Apply the concept of epistemic responsibility to campaign coverage as described below. Discuss whether you believe that journalists covering political campaigns fulfill their epistemic responsibility. Explain why or why not. Your response is due Monday, Sept. 10, by 3 p.m. (No exceptions.)
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/why-campaign-reporters-are-behind-the-curve/?hp
Teaching Notes
You must become the flame on the candle. - Thich Nhat Hanh
Sunday, September 2, 2012
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Is Media Ethics Education DOA?
It sounds like a joke Jay Leno would tell during his opening monologue on The Tonight Show. Hear about the graduate students at the prestigious journalism school? They got caught cheating on an ethics exam. Ha ha ha. Except that’s actually what happened at Columbia University
No one admitted cheating despite pressure from the school’s administrators and pleas from classmates, who feared the scandal would damage the market value of their degrees. Meanwhile, the teacher of the course, New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman, refused to comment. But if the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication, his students hadn’t exactly been soaking up knowledge. “Maybe he could e-mail his ‘speeches’ to the students instead of making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school. . . ,” one read.
There’s an old cowboy saying that goes, “When your horse dies, get off.” Journalism ethics education is a dead horse. Or else those aren’t vultures circling in the sky.
No one admitted cheating despite pressure from the school’s administrators and pleas from classmates, who feared the scandal would damage the market value of their degrees. Meanwhile, the teacher of the course, New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman, refused to comment. But if the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication, his students hadn’t exactly been soaking up knowledge. “Maybe he could e-mail his ‘speeches’ to the students instead of making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school. . . ,” one read.
There’s an old cowboy saying that goes, “When your horse dies, get off.” Journalism ethics education is a dead horse. Or else those aren’t vultures circling in the sky.
A Question for Socrates
The question of how ethics is learned, or even if it can be, is as old as Western philosophy. In Plato’s dialog Meno the title character asks, “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?” Of course, Socrates, being Socrates, resists giving a definite answer. But we can’t. The sad fact is, students had better get an effective ethics education now or they may never.
Last summer I conducted an ethics workshop for some reporters and editors at the Poughkeepsie Journal, a small daily in upstate
But what I remember most is the air of defeat that clung to the staff as we sat on hard plastic chairs in the break room discussing the cases. I could hear in their voices the bitterness and cynicism of employees forced to follow corporate policies they despised. Recently, for example, the paper had started running display ads on the front page and section fronts, a much more grievous ethical lapse, their mumbled asides suggested, than anything the case studies might have to offer.
I don’t want my students to ever wear the gray, defeated expression I saw that day on the faces at the Journal. But given the downward direction in which the media are moving, and fast, how in the world can I prevent it from happening?
Teaching Media Ethics by Telling Stories
A friend of mine who teaches at a big Midwestern university recounts in class the events of her first week as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune. She was sent to Duluth to cover Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey on the campaign trail. When they were introduced, Humphrey vigorously shook her hand. “Oh yes, Susan,” he said, “I read your stuff all the time.” He couldn’t have read her stuff, though; she hadn’t written anything yet. “Just a few words,” she explains to her students, “but words that taught this fledging reporter a great lesson about pols and the little lies they tell.”
I usually find occasion during the semester to quote I. F. Stone’s dictum, “Every government is run by liars and thieves, and nothing they say should be believed,” to make the same point. But Susan’s story makes the point better. That’s because it has existential force. Her story vividly captures in a way a secondhand quote can’t the realities of a reporter’s life.
Some might think telling “war stories” is a waste of precious class time. I’ve a colleague who didn’t want to fall into the “trap” of regaling students with stories ad nauseam (“which, let’s face it, is easier than teaching or grading,” he said). So one semester he kept track. When he toted it all up at the end, he was surprised that he’d used less than an hour - out of 45 – talking about his newspaper experiences. And yet, he admitted, it was his stories that students seemed to remember most.
