter. Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year. Even fact-­checking perhaps the most untruthful candidate of our lifetime didn’t work; the more news outlets did it, the less the facts resonated. Tellingly, a few days after the election, the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-­truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and the Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-­wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-­Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers. Needless to say, none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-­wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-­wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.

Of course, there’s always been a fair ­measure of cynicism—and more than a bit of ­demagoguery—­in American politics and among those who cover it, too. But I’ve come to believe that 2016 is not just another skirmish in the eternal politicians versus the press tug of war. Richard Nixon may have had his “enemies list” among the media, but the difference is that today Trump as well as his Democratic adversaries have the same tools to create, produce, distribute, amplify, or distort news as the news industry itself— and are increasingly figuring out how to use them. The bully pulpits, those of the press and the pols, have proliferated, and it’s hard not to feel as though we’re witnessing a sort of revolutionary chaos: the old centers of power have been torn down, but the new ones have neither the authority nor the legitimacy of those they’ve superseded. This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-­minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds. Nature, not to mention Donald Trump, abhors a vacuum.

It’s certainly been fun storming the castle over these last couple decades. But it’s hard not to look at what just happened in this crazy election without worrying: Did we finally just burn it down? And how, anyway, did we get here?

Reporting Like It’s 1989

I first came to work in Washington at the back end of the 1980s, during the second-­term funk of the Reagan Revolution, as the city obsessed over the Iran-­Contra scandal and the rise of rabble-­rousing conservatives on Capitol Hill led by a funny-­haired guy named Newt Gingrich. Within a few years, Gingrich and Co. would launch an ethics investigation to take out a powerful Speaker of the House, Texan Jim Wright, who left town warning of the new age of “mindless cannibalism” they had unleashed. It was the twilight of the Cold War, even if we didn’t realize it at the time. One November afternoon during my junior year in college I took a nap and when I went downstairs a short while later, I found the security guard in the dorm lobby staring incredulously at a tiny portable TV that had suddenly materialized on his desk. The Berlin Wall had come down while I was sleeping, and it didn’t take an international relations scholar to figure out that pretty much everything, including our politics here at home, was about to change.

To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, the New York Times and the Washington Post; and two giant-­circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news. Whether it was Walter Cronkite or the New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists. And because it was such a small in-­crowd, they were readily subject to manipulation; the big media crisis of the Reagan era was all about the ease with which the journalists could be spun or otherwise coopted into the Hollywood-­produced story line coming out of Reagan’s media savvy White House, which understood that a good picture was worth more than thousands of words, no matter how hard-­hitting.

Eventually, I came to think of the major ...

Table of contents

• Reporting Like It’s 1989