Newsless.org

A bold argument: 2008 summoned the best overall election coverage I’ve ever seen.¹ That is, the nature of our current information ecoystem — a rapidly maturing blogosphere, large news organizations working to adapt, the mainstreaming of participation on the Web — brought about a dramatic step forward in election coverage this year.

Name a type of coverage or commentary citizens look for in an election year, and I bet I can make a case that it was done far better this cycle than in the recent past. Let’s walk through a few examples:

Where do the candidates stand on the issues?

This is often cited as the most important question for voters, and it’s a very tricky one for journalists to answer. That’s because it has at least three high-level components: (1) where the candidates say they stand on the issues, (2) what contextual factors (e.g. candidates’ records, their advisers, etc.) reveal about the candidates’ positions on the issues, and (3) how political realities are likely to affect their actions on the issues in office.

Of those three components, the first is the easiest for journalists to cover, so it tends to draw the most emphasis. But if you take a look back at coverage of the 2000 election, it might shock you how ill-prepared it left us for a George W. Bush presidency. Of course, journalism can’t predict the future, and you know what they say about hindsight. But on an issue-by-issue basis, I think we would have been much better prepared for Bush’s presidency if coverage of his “compassionate conservative” talking points had been balanced with more robust coverage of other factors. A more concentrated look at the foreign policy hands surrounding Bush, for example, might have yielded hints that the group had an itchy trigger finger pointed at Saddam Hussein.

This year, the sheer surfeit of coverage enabled by the Web has meant a deep look at the range of factors affecting how each issue might play out. If you want to know what Obama has said about health care, for example, you’ll find a deep issue briefing on the matter on his Web site, or you can search YouTube for any mentions of the subject in his speeches. If you’re interested in what his advisers think, here’s an interview with Tom Daschle on the subject from a few months ago. Curious about the political environment? Try this profile of Max Baucus, or that roundtable of economists from Health Affairs. Sure, I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen with health care, but I feel as though I have a much richer sense of what could happen than I ever could have gotten in years past.

Who’s winning the horse race?

There’s no question that of all the folks covering this election, the breakout star has been FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver. We all know the story by now – Daily Kos diarist does good by playing Moneyball with politics. But the story’s familiarity shouldn’t obscure its unlikelihood, or the fact that the Web made it possible.

To me, the best part of Silver’s role was how dramatically he invalidated the horse-race narratives that pro-journos obsess over. While our newspapers and TV pundits were fussing about Obama’s problems winning over Jewish voters, Silver was finding demographic patterns far more legit and nuanced than anything the pros had thought up.

Which campaign claims are faulty and which are accurate?

No fewer than three services – FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and the WaPo’s Fact Checker – were devoted to refereeing political claims, with Snopes and others doing part-time duty. Even the candidates got in the act this year, as spurious emails flew fast and furious around the Internet. Pretty much anytime I heard a claim and wondered, “Is that really true?” I could immediately Google an accurate answer.

What are the candidates really like?

As far as I can tell, answering this question has always been the chief aim of the Boys on the Bus mode of election coverage. News organizations embed their reporters on campaign press buses at great expense so they can draw intimate portraits of candidates’ habits and qualities. The traditional profiles and long television interviews filled this function as well as ever this year. But they were augmented by the always-on, Real-World-esque stream of media that’s increasingly becoming the norm for candidates in a digital age. In years past, would we ever have seen McCain’s testy interview with the Des Moines Register, or Obama’s rousing pep talk to his campaign volunteers, or photos of his family on Election Night?

We can argue over whether this is a good or bad thing, whether an intimate moment captured (or leaked) and amplified on YouTube really tells us anything significant about a candidate’s inner life or leadership techniques. But I don’t think we can argue that more of us have access to more of them.

How does this affect me?

No contest. I didn’t want for sophisticated coverage and commentary up and down the ballot at all this year. In Minneapolis at least, I saw supercharged local political coverage – local independent media such as MinnPost and the Minnesota Independent and the Uptake provided a fantastic complement to the work done by longstanding local news orgs. Multiple sites enabled me to check for campaign donations to candidates from my neighborhood. Although the Star Tribune had fewer resources to devote to its voter’s guide, some of that slack was picked up by developments elsewhere around the Web. (Even my county judicial races were covered in the blogosphere!)

And of course, the Web excels at delivering numerous perspectives on custom-tailored issues. For example, you didn’t have to look far to find robust conversations about what a Sarah Palin Vice Presidency might mean for children with special needs. (Does her experience with mothering a child with Down’s Syndrome outweigh her tendency to rail against scientific research that could benefit those with special needs? Discuss.) Those perspectives would have been difficult to find in an earlier era.

Where can I find the funny?

Again, no contest. From Obama Girl to the Daily Show to Paris Hilton to the Onion to SNL to PalinAsPresident, the humor quotient of this election was off the charts. Not a classic journalistic function, but worth noting nonetheless.

I’ve had a number of conversations over the past few weeks with a pretty diverse range of folks (newspaper execs, art-bloggers, curmudgeonly j-school students) that suggest many politics junkies have come to the same conclusions I did. But still, I’ve put forth a broad, unprovable thesis that I expect to be heftily challenged.

Standard news industry assumptions contend that as news organization resources diminish, coverage will suffer. Most traditional news organizations have seen a decline in available resources to cover politics, so a concurrent improvement in political coverage would challenge those standard assumptions and prompt some good questions: Is this phenomenon replicable in other domains? Can we expect the coverage to be this good during the next cycle?

But the most important question is this: Has the widespread availability of better election coverage led to a better-informed populace?

I suspect the answer is no.

In our depiction of the mediascape circa 2014, Robin Sloan and I began by echoing Dickens: “It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.” We went on to say:

At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world, deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at its worst and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow, sensational.

I’m a politics junkie who’s willing to devote untold hours to the task of tailoring my coverage to suit my information needs. For someone like me, the diversity and breadth of information on the Web is perfect. But what about all those folks who don’t have the time or the inclination to cull through 150+ blogs, numerous news sites, forum postings, status updates, etc.? Who’s editing that infostream for them? Who’s pulling these nuggets together, or pointing out where to look?

As far as I can tell, no one. The task of distilling this ocean of data continues to fall to the individual.²

If this year’s election coverage was truly the best ever, but we are not the best-informed we’ve ever been, that suggests a different avenue of inquiry for those concerned about the function of journalism in a democracy. Most conversations today continue to revolve around how we support journalism as the traditional infrastructure for news crumbles. My hunch is we’re slighting a conversation that might be just as significant — not how we support journalism, but how we make it more effective.

1. Granted, that’s not an enormous sample size. Also, although it may seem like it, I’m not actually contradicting my last post, which made the point that the coverage was incapable of matching the storytelling opportunity presented by the events of this year. That’s still true. [↩]
2. And I don’t just mean aggregating, I mean curating. We have a relentless quantity of aggregators of all shapes and sizes, but I can’t point you to a single example of a site that aims to both aggregate and filter. Yes, my “best election coverage ever” argument is merely a Trojan horse for a dead horse that I’m still beating, years after the beating got good. [↩]

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