“Stories teach us how to live,” Daniel Taylor said in his essay, “The Ethical Implications of Storytelling.” What he meant was that stories preserve our experience for contemplation and evaluation. Although not all stories carry a heavy message, there’s an entire category of stories, so-called “exemplary tales,” that are told to convey a moral.
Our war stories are potentially just such tales. They can provide evidence, in ethicist John Barton’s words, of “how real human beings live through various crises and trials and remain human.” My colleague who kept tabs on his storytelling has described his stories as cautionary. Most, he said, deal with “screwups I learned from.”
But sometimes the storyteller and the audience can’t agree on what exactly the moral of a story is.
When Susan was a cub reporter on the Tribune, she interviewed the Beatles, who were on their second tour of the States. She got into their hotel room by dressing up as a waitress in an ugly, mustard-colored uniform and accompanying an actual room service waiter upstairs. Ringo took one look at her little plastic name tag – it read “Donna Brown” – and snorted, “What kind of name is that?” The waiter nudged her in the side. “Tell them what you real name is,” he urged. She did, as well as her reason for being there. Rather than throw her out, the Beatles politely answered her questions. They even let her phone for a photographer. The next day her story ran on the front page, with a photo of John sitting at a table and looking up at her and laughing as she poured coffee in his cup. She still has a glossy print of that photo somewhere.
Many of Susan’s students think she’s nuts for not having the photo hanging up in her office. They also think she’s nuts for saying she’d never participate in the same kind of stunt today. To her celebrity-struck students, disguising herself as a hotel waitress to get an interview with the Beatles seems soooo cool. They lose all sight of the fact that it wasn’t a story of vital public interest that demanded undercover methods.
Susan intends one lesson when she talks about her hard day’s night, but her students, living in a paparazzi-saturated culture, draw another. “It may be a lost cause,” she remarked to me.
Or maybe not. Negotiations over what the point of a story is can be part of the point of the story. In the process of negotiating, we test different interpretations, try out different themes. This is helpful. This is educational. Lawrence Kohlberg, the Harvard psychologist famous for his research on the stages of moral development, contended that “the teaching of virtue is the asking of questions. . . not the giving of answers.” Stories don’t necessarily have to yield clear moral rules to be of value. It’s enough sometimes if they just give us something to think about.
25 comments:
I feel that the campaign journalists described in this article are not fulfilling the epistemic responsibility of their craft. This is easy enough to say, though very difficult to fix. The article describes how campaigns are able to mine extremely specific information about voters, some of it from "private collections" and then plug this information into complicated algorithms. However, Issenberg does not cite any of the information which is generally gathered, nor is able to describe any of the algorithms, nor describe how the products of these algorithms are actually functionally applied. Basically, he avoids specifics because he doesn't know them, for the same reason that campaign reporters don't know them, which is exactly why this article is being written; the campaigns keep this info on lock. The reporters can't demand this information through a FOIL request because it isn't governmental information, many of the candidates don't hold office during a campaign and therefore aren't subject to such rules, and much of the campaigning these days is done through distinctly separate NGOs such as Super PACs. I could see a journalist perhaps getting a class-action lawsuit together comprised of citizens demanding their personal information back, as well as what was being done with it, much like a lawsuit that was filed recently in Ireland (http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/en.html).
However, the fact that I am unable to instantly come of with a perfect plan to pry this information out of the campaigns' hands doesn't mean that it could be done. That is the job of a journalist, after all.
However, until that point, what are the papers supposed to print? I feel it's a question of printing the partial story or no story at all.
