Why Horse-race Coverage is Bad
William Powers thinks, “somewhat paradoxically, the horse race has undermined itself. The demand for more political ‘sport’ has created more political substance.”
I think he’s misidentified the cause of “more political substance” if such a thing has actually occurred.
Here’s the part that I think is important to consider:
Horse race coverage lavishes attention on front-runners while basically ignoring those who aren’t polling well. Thus, the complaint goes, it turns polls into self-fulfilling prophecies. The other rap on the horse race is that it crowds out serious reporting on the issues that really matter to Americans, reducing the campaign to a little buzz factory for insiders.
These are not just “complaints.” These are proven phenomena. You can start your search for proof here.
The problem is that the press shows very little capacity to care about or understand the implications of statistical models and academic theories that have a high degree of success in predicting outcomes. These things are unreal to journalists for a number of reasons, only one of which is a lack of understanding of statistical models and academic theories in the first place.
Powers identifies another good reason for this blindness (although he’s trying to make an erroneous point):
The horse race charge has been around for a long time, and it’s rooted in something real. Generally speaking, journalists who cover politics really do love the game for its own sake. And they move in social and professional circles where the game is everything because it makes careers and pays salaries.
Bingo! In other words: Journalists are far more players in a political game (that they “love”) than “objective” observers. And journalism has a class bias (I need to add this to the list of structural biases).
Tag: journalism
Tag: rhetoric
Tag: politics