This is such an interesting article. I’ve never really noticed how much journalists lag behind in campaign coverage until I began focusing more on the current political campaigns. I have to agree with Sasha Issenberg when it is revealed that journalists are not fulfilling their epistemic responsibility. Although newspapers, magazines and broadcasting stations are covering this campaign season like never before, they are missing crucial pieces in this election. According to Issenberg, journalists “treat elections almost exclusively as an epic strategic battle to win hearts and minds whose primary tools are image-making and storytelling.” Journalists are not fulfilling their epistemic responsibility because they are not getting all the facts through their professional and technical practices. As reported in the column, data of individuals in a given area is used primarily in campaigns to reach out to people in those areas where politicians can’t attend. Another vehicle unmentioned by journalists is the ever dominating role of social media. As seen in Obama’s campaign, the use of successful campaigning through social media is used as a tool in reaching the younger voters. Technology has come a long way and journalists need to conform their practices and responsibilities to successfully cover this election. I also find data on “microtargeting” to be interesting. Who knew that politicians could retain such information to help them in this election? As Issenberg states, “Now campaigns had access to all sorts of new demographic and lifestyle markers, like lists of people who purchases religious material or had gun licenses...” This article might also explain why political scientists or individuals in an area of study are chosen as writers for newspapers such as the New York Times, over journalists who know technique more than the area of study. Just a thought.
As the roles of technology, data and campaigning begin to advance, journalists must conform and adapt to this new era of campaigning. Politicians are using these tools to succeed in this election, according to Issenberg. At the same time journalists must dig deeper for these tools to succeed in coverage of this election.
I do not feel that journalists are fulfilling their epistemic responsibility in this situation. However, I am not sure how easy it will be for them to fix the problem. As Issenberg said, “the press’s fascination with strategic calculations and gamesmanship well exceeds its ability to decode the tactics underneath.” Those running the presidential candidates’ campaigns are finding even the tiniest bits of information to use in order to sway voters, and journalist just cannot seem to keep up. Journalists are treating campaigns the same way they used to. However, as technology has increased and enabled the campaign managers to get ahead of them, journalists need to think about changing their approach to campaign coverage. While I am unsure of how they should go about finding new approaches to keep up with the campaigns, I know that in order for journalists to fulfill their epistemic responsibility they need to adapt to the changing times and the new technology that is available to them.
I agree that Journalists lack responsibility and do not "afflict the comfortable" as much as they should. The style of communication does not reflect the advancements of our time. We are capable of having multiple conversations all over the world at one time, yet our journalist seem to only use scraps of our information the government feeds them. It is there duty to ask questions that politicians do not want to answer and inform the people who they bring news to. It is there responsibility to find out what the news is as oppose to treating polls as like some breaking story that needs to interrupt dinner. They overdramatize what the government wants the spotlight on and that just seems to be the trend. Very rarely are actual political strategies and policy the focal point of a broadcast. The abundance of technology and different mediums of media have caused a gross saturation that moves further and further away from legitimate plights of our nation.
Also as Roger pointed out, this Article lacked the slightest hint of research in regard to the "algorithms" and other vague references. I thought that was almost an example of the problem which Issenberg is reporting on, but maybe she gets a pass because it's only a quick opinion piece.
I believe that covering political campaigns are very difficult because many politicians do not let journalists in on what they are doing. They help the press out a little because they want good coverage for their campaign. The article states, "The truth is that we aren't even that good at covering the horse race." The horse race is the political campaign. The quote means that it is hard to get the correct answer and the right facts that the people want to know.
"We may be covering the horse race with more bytes and airtime than ever before, but we're looking at the wrong part of the track and don't know how many legs are on a thoroughbred." This shows journalist and other people that although there is more technology than before it is still hard to cover a political event.
Communicating with the public is an important part for journalist and politicians because the public needs to know what is going on, especially if they are going to vote.
I believe that journalists are trying to let the public know what the politicians are doing. Whatever the journalist finds out the public will find out. Journalist are not being bias to anyone. They are listening to the speeches and then they write down what they hear.
"Journalists tend to mistake the part of the campaign that is exposed to their view." "They treat elections almost exclusively as an epic strategic battle to win hearts and minds whose primary tools are image-making and story telling. This shows that journalist have to find the truth and report it, no matter how hard the story may be. Their job is to report and tell the public the truth.
I feel like when journalists cover political events, especially one of this magnitude, they tend to put their opinion into their writings, they are allowed to ask candidates the questions they want, instead of asking a really gut wrenching question that may sway the opinion of the people or asking a really gut wrenching question to persuade the opinion of people. I think that some journalists can be very bias, so I don't think they cover their epistemic responsibility. You have in our society news stations that are very liberal and very conservative, just like newspapers do the same. In a political race your putting two people up against each other to win a position that is arguably the most powerful position in the world, of course people are going to be bias on who they want to win, it is a competition, you want your guy to win and your going to want to persuade others to follow your opinion. At the same time I think with new technology it is hard for journalists to keep up and and report everything, but I also believe they say what they want to, not what the people should hear all the time. "Journalists tend to mistake the part of the campaign that is exposed to their view for the entirety of the enterprise. They treat elections almost exclusively as an epic strategic battle to win hearts and minds whose primary tools are image-making and storytelling." As it says right here journalists try to win over their readers to be on their side of the story.
I feel the main failing of campaign journalists, in regard to their epistemic responsibility, is that they tend to cover the race more than the issues at hand. Sasha Issenberg addressed this idea when she wrote, “journalists, this line of argument goes, choose to fixate on which candidate is a superior campaigner or savvier strategist, not on who has sounder ideas or is better prepared to govern.” A campaign journalist’s first objective should be to examine what type of leader a candidate would be and to pose important thoughtful questions so that we may gain important thoughtful answers to the issues at hand. This is true whether it be for a news article, a televised interview and most especially, a debate. As far as the issue of journalists lagging behind candidates due to an increase in the use of advanced data mining techniques, you can barely blame the journalists, whose resources are far more limited to the campaigns. There is so much money in campaigns, in this day and age, that it would be impossible for the lowly journalist to be able to use the same techniques to predict a candidates next move. That is why it is so important for journalist to move away from trying to call the race and focus solely on the candidates themselves. They should examine past actions by the candidates, inconsistency in their rhetoric and other attributes that would tell the voting public exactly what it is they are voting for. If journalist expose candidates for who they are then the voting public can come to their own conclusions despite being targeted for a specific reason by the candidate. If the public is well enough informed the data mining tactics to figure out who to pander to should have a minimized effect.
Until I read this article and thought about the issue of epistemic responsibility I hadn't even realized how little I actually knew about the campaigns currently going on. I think it is true that the real issues that we are facing are not being directly spotlighted. I feel as if the RNC and DNC were just big spectacles that journalists were treating as if they were just a televised party. All I heard about was Ann Romney and her so-called adorable story of how she and Mitt met and married. I heard over and over of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama embracing on stage as Clinton officially gave Obama the nomination. I question why the presidential race has indeed become nothing but what Issenberg calls a "horse race." I feel like the only news I ever hear is what the Romney vs. Obama poll percentages are, along with the fluffy things like a hug from the former president. There are thousands of journalists covering every second of this horse race, give me more information. I want to know everything I possibly can about each of these candidates before I pick one over the other on election day, and the coverage that just tells me who is currently ahead in the polls is just not cutting it.
I can easily say that the campaign journalists are not fulfilling the epistemic responsibility. I feel campaign journalists do not know what they are talking about half the time. Not to mention most are too busy reporting about all the mudslinging and negative statistics of the candidates, Republican and Democrat. All i read in the paper is how both the RNC and the DNC were ridiculous and full of lies! Did i watch either convention? , No i did not, and i am happy about that. I am not a fan of politics, i do my best to keep away from political conversations, and never tell anyone who i am voting for (RP!) I do however believe that campaign journalists are bias to either the Republican or the Democratic candidate and are busy helping with all the mudslinging and not getting and giving enough cold hard facts.
Prior to reading this article, epistemic responsibility, in regards to political campaigns, was not something I gave much thought to. I guess I am at fault the same way the journalists covering these campaigns are. I don't consider myself a political campaign expert in the slightest, so I generally tend to trust what I'm reading in my news source's campaign articles. After reading this article, I found it to be very true. Every article I read dealing with this years presidential election, and previous years as well, tends to focus on "the battle to win hearts and minds." Whether or not journalists are oblivious to the fact that there is more to a campaign than swaying voters or the information behind the scenes is too hard to obtain, I do not know. I'm going to assume the later of the two. The author of this article didn't mention any specifics other than saying journalists are missing things like a candidate's focus on fine-tuning statistical models to refine vote counts and efficiently identifying existing supporters. He did not mention how to go about retrieving that information. I agree with Samuel Popkin's quote, "All journalists have one channel and all campaigns have one hundred, between Internet, TV, and email." So how do we fix this problem? Now that this article has been written and some light has been shed on the topic, I believe motivated journalists will figure out a way to get the information that we're all missing out on.
I found Sasha Issenberg's article very interesting. I agree that journalists do not fulfill their epistemic responsibility when reporting on politics for a variety of reasons, and this issue would not be easy to rectify. First of all I believe although a journalist is supposed to report objectively it is impossible for them to fully disregard their own biases. Particularly when it comes to politics, people have a very strong set of beliefs and thus feel very strongly about certain candidates. This is the first problem with political reporting. However, this article brought to my attention an even bigger issue for journalists and that is the undisclosed sources of information the government utilizes to maximize the accuracy and success of campaigns. Journalists have no right to that information and it's very hard for them to get much else. I do personally feel though that neglecting to try their absolute hardest to get the most truth about candidates and their ideas makes a journalist irresponsible. Journalists have always been an enemy of high-profile individuals who need public support because they expose truths that these individuals try to hide, yet today it seems they are just giving the public whatever the government, candidates, or the PR agents who represent them will give them, like scraps of the whole story.
It's hard to say what the best plan would be to resolve this. There is no easy fix to returning epistemic responsibility to campaign reporters. They need to be able to adapt, to keep up with the advances of the campaign. Issenberg said "Until about 2000, we were able to keep pace with major innovations in the political world. When new tools were developed for measuring public opinion — whether it was tracking polls, focus groups or the so-called dial sessions that measured a voter’s instantaneous response to a video — news organizations could replicate them." So the question becomes what has changed? Why in the past decade have journalists lost their edge?
These questions are too hard for me to answer but it is safe to say that campaign reporting is not as ethical as it used to be. Journalists who report a half-truth or a story that will get ratings but won't help the public make an informed decision and perform their civic duties are disregarding their epistemic responsibility.
Journalists covering political campaigns do not follow their epistemic responsibility. Journalists following stories that has continuous action and change works on the clock to get the best stories out that would catch most readers' attention. It then becomes natural for the journalists to want to write in ways that would be more interesting and understandable to the readers. However, such stories as presidential campaigns should not be treated as stories, and cannot be written with little understanding of the strategies and the knowledge being used. As stated in the article, journalists do not have enough access to the extreme amount of political information that are being gathered for the campaign. Thus, it only becomes possible for the journalists to work with the information they have. According to the code of ethics for journalists, they must 'minimize harm.' If journalists use minimal amount of information and inform the wrong information the the audience, it will cause an extreme harm to the campaign. Journalists' job is to let the public know the truth, and must not influence their opinions. It is extremely difficult to minimize influence on political campaigns through articles in the media.
After reading Issanberg's article, it is clear that journalists are not fulfilling their epistemic responsibility. Journalists are responsible for getting the hard facts, not their opinions, about what is happening right now. Journalists should be even more careful about their opinion influencing their piece during campaign season because they should be strictly talking about the candidates and such. Also, journalists should constantly be looking for the "other story", said former Ottaway professor Andrew Lehren at a seminar last semester. If all the journalists are talking about who won the caucus and what that means for the candidate, or if they are writing about who the candidates chose as their running mates, then there should be other stories that dig deep down and get to the core of the information. Journalists have a lot of responsibility to get the information out to the public, and if they are three steps behind, how can they be fulfilling their responsibility? I think that journalists need to step their game up and remember why they wanted to be a journalist in the first place. If there is no passion then there is no good writing. Journalists need to be passionate about writing so they can go out and get the best story and fulfill their tasks and responsibility and be on top of the game.
I agree with some others here in that I don't always feel particularly well-informed about politics, and this article made me realize that perhaps there's a reason why. If journalists are not fulfilling their epistemic responsibility and are instead writing what the public wants to hear, as seems to be the case in the example given about Ryan's poll numbers, can the public trust the news? I've found it hard to keep up with the campaign trail this year because of this; it seems no sooner does a political figure say something than a journalist or a social media user comes out and proclaims it a lie. But is journalism ever truly unbiased?
I agree that the article was somewhat scant and didn't quite explain what the tactics used by political strategists to gather information are. I would have liked to know more about those tactics in order to grasp the scope of the problem, and so other journalists could realize the problem as well. I doubt that this one piece is going to do much moving and shaking on its own, but it will hopefully up awareness among those who most need it.
Today’s media is pushed and pressured in ways that they have never been pushed before. The demand for “news” in our society is unrealistic and creates a system where bad information gets passed off as breaking news. Our culture has developed an expectation that every day we are entitled to new stories that should have impact on our lives. This is especially true now, when the nation’s attention is turned to the presidential election. The reality is that sometimes things progress slowly and there may not be any significant developments within a campaign within a twenty four hour period. It is because of the potential lack of relevant information in conjunction with the push for new news stories that bring journalists to stretch the truth and publish stories that may not be completely accurate. Whether or not this can be seen as a conscious lack of epistemic responsibility on the part of journalists, or a much greater issue requiring a reevaluation of the way our entire media operates is a very interesting question. The New York Times article by Sasha Issenberg brings up several interesting points that I feel should be considered when answering this question. For starters, I find it a little amusing that she begins by suggesting that journalists stick to reporting on who has “sounder ideas” when in fact the political candidates almost never talk about what they actually plan on doing in office during election season. I think her point about the level of planing, secrecy, and financing that goes into a political campaign are very important. The people who are in charge of managing a candidates campaign are very carful about what information gets released to the press, leaving most journalist to speculate about what is going on. My personal belief on the issue is that journalists to not maintain epistemic responsibility, however, I do not blame them ether. I see journalists as victims of our society. If we did not place such a strong emphasis on regular news updates, the press would not be pressured to publish stories until they were ready to be released.
I personally have not really been following the political campaigns because I find it all to be a bunch of bogus. I don't really know why I feel this way, but this NY Times article has given me a better understanding of my own lack of interest in political campaigns. Before, I guess I would have said it was the politicians themselves I did not trust, and while I still have my doubts, I now believe that it is largely the political press at fault. Even when Obama was first elected into office, while so many of my classmates, teachers, and everyone else, cheered on the fact that we would have the first man of color in office, I seemed to be the only one not entirely sold. The shallowness that revolved around people's reasons to vote for him made me uncomfortable. I feel that most Americans were sold by the idea of change simply because we were headed for a "depression." We've always needed change. One of the reasons we were probably facing a depression in the first place was a lack of it. I feel Americans were desperate and had our economy been in a better state at the time, Obama probably would not have been elected. I may be going a bit off, but I feel this ties into the the tactic professional campaigners use to win campaigns.
According to this article, I would have to say that journalists are not fulfilling their epistemic responsibilities. While I was home on Thursday night, I tuned in to the convention. The day before, I saw news coverage (I forgot on which network) about the anticipation of Obama's address, and it was focused on whether Obama could live up to the hype; whether Obama would have a better speech than Mitt Romney, which I feel ties into what Sasha Issenberg mentions in her article about campaign reporters treating elections as an "epic strategic battle to win hearts and minds."
To me, what this article basically states is that professional campaigners have outsmarted journalists, and that journalists who have an epistemic responsibility have not yet caught up. I like that Issenberg said in her article "journalists tend to mistake the part of the campaign that is exposed to their view — the candidate’s travel and speeches, television ads, public pronouncements of spokesmen and surrogates — for the entirety of the enterprise," and I agree. I feel the public does the same, but then again, it is the journalists who have are to uphold epistemic responsibility. So if the public is guilty of this, it is at the fault of the political press.
I agree that how a candidate runs for office helps to illuminate the decisions that they will make after taking office, and that "to understand how they will govern, we need to understand how they run." It is the media's responsibility to present this kind of information to the public.
To conclude my statements made about President Obama, they aren't to say that I don't think he's been a good president.
I would agree with the statement that reporters for the mainstream media are not fulfilling their epistemic responsibility to the public when it comes to campaign coverage. But I don’t think it’s entirely their fault.
In Sasha Issenberg’s article “Why Campaign Reporters are Behind the Curve,” the author recalls the common analogy that the media tend to cover campaigns like a horse race, wanting to be the first to accurately predict who is going to win, and writing articles as if they were a play-by-play, blow-by-blow account of some sort of sporting event or game. Issenberg then writes, “The truth is that we aren’t even that good at covering the horse race.”
While journalists are playing by the rules of the game, she writes, trying to remain objective and neutral, reporting what each candidate says in public forums and interviews, working with the information that their campaign releases, and basically adhering to tradition in covering the time-honored American democratic process, meanwhile, behind the scenes, the entire game has changed.
The author informs us that campaigns are using new techniques, such as behavioral psychology, statistical modeling, tracking polls, focus groups, “dial sessions”, data mining and analysis, and microtargeting, in order to pinpoint who the most important voters are and identify how to predict and/or manipulate their behavior. This means that while journalists are reporting on how the entire country, comprised of red, blue, and “swing” states will vote, the campaigns are ignoring everyone who has already made up their minds, which is most of the country, and instead focusing on manipulating the decisions of those few voters who make the difference.
“Now, instead of defining voters by a handful of self-evident attributes like rural Hispanic Democratic men or non-college-educated white seniors, campaigns could group individual citizens according to segments or scores that reflected gradations of predicted habits…not by visible demographic commonalities but because they were projected to behave in similar ways,” Issenberg writes.
The question this raises is how are journalists supposed to report on what the campaigns are actually doing if everything important is done behind the scenes, and everything the journalist has access to is staged and scripted?
But since new techniques, like data mining and statistical analysis, have helped the campaigns to change how they operate, haven’t new techniques, and technologies, helped journalists to cover the campaigns differently? Think social media, FOIL requests, enhanced investigative training.
Journalists have an epistemic responsibility to “seek the truth and report it,” and to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I don’t think most reporters are succeeding particularly well at either currently, when it comes to campaign coverage, however- I would say that their job has become a lot more difficult.
Most mainstream political journalism does not fulfill its epistemic responsibility.
There are many reasons for this lack of substantive coverage. Investigative journalism has faced the brunt of newsroom budget cuts. Journalists are increasingly pressed for time as fewer people must work to produce the same amount of news. To make matters worse, our society seems ill equipped to discuss political issues in general.
The practice of 'embedding' reporters into warzones - and on campaign buses - is counterproductive. The journalist's role needs to be that of an inquisitive, challenging, outsider, not a dependent caddie being chauffeured around by the subject of the story.
In a front page report, the New York Times revealed in late July that every major news organization essentially allows news to be censored by campaign officials (See:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/us/politics/latest-word-on-the-campaign-trail-i-take-it-back.html?_r=4&pagewanted=all). This information reinforces the idea that mainstream journalism is no longer capable of serving in the capacity of the fourth estate. We need to develop new models for providing the important independent check on power that comes from a free press.
For an example of what more substantive political coverage could look like in the current media landscape take a look at ProPublica.org
Judging by the article "Why Campaign Reporters are Behind the Curb" as well as my own personal experience as a meda consumer, I believe that journalists are absolutely failing to fulfill their epistemic responsibility. A journaist should be a type of filter, not to control what information people receive, but to determine what information is necessary for them to make intelligent decisions about their government. If the media fails to keep up with the technology and methods of investigation utilized by campaigns, they are ignoring their duty and blindy accepting information without fulling understanding its implications or validity. To accept information provided by a campaign without questioning what a groups motivation may be or how it was arrived at is not only irresponsible but immoral.
Of course, it's understandable that it's extremely difficult to keep up with the rapidly advancing world of analysis, but this is definitnely no excuse because staying in pace with what is most going to effect the public is one of the core duties of journalism.
As a journalism student with a political science minor I was shocked by this article. In no way are journalists fulfilling their epistemic responsibility. Journalists covering elections are basically ignoring the new age of campaigning and are misinforming the public.
As many others said, journalists cannot continue to blindly accept what the party machine is churning out for public consumption. Articles written about speeches and prepared statements are not going to help any citizen make an informed decision or vote intelligently. One point made by the article that I thought was so important was, "to understand how they will govern we need to understand how they run."
Some other comments included the fact that cutbacks in the journalism industry are making succinct reporting like this more difficult. I optimistically, maybe naively, hope that these cutbacks do not continue to degrade the caliber of reporting. Maybe the changing environment of news media will even empower journalists to follow more important stories like the science of political campaigning instead of what Michelle Obama was wearing at the DNC.
This article brings up very relevant points about sensationalized campaign coverage. Blunt fact: I have always hated articles about polling data. Issenberg’s article reveals that much polling data thrown around by the media is quickly turning obsolete in a new technological era of campaigning. I am constantly irked by articles spewing how one politician is polling better with whichever demographic because of something recent and fleeting. Popular media seems to lack in discussion about differences in policy between two candidates and how those policies could affect us. More light could be shown on politicians’ track records of legislation and governance. I have always thought that the media’s coverage of campaign strategy seemed like just a scratch on the surface, especially when it comes to actual issues. This article explains how out of touch popular media is with the most recent technological methods of campaigning. Although Issenberg doesn’t seem to have an absolute knowledge about these new technological campaign strategies, I am happy for the additional awareness he has shared with me on the subject. I don’t think that the media is fulfilling enough of its epistemic role in our democratic society. Journalists should put campaigns under a microscope so that they may inform fellow citizens of the methods politicians use to lure us into votes. Issenberg’s article is a good start
I have to say I was torn about wether or not they were fulfilling there
epistemic responsibility at first, only because it is not only the
journalism field that suffers because of the great rate of
technological advancement, but then I thought to my Public Relations
professor who always says that the tactics of the trade stay the same,
only the tools change. In this regard, I think that it is the
journalists responsibility to adapt to all these new modes of
communication and research, which should allow them to accurately
report on political campaigns, and uncover a more clear picture of what
the truth is instead of merely regurgitating what they are told by
campaign mangers and such.
Michael C. Kelly
This article gave me a new perspective on what a journalist's responsibilities are. The goal should be to write political articles that are valid, informative, and give the voter something to base their important decision (who deserves their vote) on.
I think it is fair to say that for the most part, journalists are not fulfilling their epistemic responsibility to the public. Most political articles have a clear bias. Not only do we hear about the issue, but generally a slant on the candidate as a person. We get a clear view of how a candidate acts toward the audience, how their manner is, if they are a good public speaker and so on. A piece of journalism speaks stronger and more credibly if the writer is giving the facts in a fair and inclusive way.
I feel that since I am still in school and not in the workplace yet, there is a lot to learn in terms of why this happens. If an editor is more likely to publish something that caters to their readers' demographic, then likely that is what the journalist will write and submit.
This article gave me a new perspective on what a journalist's responsibilities are. The goal should be to write political articles that are valid, informative, and give the voter something to base their important decision (who deserves their vote) on.
I think it is fair to say that for the most part, journalists are not fulfilling their epistemic responsibility to the public. Most political articles have a clear bias. Not only do we hear about the issue, but generally a slant on the candidate as a person. We get a clear view of how a candidate acts toward the audience, how their manner is, if they are a good public speaker and so on. A piece of journalism speaks stronger and more credibly if the writer is giving the facts in a fair and inclusive way.
I feel that since I am still in school and not in the workplace yet, there is a lot to learn in terms of why this happens. If an editor is more likely to publish something that caters to their readers' demographic, then likely that is what the journalist will write and submit.
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